Welcome to “Retirement Mark”!

Merriam-webster.com defines “unique” as “used to say that something or someone is unlike anything or anyone else; very special or unusual; and belonging to or connected with only one particular thing, place, or person.”

If you’re here because you’re looking for retirement tips, advice, new income strategies you haven’t yet heard about, or you just simply want to learn how to live your retirement years to the fullest (and I assume you do, otherwise you wouldn’t be on my page), you’re in the right spot. Keep reading.

In this blog, I am going to show you little-known ways you can increase your retirement income, reduce taxes, AND preserve your nest egg using unique strategies that you may not even know exist. I will be regularly posting articles, short videos, and podcasts covering many different unique retirement strategies and vehicles.

I am not a conspiracy theorist.  I do not believe that the recent removal of Twinkies from the grocery shelves was part of a Communist plot.  I don’t think our own government faked the bombing of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in 2001, and I do believe that, yes, men actually landed on the moon, and no, it wasn’t all filmed in the Arizona desert.  I suppose it also makes me naïve to say that I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the Kennedy assignation.  But I do believe that there is an ongoing effort by the media and some in the financial community to focus our attention solely on the accumulation of assets instead of the preservation and cautionary use of our assets.

If you needed heart surgery tomorrow, would you go to your primary care physician for the operation?  I doubt it.  If you are going to have your heart worked on, you want a specialist – someone who has spent a few years studying nothing but the circulatory system and who knows his way around the chest cavity. Do you concur?  I assure you that I am by no means casting aspersions on general practitioners or the role they play in keeping us healthy.  As a matter of fact, a general practitioner is trained to know a little bit about everything that goes on with our bodies.  You could even say that these doctors specialize in generality when it comes to the practice of medicine.  They are on the front lines, so to speak.  They are the first ones to spot it when something isn’t quite right.  As you would expect, when they detect some ailment that is beyond their scope of expertise, they will not hesitate to refer you to a specialist for further treatment.  It should work that way in the financial profession, but, unfortunately it usually doesn’t. There are many generalists in the financial advisory field who, for whatever reason, don’t always refer their clients to specialists when they should.  Take retirement income planning, for example, the area in which I specialize.  It is as intricate and delicate to your wealth as brain surgery could be to your health, as this and subsequent post in this blog will show.