Where we begin

The philosophy behind the LS proprietary Redefining Wealth Process℠ is a framework where all financial planning should begin. This defines your purpose to determine proper segmentation of your assets and balance.

Discover

Evaluate

Implement

Review

The Five Key Pillars
for Retirement Planning

INCOME PLANNING

INVESTMENT PLANNING

TAX PLANNING

HEALTH CARE PLANNING

ESTATE PLANNING

Five Key Pillars for Retirement Planning

LS Redefining Wealth℠ Process is LS Wealth Management’s proprietary approach, which consists of Five Key Pillars for Retirement Planning.

Income Planning

This in-depth strategy utilizes sophisticated financial planning and analysis review software. Employing our exclusive Blueprint approach, we analyze your current financial situation and retirement plan through the filter of risks. These risks include inflation, longevity and sequence of return risk. After this rigorous evaluation, you’ll receive a customized retirement income plan with tailored financial strategies designed for you and your unique retirements. This customized plan encompasses every aspect of your financial life, better positioning you to achieve a secure retirement.

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Discover your options

Imagine what your ideal retirement looks like and explore what’s important to you. As part of LS Wealth’s proprietary process, we collaborate with you to determine your goals for retirement. To ensure that process is anchored in your financial situation, we review your assets, liabilities, expenses and income so we have a full picture of where you are today. Our goal in the discovery process is to determine where you are and where you want to go. With that information in hand, we move to the evaluate part of the Redefining Wealth Process℠.

Evaluate your current situation

If your retirement income plan isn’t in writing, it’s not really a plan. Through LS Wealth’s Redefining Wealth Process™, we align your retirement expenses with your income so that you can meet those expenses through consistent, predictable income. Our proprietary life-arc planning software ensures that every contingency is covered. This allows us to build a customized income plan that includes:

Income planning
Budget and expense analysis
Inflation planning
Spousal planning
Strategic, proactive tax planning
Healthcare planning
Social security maximization
Longevity planning

Execute your plan

Once you are satisfied that our approaches will help you achieve your financial goals, our team of professionals will put your plan into action. That means replacing your current investments and strategies with approaches designed to maximize your wealth, ensure you have a robust stream of income and protect you from downside risk.

As part of the plan execution process, LS Wealth positions your portfolio to achieve your retirement objectives through:

Generating consistent retirement income
Applying sophisticated investment strategies
Reducing investment risks
Hedging against downside risks
Maximizing investment returns
Mitigating healthcare risks
Protecting surviving spouses

Respond to changing situations

As part of the ongoing review process, LS Wealth continually assesses your goals and strategies to determine what, if any, changes are needed during your retirement journey. Retirement is not static — it’s dynamic and always changing. That means that as your situation changes, your retirement plan also needs to adapt.

Many retirees find themselves in situations that they didn’t anticipate while planning for retirement. That’s why you partnered with LS Wealth — we are experienced in the unexpected situations that occur during retirement. These can include:

Severe or chronic illnesses
Widowhood
Divorce
Relocation
Downsizing
Changes in employment

That’s in addition to the risks that every retiree faces, which include longevity, tax and inflation risks. Retirement is an incredibly rewarding stage of life, which can also bring many challenges. Let us help you navigate your retirement journey.

Income Planning

As the foundation of a successful retirement, income planning provides a reliable and predictable income that’s not dependent upon the economy. This involves converting 401(k)s, lump-sum pensions, IRAs, and other investment vehicles into a sustainable consistent income stream. We begin this process with a comprehensive budget and income analysis. After accounting for Social Security and pension income, we create a plan based on your existing investments and savings. That plan is designed to mitigate risks such as inflation, tax, death of a spouse, sequence of return risk, market risk, and interest rate risk. In crafting your retirement income plan we assess what kind of impact each risk would have on your ability to maintain a consistent stream of income. LS Wealth income strategies are goal-based, time-segmented, and employ flooring methodologies. The goal-based approach involves determining an appropriate sustainable withdrawal rate that will support your income needs while preserving as much of your principal as possible. Typically, this amount is between 3 to 4 percent, adjusted for inflation. The time-segmented approach helps diversify assets into buckets based on specific time horizons. The methodology behind this approach is to invest each bucket differently based on its specific purpose. This strategy de-risks a portfolio because it separates income and growth assets, insulating income producing assets from market volatility and market drawdowns.

