The seven parts worth expecting
Goals and priorities
What the household is trying to fund, protect, preserve, or change—and how competing priorities are ranked.
Current facts
Income, spending, accounts, debts, benefits, insurance, taxes, estate documents, family responsibilities, and relevant constraints.
Assumptions and limits
Retirement dates, longevity, inflation, returns, spending, benefit elections, taxes, and what the model does not predict.
Courses considered
The meaningful options that were compared, including the advantages, disadvantages, and risks of each.
Coordinated recommendations
Clear recommendations tied to the household’s stated goals, facts, assumptions, and acceptable risks.
Actions and ownership
What happens next, in what order, by when, and whether the client, adviser, custodian, employer, CPA, attorney, or insurer owns the step.
Monitoring rules
What will be reviewed, by whom, how often, and which changes should trigger an earlier review.
Retirement-specific decisions should connect
The closer the paycheck is to stopping, the less useful it is to analyze each account or benefit in isolation.
- Income: the timing and role of Social Security, pensions, earned income, and portfolio withdrawals.
- Spending and reserves: essential expenses, flexible spending, near-term cash, and large known purchases.
- Investments: the job of each account, time horizon, allocation, withdrawal order, and rebalancing rules.
- Taxes: projected taxable income, account-location choices, distribution timing, withholding, and issues to coordinate with a tax professional.
- Health care: coverage before Medicare, enrollment timing, premiums, out-of-pocket exposure, and long-term-care considerations.
- Estate and continuity: beneficiaries, titling, decision-makers, document review, and what a surviving spouse needs to know.
The implementation page may be the most important page
- Put actions in dependency order; some decisions cannot be made safely before others.
- Name the owner of every task.
- Record deadlines, enrollment windows, and documents required.
- Separate advisory recommendations from tax or legal work that requires another professional.
- Define completion evidence: confirmation, statement, filed form, updated beneficiary, or signed document.
- Schedule the first review before the plan is put away.
Signs the document is incomplete
- It contains projections but no recommendations.
- It contains recommendations but no rationale or alternatives.
- It assumes one spouse will always manage every financial detail.
- It does not name implementation responsibilities.
- It treats tax, health coverage, income, and investments as unrelated.
- It provides no rule for when the plan should be revisited.
Primary sources
These sources describe the financial-planning process and the broad areas a financial plan may address.