Mark Lotocky, CPA, CFP
Retirement planner. Accountant. Curious about how people make decisions.
I’m Mark Lotocky, and I lead the planning at Dixon Davis.
I am a CPA and CFP who combines accounting and financial-planning knowledge with extensive training in coaching, human behavior, and the heuristics that shape how people make decisions.
My work is focused on helping people move into and through retirement with the important financial decisions considered together.
Why I focus on retirement
I started my career in accounting. It taught me how to understand the numbers, tax and corporate structures. It also showed me how much can still go wrong when nobody is looking far enough ahead. That is what eventually pulled me toward financial planning.
Over the years, I have worked with people in their early twenties through to their nineties, across all kinds of financial situations. But retirement is the work I keep getting drawn back to.
Retirement is where so many decisions come together at once. Income, tax, investments, pensions, CPP and OAS, property, family and estate decisions can all affect one another. It is also a point in life where the decisions become very real, very quickly.
It is always a privilege to be part of someone’s transition into retirement and help them get to a clear next step.Someone can come in asking whether they will ever be able to retire, and a few months later they are handing in their notice because they understand what is possible, what needs to happen and how the pieces fit together.
Being part of that shift, from “Can I actually do this?” to knowing it is time, is one of the most rewarding parts of the work.
How I think about planning as an accountant
The plan should drive the decisions.
I do not start with the investment portfolio, a tax strategy or a product. I start with the retirement you are trying to build, then work backwards into what the financial pieces need to do to support it.
Complexity has to earn its place.
There is almost always another strategy, structure, account or optimization available. That does not mean you need it.
I prefer to start with the simplest answer that works and add complexity only when the plan shows there is a good reason for it.
The whole retirement matters more than any one decision.
A tax strategy can look great on its own and still make the overall retirement worse. The same can be true of an investment decision, a pension decision or an estate strategy.
Sometimes paying more tax now creates a better result later. Sometimes an investment with a lower expected return makes life simpler. Sometimes giving money away means leaving a smaller estate and getting much more from the money while you are here.
The goal is to get more of what matters to you from the money you have.
Experience and training
CPA
My accounting background helps me understand tax, corporations and how financial decisions flow through the numbers. It is particularly useful when retirement involves a business, corporate investments or more complicated tax decisions.
CFP
My financial-planning training provides the broader framework for bringing income, investments, pensions, government benefits, estate decisions and the rest of your financial life together.
Thousands of plans
Experience matters because retirement planning is rarely about knowing one rule. It is about recognizing which questions matter, where the trade-offs are and what deserves a closer look.
Experience matters because retirement planning is rarely about knowing one rule. It is about recognizing which questions matter, where the trade-offs are and what deserves a closer look.
Coaching, human behaviour and decision-making
I have also done extensive training in coaching, human behaviour and the heuristics that influence how people make decisions.
That matters because people do not make retirement decisions like spreadsheets. We hesitate. We anchor to old assumptions. We can worry about risks that matter less than we think and overlook ones that matter more. Two people can look at exactly the same numbers and see two very different futures.
The real expertise is knowing how to apply all of that to the decisions in front of you.
What working with me is like
I see my role as a thought partner. You bring your experience, your priorities and everything you know about your own life. I bring technical knowledge, the experience of having worked through thousands of financial plans, and, often most importantly, an outside voice.
I ask a lot of questions. Some are financial. Others are about what you want retirement to make possible, what you are trying to protect and why certain decisions feel important to you.
I will also challenge your thinking from time to time. Not because I need you to agree with me, but because some of the most valuable planning happens when we test an assumption, look at a decision from another angle or question something that has simply been accepted as true for a long time.
Sometimes the most valuable thing I can offer is that outside voice. Someone who is not emotionally attached to the decision, who can see the trade-offs more clearly and help you work through what actually makes sense.
I will tell you when I think something needs to change. I will also tell you when I think the best decision is to leave something alone.
My job is not to make the decisions for you. It is to be an outside voice that helps you think them through well enough to make the right decisions for yourself.
If you want the longer story
My route into financial planning was not particularly direct.
There is a longer road from The Wealthy Barber, to accounting, to Dixon Davis. It involved an early fascination with money, a few experiences with the sales side of the financial industry, time in the military, becoming an accountant and eventually realizing that I was much more interested in helping people decide what should happen next than documenting what had already happened.