Ep 116 | A Retirement Ready VIP Session Experience

Do you ever wonder Am I ready to retire? or How do I know if I can retire? In this episode, I take you inside a Retirement Ready VIP Session, where I helped a client get clear on her numbers, eased her worries, and provided action steps to move her forward on her retirement planning journey. If you’re ready to retire with confidence, this is for you!

What You’ll Learn:

✅ What Happens in a VIP Session – A behind-the-scenes look at how a Retirement Ready VIP Session works, what you can experience, and how it will support you to get ready for retirement. 

✅ How Do I Know If I Can Retire – Learn how to calculate your Financial Independence (FI) number, why it matters, and how to close the gap.

✅ Build a Structured Savings Strategy – Gain insight into sinking funds, emergency savings, and how to plan for non-monthly expenses. 

✅ The Mortgage Payoff Debate – Discover different perspectives on paying off your mortgage before retirement and how to decide what’s right for you.

Ready to Get Clear on Your Retirement Path?

Book your free Confidence Kickstart Call and in just 30 minutes, you’ll know what’s standing between you and retirement, and how to overcome it.

👉 Click here to book your free call now

Or, grab one of my free resources to help you take the first step:

5 Must-Do Steps for Retirement Planning — A simple guide to help you prepare with purpose

Retirement Ready Checklist — Make sure you’re not missing a single step on the road to retirement

Transcript

 Welcome to today's episode. I'm excited to share with you the results of a live VIP session. Now, I'm not playing the session live. I'm walking you through a deep dive of what the experience was like and also letting you know what it could like. Look like for you. I'm excited to share these specific results and kind of better explain what my retirement ready VIP session is all about.

You can read more on the sales page by using the link down below in the show notes, or just stay tuned. I'll, I'll share with you exactly what it is. The purpose of the VIP session is to answer your specific questions. You might be wondering, how much do I need to save? Am I on track? Am I too late? Is it going to be possible?

Whatever that question is, we will answer it. This session also will support you by giving you strategies to help you overcome. Some big challenges and hurdles that either you feel you have or I can see on your journey. This session is tailored to you. It is, giving you the specific advice you need to achieve what you want.

My client came to me wondering if she was on the right track. She had already put a lot of actions into place, but was still swimming in. Am I doing the right thing? Is it going to work? Am I on track? Am I gonna reach there?  all of those things. Her number one question was, what is my FI number?

Now? FI is financial independence. That's the number to, achieve a comfortable retirement. Well, there's lots of levels in that comfort, comfortable, but you know here that I talk about creating your own. With hers, we identified what that FI number was, and she was wondering if she's on track to get there.

Before the session, she filled out a questionnaire that detailed her specific desires and wishes about retirement. It also answered like what she had done in, managing money, how she felt about it. Was it working for her, was it not working for her? I ask all of those things. I. It's not a long questionnaire, but it helps me get to know who you are a little bit better with budgeting and your desire for retirement.

She also completed the financial spreadsheet. Now that might sound scary, but this provides an overview of the financial situation financial situation. You just list all of the things as I ask 'em on the left side. Fill in that number and keep on going. This financial spreadsheet is used as the basis during our session.

All clients submit the same prep work prior to your own individualized two hour session. Getting it into me before the session and at the time I request, which is 48 hours, helps me prepare what I'm seeing. Now how I'm scoring you on the retirement readiness scorecard I have. And when we jump into this two hour session, we're hitting the ground running and everything about this session is about getting results for you.

My client, as I already a little bit shared, she came to me wondering what her fi number was. Was she on track? And if not, what should could she do? Which I love that question as that shows, kind of an abundance mindset instead of, is it not gonna happen type of thing. So very, very key there.

She was wondering when she should pay off her mortgage. I. And how much savings she should have outside of investments. These questions are very common. You may be having those same questions or something similar, or you might be like, I'm not even there yet. I understand that. The start of the session is the overview of your finances, like I said, by using a retirement readiness scorecard.

I rate what I see in each area. On this prep work as being on track or it needs at attention. Sometimes there's few things that are mastered, and then I give action steps for those areas that are not mastered to help you move forward and master them yourself. There are five areas that I review, cashflow and budget.

They are together. There's sub areas below that. Savings is area number two, retirement planning. Also, again, some subsections underneath this area. Four is investing basically your knowledge about it. And number five is what I call subject matter. This is social security, Medicare, pensions, stock options, all of those things.

Taking your prep work, I score your scorecard. We meet in the session and we review this. It helps us kind of align up those action steps. What feels good to you, what you know you can do or you maybe not quite ready to do, and we start building this roadmap for you to reach retirement. Back to my client.

She had a very solid financial foundation. She had a budget. She was tracking expenses, her savings were off the charts. And she was managing debt very well. Mortgage student loan, that was it. Paying off her credit card every single month. Her biggest challenge came from not having a plan for those irregular non monthly expenses.

