Nobody wants to outlive their money.  The major challenge in retirement planning is to ensure that the money doesn’t run out.  Will it last through your expected lifetime?  The place we start is with your life expectancy, and there are a number of government publications that are helpful here.  We may want to adjust this expectancy by a few years – what if both grandmothers lived to 103, for instance?

Then it’s a matter of what you will need as income each year, for the rest of your life.  The goal is to provide you with the lifestyle that you’ve become accustomed to.  Now that you’ll have all the time you want, what are all of the things you’ll want to do?  What might you have postponed until after retirement?  We want to plan on having your retirement assets generate enough annual income to provide you with the resources you need. 

Again, while there is no crystal ball, we can use realistic projections here, too, to get a good idea of what will result from various scenarios.  This is another area where we will want to investigate what guarantees might be possible to ensure that the money doesn’t run out.