So, what does finding your financial speed mean? 

“Financial speed” is a phrase I coined to help people in retirement planning. Simply put, I use some key data from their portfolio to show how and why it’s moving and how fast it should be moving to reach their goals. It’s actually pretty basic math.

To calculate your financial speed, ask yourself the following three questions:

• What kind of return do I need to target during the accumulation phase of my retirement?
• What is my risk tolerance number?
• At what speed does my portfolio need to be moving during the distribution phase of retirement?

As a hypothetical example, let’s say a client, after going through our planning process, discovers that they only need to target a 3{e1706a52c3b3138427a8e72931d9d59b6d08ac610477d60aad46d317c02b8d31} return. If they only need 3{e1706a52c3b3138427a8e72931d9d59b6d08ac610477d60aad46d317c02b8d31} and are truly targeting 10{e1706a52c3b3138427a8e72931d9d59b6d08ac610477d60aad46d317c02b8d31} with a high standard deviation (what I like to call the “wobble factor”), why should they take that unnecessary risk?