Do you remember when you first played a game of Tetris? You weren’t very good. Neither was I. It makese sense that we struggled - it was all so new to us.
The game seemed to move too fast. You were unsure of your moves and pieces ended up placed in the wrong spots. You couldn't recognize how to manipulate pieces to put them into ideal locations. You didn't recognize how the shapes could fit together. Even as you struggled to decide where to put pieces, decisions were made for you as the game progressed by dropping blocks into spots you wouldn’t want them.
Every time a piece didn’t go in the optimal location, you created an inefficiency and had wasted space. You had lost opportunity. You had less margin for error moving forward. Future decisions needed to be made more rapidly. You experienced greater stress.
Yet each game you played, you improved your skill set. You learned new combinations and saw arrangements that eliminated rows more regularly. You effortless manipulated the pieces to place them in an optimal manner. The game felt like it was slowing down.
Eventually, you started reaching higher levels of the game. You could operate on a skill level you didn’t even know was possible. Levels that seemed to move impossibly fast when you began were now navigable with minimal effort. You reached a level of mastery.
Retirement planning works much the same way. When you first start to play the game the pieces are awkward, you don’t understand how they work together, and they move faster than you expect. Possibilities exist of which you are entirely unaware. You want to delay decisions because of your uncertainty, but even when you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.
The difference comes in that you cannot hit a magic “Start Over” button on your retirement planning the way you can with a game of Tetris. With Tetris, you can play one hundred games and get better each time. With your retirement planning, you only get one try.
At Profectus (Latin for growth & success), we’ve played and won the retirement income planning game hundreds of times for clients. We see how all the pieces fit together. We know how to move them around to create efficiencies. We know the order to use the pieces. The game has slowed down for us. We’ve reached a level of mastery.
As decisions need to be made around income planning, tax planning, estate planning, cash flow planning, asset preservation, Social Security selection, asset withdrawal order and other retirement planning concerns...do you want to be making those decisions like it was your first game of Tetris?
Who do you want arranging the pieces in your retirement income plan? Someone who is playing the game for the first time? Or a team of professionals who has done so hundreds of times over the course of several decades?