Navigating Your Financial Voyage: Charting a Course Toward Pre-retirement Dreams

Planning for how and when you’ll retire — and the financial resources you’ll need — is of course crucial. But what about all the exciting things you want to do before you reach your golden years? Your overall financial plan should include those too. You may want to buy a home or rental property. Maybe you want to invest in yourself through additional education, finishing a bachelor’s degree or getting an MBA. You may want to start a business, or travel.

Some of the items on your bucket list may be things you’re planning to do in a year or less, which makes them short-term goals. But others will be things you’d like to do in one-to-five years: Those are intermediate goals. Longer term goals are things you’d like to accomplish beyond five years such as becoming debt-free, turning a passion into a profit center or taking an extraordinary cruise to celebrate a major life event or landmark anniversary.

Your situation, goals and timeline are unique, so off-the-shelf solutions are unlikely to fit your needs. You need a financial plan as individual as you are — one that considers your short-term situation, moves you toward accomplishing your intermediate goals and helps set you up for long-term success.

At Merit Wealth Advisors, we don’t use cookie-cutter formulas. We listen to your dreams, your reality and your concerns, then craft a plan for all three stages of your future financial life: short, intermediate and long-term. We consider where you are, what you want to accomplish and what level of risk you’re comfortable with.

We do more than simply look at the numbers in your budget, bank accounts and 401(k). We look at you as an individual, at your hopes and aspirations, before developing a prudent plan to work toward desired outcomes. We can help you set realistic goals for yourself — and help you gauge your progress over time.

We build a plan that’s tailored to you. One that will give your goals clarity by defining the steps you need to take to reach them, comfort with the degree of risk you may face along the way and greater confidence that you’ll be well-positioned to meet the milestones — short, intermediate and long-term — you want to achieve.

We can help you with a saving and investment plan, show you how to plan for a home purchase or create a stream of rental income, advise on debt reduction and work toward building the future you want — as well as help you navigate detours when they come your way. And we can integrate all of this with a lifetime strategy geared toward reaching a secure and stable retirement — after you’ve opened that fly fishing shop, put your kids through college and traveled to Iceland to see the Aurora Borealis. We’ll help you set sail toward your financial horizons and work to keep the winds at your back for every leg of the journey.