Flooring is a technique based on a budget of basic and discretionary expenses. In the event of an income shortfall, the flooring approach ensures that clients have at least basic expenses covered on a consistent basis.

INVESTMENT PLANNING

As you move closer to retirement, time is no longer on your side. Earlier in your career, you could embrace a growth at all costs philosophy because you had time to recover from potentially devastating market drawdowns. At this stage in life, a mindset shift is required where the focus becomes preserving and growing capital and generating the income that will be needed throughout retirement. In our discussions with pre-retirees and retirees, we find that all too often, they are carrying more much risk than they realize their investment portfolios. At LS Wealth, we work with you to determine the right amount of risk for you given your unique situation. As part of this process, we help you figure out your risk capacity, risk attitude and risk need. These are the first steps to building out a sustainable investment plan. Once these risk metrics are determined, our team of investment professionals and practitioners can identify the most appropriate investments to execute your unique investment plan.

Tax Planning

Many investors fail to realize the distinct difference between tax preparation and tax planning. Tax planning involves proactively ensuring that investors receive all the tax breaks they are entitled to, ultimately minimizing their obligation. Our tax services, exclusively provided our elite CPA team to LS Wealth Management℠ clients, utilize sophisticated strategies to avoid paying unnecessary taxes. As part of the Five Pillars for Financial Planning and the LS Redefining Wealth Process℠, our CPAs proactively build client tax strategies designed to minimize taxes now and in the future. We believe that the giant spending deficit owed by the U.S. government means that taxes will most likely increase in the future. That means a lack of tax planning could prove very costly. Unfortunately, most retirees pay too much in taxes. We ensure that our clients are effectively prepared with sophisticated strategies designed to significantly reduce tax burdens over the course of a lifetime. These approaches save retirees — and their estates and heirs — thousands of dollars. In collaboration with our tax attorneys, our CPAs stay up to date on the latest tax laws and tax court rulings to provide the most current advice possible.

HEALTH CARE PLANNING

This Pillar of Planning is embedded with the need for Income planning. Fidelity Investments estimates that the average couple will need $295,000 in today’s dollars for medical expenses in retirement, excluding long-term care. Health care continues to be one of the largest expenses in retirement. Unlike your parents’ generation, you won’t likely have access to employer or union-sponsored retiree health benefits. So health care costs will likely consume a larger portion of your retirement budget — and you need to plan for that. There are several drivers behind this mounting retirement health care cost challenge. In general, people are living longer, health care inflation continues to outpace the rate of general inflation and the average retirement age is 62 for most Americans, which is three years before Medicare eligibility kicks in. While Medicare covers many expenses once you qualify for it, there are many expenses that aren’t covered, including experimental drug treatments, hearing aids, glasses, and, of course, long-term care expenses. Even the most carefully crafted retirement income plan can be destroyed by a long-term illness or Medicaid spend-down. It is not enough to simply develop the proper investment plan — what’s required is an in depth, comprehensive retirement income plan designed to mitigate health care and longevity risk.

ESTATE PLANNING

Proactive, strategic estate planning positions your estate to pass wealth onto your beneficiaries in the most tax-advantageous ways. Unfortunately, many retirees lack a team of estate planning experts that can create the most advantageous estate plan possible. At LS Wealth, our team includes all the professionals required to construct a complete and holistic estate plan, including a fiduciary investment advisor, an elder law attorney and a CPA. Adding a complete estate plan to a comprehensive retirement income plan ensures that your assets will be distributed according to your wishes after you pass away. This helps your heirs receive their bequests with minimum taxation and very little probate and other delays.

Where we begin