Retirement requires planning
Aaron Cedeño | Staff Writer

When it comes to planning for retirement, Joe Kain said, it all comes back to organization and common sense.

Kain owns Sunflower Asset Management, 12351 W. 96th St., and is a financial planner with more than 20 years of experience in the field. During his career, he’s helped individuals and families from a wide variety of financial backgrounds plan for their futures.

Some of the most common questions he hears, he said, are those that deal with retirement. When is it time to start setting money back? How much money is enough?

The answers, as it turns out, depend entirely upon the individual.

“There’s a lot of psychological baggage associated with money, whether it’s retirement or any of these things,” Kain said. “I feel like a psychoanalyst at times trying to figure out what causes people to feel the way they do about things.”

Many people who near retirement age start to experience some anxiety about their income levels and spending habits, he said, causing them to wonder if it is safe to retire. The economic downturn in recent years and current bear market have played roles as well.

Much of that anxiety could be avoided, he said, with a better understanding of personal spending habits and a willingness to start setting money aside at an earlier age. Things like investing in an employer’s 401K savings plan and maintaining an organized budget were good places to start.

Often, something as simple as putting a preliminary plan down in writing could act as a catalyst, Kain said. By taking inventory of current assets and expenditures, it was possible to get a clearer picture of what an individual would need to continue that lifestyle upon reaching retirement.

“We can lecture all day; if they’re not self-motivated to actually do something, it falls on deaf ears,” he said. “Most people, I really do think, they know what their lifestyle is.”

When a preliminary plan has been laid out by the individual, that’s when a financial planner’s advice was most valuable. There are a lot of scare tactics circulating in the financial press these days, he said, and while there were cases where people had to return to work because of inadequate retirement funds, that was usually the result of them taking too much risk with their stock portfolios.

If a client has been sensible, planned and constructed a realistic picture of what their post-retirement spending likely would be, he said, they were more likely to enjoy a successful, safe retirement.

“You can’t always protect people from themselves, and that’s where a financial adviser sometimes can be a great benefit,” Kain said. “Not so much getting them a 30 percent return in the stock market each year, but preventing them from making huge mistakes.”