Enjoy The Journey: Successful Retirement Strategies and Stories

By Scott Manley and Elaine Manley

We have been helping people enjoy a successful retirement for decades. The goal of this book is to share key learnings and wisdom from our many years of experience to help enrich your life and your retirement years.

This book can help you begin thinking about your core financial values, aspirational goals, and the resources tha

• Language: English
• Publisher: Financial Journey Publishing
• Release date: Nov 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9798989205608

Book preview

Introduction

We have been helping people enjoy a successful retirement for decades. The goal of this book is to share key learnings and wisdom from our many years of experience to help enrich your life and your retirement years.

This book can help you begin thinking about your core financial values, aspirational goals, and the resources that will help you make them happen. It is time to dream big!

We think you’ll find reading some of our client’s stories valuable. In this book, we call them Real Client Stories. These are the stories of our clients who have won the game and continue to achieve their goals and enjoy their journey. We invited our clients to help us write their true-life stories and let them pick their first names for confidentiality. Most of the stories include things that worked, but we also added some that didn’t. We are confident this book will expand your ideas of what’s possible for you.

It’s important to understand that each person’s situation is unique. This book highlights some key items to consider. In addition, we believe the best thing for you is to work with an advisor that is very experienced in retirement strategies. Yes, you can do it on your own if you take the time to educate yourself fully. However, you will be doing this for the first time, with the potential to make mistakes unknown to you and mistakes that might be prevented by working with a Wealth Manager. You can partner with an experienced Wealth Manager who knows how to handle different situations, avoid common mistakes, and has helped many families succeed with proven strategies.

When looking back over the many families we have helped over the years, every one of them had at least one or more red flags in their personal financial situation. Red flags are errors that can dramatically impede the success of their plan. Common red flags include insufficient reserves, missing or incomplete estate plans, and too much money in risky investments, to name a few. Please don’t be penny-wise and pound-foolish. Invest in professional guidance, even if for a few hours periodically, to ensure you don’t get hit by something you didn’t realize was a risk.

Our goal is to help people reach their goals, but that is not enough. There can be more. We have seen people work their entire life to reach the point where they are financially independent and no longer need to work. A few people have reached this point only to suffer a medical illness or pass away without ever getting to do many of the things they have dreamed of doing for many years.

We think it’s important for people to enjoy the journey as they work toward retirement and during retirement. We feel so passionate about this that we put a sign on our office wall, right as you walk in our front door, that says: "Enjoy the Journey." In addition to helping people, we are committed to living our lives this way and helping our team and family enjoy the journey.

This book is designed to be practical and inspirational and help you make smart decisions as you enjoy the journey. Now, let’s begin your journey!

Chapter 1: Where Do I Start?

Making a big change in life, such as deciding when to retire, can be intimidating. It can also be difficult to know where to start. There are lots of things to consider and lots of decisions to be made. Common concerns we hear from people include:

When can I retire?

Do I have enough money to retire the way I want?

Will I be able to afford my desired lifestyle?

Will I have the freedom to pursue my passions and hobbies?

How much can I spend when I retire?

Will I run out of money?

Will I have enough money for health care costs?

What if I need long-term care? Can I afford it?

How do I care for my family, including my parents and kids?

Should I stay in my home or sell my home and move?

All these questions and concerns can lead to a high level of anxiety and be overwhelming. For some people, these issues are too much to confront on their own, and it leaves the person stuck and unable to move forward.

We have also seen people decide to move forward to make these big changes, doing everything on their own, without the guidance of professionals. Some errors we see include:

Investing their money with too much risk and taking big losses during a market correction

Having no estate plan or missing key elements of an estate plan

Retirement accounts left behind in the 401k accounts of many past employer plans

Spending their money so fast that they run out of money later in life

Unprepared for major health expenses

Unprepared when a long-term care need arises

With proper planning, many of these issues can be avoided. But, if they happen, it is best to have a plan in place to deal with these issues quickly and effectively. A well-executed plan can also significantly reduce the stress and worry that can occur when implementing major life changes.

At Financial Journey Partners, we’re known for helping our clients make smart decisions so they can focus on things that are important to them and enjoy the journey along the way. We use comprehensive planning and industry-leading tools to help our clients reach their goals.

By working with people for decades, we learned the essential elements that people need to consider to achieve their goals and avoid common mistakes. This led us to create The FJP Retirement Framework. It includes the essential elements of our comprehensive planning process.

We have found our FJP Retirement Framework has helped people be more successful. In this book, we will share many Real Client Stories. These are stories about the journeys of individuals and families and how they have successfully achieved their goals. We want to share our experience and wisdom with you to help you achieve your goals and accomplish more than you thought was possible. You may have completed some elements of the FJP