Kevin McCormack, President, Pension Parameters
It may be true that most financial advisors have most of the answers on pretty much all investment and/or retirement issues, but Kevin. F. McCormack, president of Pension Parameters Financial Services, Inc., finds it striking how many questions clients pondering retirement haven’t asked of themselves. “F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said that there are no second acts in American lives,” says McCormack, “but he was wrong. That’s precisely what retirement is, and how this second act plays may depend on self-asked questions that certainly should also be shared with an advisor. They key on one obvious issue (money, of course) and on two that are perhaps not to so obvious—expectations and the unexpected. Today’s nest egg can, 20 years down the road—because today’s seniors have an increasingly longer life expectancy with greater medical costs—be far less than what is needed for a comfortable retirement. For that reason, a sobering question I ask all clients to ask themselves is this: does my retirement plan protect me from the unforeseen and unexpected? It may be a variation of the axiom ‘hope for the best, plan for the worst’, but safety nets and how we allow for them, after all, do assure peace of mind. The play may be the thing, as Shakespeare observed, but financial security is clearly one of the things that helps retirees better cope with whatever life throws at them.”