You hear me talk about this all the time. These are sinking funds and savings buckets, and most. Most times not. This is a biggest stumbling block for all of my clients. Not quite sure how to plan for these. How much to set aside, how do I work this in? That was my client. She says I do really well and then, I see a piece of furniture I love, or it's a birthday, something like that.

And I overspend, nope, we just haven't quite got that system into place to cover those things that we normally do. That we normally enjoy spending our money on. We talked about. Her random expenses as that's what she defined them and explained how in long-term coaching, creating a plan can support her to being prepared for those.

Planning, for those, knowing how much to set aside, how much is too much, how much is not enough.  all of those things that come with those sinking funds and save savings bucket. Those are your sinking funds are your emergency funds. They're going to be made up of different categories for you, for your life, who you are, what you've got going on.

They're different for everybody. All right, the next thing we walked through was how I had calculated her FI number, gave her the first number, and there was a gap from. Savings projection to the actual FI number, projecting off her current expenses, but then knowing and educating her on the levers she could pull, there's things we can do to close that gap.

Get a little bit more cozy with our expenses.  look at some of our investments. Do we have a good mix? Are we maximizing? Do we need to go talk to a financial planner about that? What are our other income sources that may reduce that FI number that we're going to get monthly? How do all of those things factor the other factor?

At what age,  these are very important to be able to fit in the plan. Now everybody's. Income sources are going to be different. How much we're saving, how much we need kind of goes off of how much we make. So being able to calculate that FI number and then knowing those levers for you that you can shift and move, and how to start closing that gap more quickly to making retirement possible for you.

The next area we covered was her question about. Paying off her mortgage and when now this is a personal finance decision, there are some people who say they will never pay off their mortgage. There's other people who won't retire until it's paid off. You know it. It can be you're in one camp or the other, or maybe you're not filling either camp and you need coaching around how that feels with everything else, getting that plan in place, what does it look like and how does that make you?

Phil and carrying it with you into retirement or not. being key on that and thinking of that if that's something that you have. The next area we went to was her concern about liquid savings. She had heard my episode where I talked about that I needed more, and I recognized that in our moving situation, that having more liquid savings.

It's more than you think, and kind of exploring that with her as to her position, her family situation, her desires that she wanted to do in retirement, relocation, all of those things. And then helping her understand why liquid savings as opposed to 100% investments. This was how we walked through.

And spent our time, we spent about 40 minutes doing the overview, covering all of things, discussing what worked for her, help her understand, what I was seeing better understand what she was doing, and kind of piecing those together to really solidify those action steps. And then it is a two hour long session.

But I love to give her a break, get up, walk around, get the blood flowing, clear that head, and then we come back to. Specialized coaching. We spend about 45, 50 minutes in that what? What do you need coaching on immediately? What do you want to achieve from this session? And then we work on that in the second part of the session.

I love these sessions. There's so much accomplished, there's so much done, and it is very tailored to you. I'm sure you have two hours in your life plus maybe an hour on the side to fill out this prep work. To really get an idea of what you need to do next. That's what this is.  the purpose is to answer your questions.

The goal is to give you a plan to be able to move forward and recognizing,  should you do it by yourself or should you do it with a coach. I love holding these sessions. My client and I, we had such a great time together. She was so excited. By the time we got off, she had written down so many notes.

I also keep notes, you get deliverables that are spelled out, specific, all of the things I covered, and so it was just such a great time. I love spending two hours with new clients and help support them in their retirement journey. As you know, I have. Been a proponent of that for the last six, eight months that retirement is possible.

This session is one of those ways to understand how possible it is. So some takeaways from this session with my client is the importance of having a structured savings strategy. Now I've kind of teased and I still have it coming. I will have a savings academy. It's going to be a course with some group coaching later in the summer.

If you're interested in that, make sure you have joined my newsletter. Second thing we know is how understanding your FI number helps you take control of your retirement path. understanding there's some levers you can do that are going to be personalized to you. What you need to do, double down on, pull back on something, whatever those things are.

Again, the mortgage payoff debate, it really is coaching, it's really personal finance. It's not a one size fits all. It, it really, you have to dig deep into yourself and understand why you believe what you believe, or why you don't have a belief, and then going from there and exploring that.

If you are asking the same questions or similar questions that my client had, it's time for you to book a retirement ready VIP session. For those who book a session before the end of April, not hold your session, just get it booked, get it on my books, get it in there as I will be gone a couple weeks in May.

And you will receive an extra financial health audit that we will do in addition to what I've just described. As well as I will give you some bonus worksheets to support your specific action steps that we define in that roadmap.  Please, if you're thinking about it, consider it retirement ready, VIP session.

The link is down in the show notes. Get it booked before April 30th to receive those bonuses. And have such a great time doing it. I'm so excited to support those of you who are ready to start moving forward. And if you're not quite ready, I understand, keep listening, keep staying in tune, and we'll see you next week.