Retirement has a lot of moving parts.
When to retire. How much you can spend. When to take CPP and OAS. Which accounts to draw from. Tax. Investments. Property. Family.
There is a lot to get right.
It is easy to wonder what you might be missing.
The decisions do not happen independently. One choice can change the tax, the income, the investments or what becomes possible somewhere else.
And it's even harder to know whether you have considered everything that matters.
The years around retirement matter.
You have spent decades building what you have. Now come decisions that can shape the next thirty years, and some are difficult to undo.
Getting the important ones right matters.
So how do you make the right decisions?
To tackle the uncertainty, retirement decisions need to be made together. One decision can affect another. Taxes can change income. Income can change investments. Investments can change what is possible elsewhere.
The job is to work through the decisions while keeping the whole retirement in view.
Bring it all together.
That is what the Retirement Plan is designed to do.
We bring the important parts of your financial life together and look at them as a whole. Income, tax, investments, pensions, CPP and OAS, property, corporate assets, spending, family and the retirement you are trying to build.
It is not enough to solve each piece. You need to know how they all fit together.
Sometimes we find something important that has been missed.
Sometimes we find a better way.
Sometimes we test what you were already planning and confirm that it works.
And sometimes we show you that something you have been worrying about matters less than you thought.
Then we work through the decisions together.
The goal is not to create more decisions. It is to know which ones matter, understand how they affect one another and build one retirement plan around them.
A retirement planning process refined over decades.
Dixon Davis has been helping people plan for retirement since 1988.
As a fee-only planning firm, we have carved financial planning out as its own job. We are not trying to make the plan fit an investment product or another pre-decided solution.
That lets us focus on what matters most: understanding the whole retirement, putting the right pieces together and bringing in the right professionals when they are needed.
Today, Mark Lotocky, CPA, CFP, leads that work, combining accounting and financial-planning knowledge with extensive training in coaching, human behaviour and the heuristics that shape how people make decisions.
The real expertise is knowing how to apply all of that to the decisions in front of you.
From Questions to Taking Action
A clear process for working through the decisions, testing the possibilities and turning them into action.
01 · INTRODUCTION
Start with what is on your mind.
We talk about where you are, what you are trying to figure out and whether we are the right fit to work together.
No guessing. No surprise invoices.
02 · ONBOARDING
Bring the pieces together.
You provide the information we need to understand your financial life.
We organize the picture.
03 · DISCOVERY
Get clear on what the money needs to do.
Before we start making financial decisions, we need to understand what you want retirement to make possible.
What matters. What you want more of. What you are trying to protect. What you want the next stage of life to look like.
04 · FOUNDATION
Explore what is possible
We look for gaps, risks and opportunities, then test different paths and the trade-offs that come with them.
This is where we ask the bigger questions, compare the possibilities and decide which direction is worth pursuing.
The thinking happens here.
05 · PLANNING
Turn the decisions into actions.
Once the direction is clear, we work through the details and optimize how the pieces fit together.
Income. Tax. Investments. Pensions. CPP and OAS. Property. Corporate assets. The decisions are refined around the retirement you are building.
Then we turn them into a specific action plan.
We build the actions that make it all happen.
Two ways to plan for retirement.
Everyone comes to retirement from a different starting point and wants something different from a financial planner. That is why we offer two planning paths.
01 · Core helps you work through the mechanics of retirement.
02 · Retire To helps you decide what you want retirement to make possible, then builds the financial plan around it.
You do not need to know which one is right for you before we talk. We can work that out together during the introductory call.
RETIRE TO PLAN
Build a retirement worth retiring to.
The Retire To Plan gives us more room to go beyond the mechanics.
We spend more time exploring what you want retirement to make possible, uncovering questions you may not have thought to ask, comparing different versions of retirement and working through the trade-offs before deciding on the path forward.
Then we build the financial decisions around the retirement you want to create.
Best for:
You want more than an answer to whether you can retire. You want to work through what you are retiring to and build the plan around it.
Scope:
4 planning meetings
Estimated timeline: 90 days
Best for those looking for an ongoing relationship.
A clear plan,
and a specific set of actions.
By the end of the process, the decisions we have worked through are turned into a detailed action plan. You will know what needs to happen, what order it should happen in, what can wait, and which decisions should be revisited later rather than made today.
Some actions may be simple. Others may involve your accountant, investment adviser, lawyer or another professional. Some may require a change. Others may confirm that what you are already doing is exactly what you should keep doing.
You will know where you stand, what needs to happen next and why. A retirement plan you can actually act on.
But it doesn’t have to end there.
The Retirement Plan stands on its own.
Take it and Go
If you would rather take the plan and manage what comes next yourself, you can do that too.
Continue with the Living Plan
If you want someone continuing to think ahead with you, keep the plan current and help with the decisions that come up, you can continue with the Living Plan.
OPTION 1
OPTION 2
You decide after the Retirement Plan is finished.
