Retirement planning brings a lot of pieces together.
Will you have enough income? What happens if inflation stays high? When should you take CPP and OAS? Which accounts should you draw from first? What happens to the tax?
Then there is housing. Healthcare and long-term care. Market downturns. Helping children or aging parents. And figuring out how to stay healthy, active and connected through a retirement that could last thirty years.
Each question matters.
The harder part is knowing how the answers work together.
More information doesn’t always mean more clarity.
You may have an accountant, an investment adviser, a lawyer, a pension administrator and more information available than ever before.
They can all be good at what they do.
But you are still left trying to figure out which decisions matter, how one affects another, and whether anything important has been missed.
You shouldn’t have to be the person connecting all the pieces.
Planning first.
Everything else follows.
That is why Dixon Davis is built around the plan.
We look at the retirement as a whole first. Then the tax, investments, income and other decisions can follow what the plan shows you actually need.
Sometimes that means making a change. Sometimes it means doing nothing.
The plan should drive the decisions. Not the other way around.
Mark saw the problem from both sides.
Before leading Dixon Davis, Mark Lotocky, CPA, CFP, saw a financial industry often focused on what could be sold. Later, as an accountant, he saw good professionals doing good work but often looking backward or focusing on their own piece of the problem.
He wanted to do the work in the middle: look ahead, bring the pieces together and help people make the decisions before the outcome was already decided.
That thinking shapes how Dixon Davis works today.
Our five fundamentals
On how we think financial planning should work.
01 · CLEAR FEES
Planning should have
a clear price.
You should know what the planning costs, what you are paying for and what you are getting.
No guessing. No surprise invoices.
02 · ALIGNED
The advice should be aligned
with you.
The plan should reflect your goals, wants, needs and priorities, not a product or solution decided in advance.
Sometimes the right answer is to make a change. Sometimes it is to leave things exactly as they are.
The advice should be able to go wherever the plan leads.
03 · PLAN FIRST
The plan should drive the decisions.
Investments, tax, income and the other financial decisions should follow what the retirement plan says you actually need.
Not the other way around.
04 · KEEP IT SIMPLE
Planning should be simple
and guided.
We start with the basics and let the plan prove when more complexity is actually worth adding.
Complexity has to earn its place.
05 · VALUE
Planning should earn its fee.
There is value in knowing the important decisions have been thought through. But good planning should also create real financial value.
Better decisions around tax, withdrawals, investments, pensions and government benefits can add up over a retirement.
So we built a calculator to help put a number on it.
The estimate is not a promise. It is based on published research and clearly identified planning assumptions
The goal is to get more of what matters to you from the money you have.
Built around retirement.
Shaped by decades of real planning.
Dixon Davis has been helping people make financial decisions since 1988.
That experience has shaped what we look for, the questions we ask and how we work through retirement decisions today.
Experience matters because you get better at knowing where to look.
The planning should change something.
Good planning is not measured by how many pages are in the plan.
It should change a decision, uncover an opportunity, make something clearer, or show you that you can do more with what you have.
Here is what that has looked like for a few of our clients.
HEATHER & STEVE
More than enough.
They just needed to see it.
Heather and Steve had built a successful financial life with businesses, corporations, rental properties and professional advisers already around them.
What was missing was one plan connecting everything.
The planning uncovered major tax and structural opportunities and, just as importantly, showed them they had more financial capacity than they realized.
That changed the conversation. They could help their daughters, make decisions about family property, and approach work increasingly as a choice.
KEVIN & BARB
The plan gave them permission
to use what they had built.
Kevin and Barb entered retirement expecting to hold their rental properties and live largely from the income they produced.
The planning showed them another path and more than doubled what they felt comfortable spending from the beginning of retirement.
They travelled and spent more time with their daughters.
About fourteen months later, Barb died unexpectedly. Kevin later told us how grateful he was that they had used that year together rather than waiting for some future point when spending finally felt safe.
