The Key Ingredients:

Here's what you should contemplate as you develop your retirement plan:
 
·      A vision for your life in retirement beyond just ensuring that your nest-egg is
large enough.
 
·      A plan ahead for efficient lifetime tax strategies in terms of what types of accounts to hold assets in and how to draw from different accounts over time, while also managing required minimum distributions from qualified retirement accounts and taxes on Social Security benefits.
 
·      A strategy for claiming Social Security benefits that seeks to provide the best financial outcome rather than relying on the easy, but potentially costly, solution of claiming as soon as possible.
 
·      An understanding of Medicare and how to decide among the numerous options it provides for basic and supplemental coverage and prescription drugs.
 
·      To consider whether lifetime income guarantees may improve plan success through their ability to help manage longevity and sequence-of-returns risk in retirement.
 
·      A plan for managing potentially large long-term care expenses, whether that be through self-funding, long-term care insurance, or spending down assets and relying on Medicaid.
 
·      To decide on the best way to incorporate home equity into the retirement plan.
 
·      A risk-management strategy using different types of insurance, which may include term or permanent life insurance, disability insurance, homeowners’ insurance, an umbrella policy, and so on. (Insurance products are offered through nonbank insurance agency affiliates of Wells Fargo & Company and are underwritten by unaffiliated insurance companies.)
 
·      An estate plan, including documents such as powers of attorney, wills, and consolidated information to help those who may need to manage the household finances in the event you cannot. (Wells Fargo Advisors and its affiliates do not provide legal or tax advice. Any estate plan should be reviewed by an attorney who specializes in estate planning and is licensed to practice law in your state.)
 
·      A way to educate your heirs on how they can continue with financial and life success over multiple generations.
 
·      To plan ahead for protecting yourself from elder financial abuse.
 
·      And finally, an investment management strategy based on low-costs, diversification, proper exposure to the different risk factors, and that is shown to provide the best risk/ return tradeoffs to help maximize the probability of plan success as well as to minimize the harm of failure.
 
Yes, this is a lengthy list. It's not meant to scare you. Instead, it is to help emphasize the need to plan, because if these hurdles are not planned for, the odds increase for you and your loved ones being alive without sufficient assets to maintain a desired, let alone a minimally acceptable standard of living.
 
Our approach isn't confined to a rigid blueprint. Rather, we work with you to develop your plan and then make ongoing adjustments based on your unique financial situation.  Think of it as a pilot charting a flight plan before takeoff, then adjusting the plane's trajectory in response to various factors. What matters is having both a well-thought-out plan and then making course corrections to help ensure a secure and successful journey.