Connecting the Dots on Your Retirement Plan

1. Discovering your “financial why”

The planning process begins long before any spreadsheet is opened. A Mercer Advisors wealth advisor starts with a thorough discovery process, which includes a structured, in-depth conversation designed to understand your full financial picture and, more importantly, the motivations behind it.

Because money without purpose is just paper, the most important question your advisor will ask isn’t “What’s your risk tolerance?” It’s “What matters most to you?”

We call this arriving at your “financial why” — the deeper motivations that give your retirement planning strategy its direction. Your financial why might be the freedom to pursue passions you’ve put aside during your career, the ability to provide for your family across generations, or simply the confidence to transition out of your career on your own terms. Identifying it sets the tone for every decision that follows.

During discovery, your advisor will also explore anticipated life changes that could affect your retirement income planning: relocating in retirement, supporting adult children, the potential care needs of aging parents, or a liquidity event from a business you’ve spent decades building. These are not peripheral considerations. They are the very circumstances that make your plan distinctly yours.

2. Creating your retirement plan

With a clear understanding of your financial why, the next step is translating that purpose into a concrete, coordinated plan. This is where retirement income planning becomes both art and science.

Your Mercer Advisors wealth advisor can work with you to define goals that are specific, realistic, and connected to one another. How much have you saved to date? What are your current contribution levels across retirement accounts and additional investments? What does your monthly spending look like, and do you expect that to change as you approach and move into retirement?

If you have meaningful assets outside of traditional retirement accounts, those factors become central to your plan. For example, real estate, business equity, deferred compensation, or a concentrated stock position. Coordinating them with your retirement income strategy involves comprehensive planning that looks across your entire financial picture, not at just one piece of it.

For many of our clients, the plan also involves planning for major transitions. A planned move in retirement, for instance, carries significant tax, estate, and cash-flow implications that may not be obvious on the surface. So does a business sale, an inheritance, or a shift in income sources as you phase into retirement. Mapping these transitions before they happen allows your plan to respond thoughtfully rather than reactively.

Higher-education planning for children or grandchildren may also be woven into this plan. When prioritizing saving for education and retirement simultaneously, a coordinated strategy helps ensure you’re not sacrificing one goal for the other.

The result of this process is a retirement roadmap: a connected, living document that reflects where you are today, where you want to go, and the steps designed to get you there.

3. Designing an investment strategy for your long term goals

A retirement roadmap needs an investment strategy capable of navigating the distance. This is the third critical component of the planning process — and arguably the one where working with the right advisory team can make the most meaningful difference.

Markets don’t go up every year. If you’re monitoring your portfolio day-to-day, market volatility can trigger the kind of reactive selling that erodes long-term gains and compromises your retirement income strategy. A disciplined, goal-oriented investment approach — one built to weather market cycles rather than react to them — helps you remain focused on what matters: your long-term financial independence.

The Mercer Advisors investment team evaluates, vets, and monitors a broad range of investment options to help clients pursue financial independence.

The options available to you can include:

• Exchange-traded funds (ETFs): Cost-efficient, diversified instruments suited for broad market exposure and portfolio diversification across asset classes.
• Mutual funds: Actively or passively managed vehicles that can complement an overall retirement income strategy with targeted exposure.
• Separately managed accounts (SMAs): Individual portfolios of stocks and bonds managed directly on your behalf, offering a level of personalization and potential tax efficiency that most pooled vehicles cannot replicate.

The right combination depends on your goals, your timeline, your tax situation, and the complexity of your broader financial picture. Mercer Advisors wealth advisors work alongside the investment team to design a strategy calibrated to all these factors — not just one or two of them.

Importantly, your investment strategy isn’t designed in isolation. It’s built to work in concert with your retirement plan, your tax planning, and your estate planning considerations. That coordination is what transforms individual accounts into a coherent, purposeful financial plan.

Staying connected to your plan

Retirement income planning is not a one-time event. The financial life of a successful investor is dynamic — goals evolve, markets shift, tax laws change, and life circumstances rarely follow a script. Your retirement plan should evolve with you.

That means staying in regular contact with your wealth advisor, revisiting your plan when significant transitions occur, and ensuring your investment strategy remains aligned with where you are in your journey — not where you were when the plan was first drawn.

A key goal is to reach retirement. Another is to achieve the financial independence you’ve spent years working toward, with a plan that gives you the confidence to enjoy it.