Torrid Tech Talk Archives - Page 6 of 8 - Retirement Planning Community by Torrid Technologies

5 Steps For Planning Your Retirement

May 19, 2016 by suzies Leave a Comment

Have you tried planning for your retirement?

Only 1 in 3 Americans 50 years of age have given it a go,

according to Tom Sightings’ article in Daily Finance.

He lists 5 ideas of things to think about as you try to plan for your future…an idea of where you’re going if you just feel overwhelmed and lost by the whole thing!

5 Items to include:

1. Manage Your .. (read more)

Use your RetirementView to try adding these 5 elements to your plan and see if you can keep the green! If you don’t have RetirementView yet, try this FREE demo. There’s no time limit, you just can’t change your rates of return.

Happy Planning!

Filed Under: Basic Retirement Planning, Torrid Tech Talk

4 Questions to Ask Before Retirement

February 23, 2016 by suzies Leave a Comment

From DailyFinance.com

It’s an achievement to make it to retirement. Years of hard work pay off once you have saved enough and get to hand over a resignation letter to your boss. You say farewell, and there may be a few tears as you part ways with your former life. But there’s also the excitement of finally starting the new leisurely chapter of your journey.

The next day there’s no reason to get up before 10 a.m. You feel so grateful you no longer need to wake up early just to get ready for boring morning meetings. You get up and go downstairs, brew a morning cup of coffee and sit down at the table and ask, “Now what?”

The start of retirement is a time of exploration for some people. There is a new life routine to figure out. Here are a few questions to ponder as you enter retirement.

Do you plan to reduce stock exposure? It’s commonly accepted that you should gradually decrease the risk in your portfolio as you age and accumulate more assets to protect. Many people do this by adding bonds to their portfolio in order to reduce volatility during retirement. Unfortunately, there isn’t a simple asset allocation that fits everyone’s circumstances. Adding more bonds might help you sleep well at night because they reduce volatility, but you also risk outliving your money if you live a long life. You could add more stocks if you have a long time horizon, but a bad sequence of return at the beginning of retirement could cause your portfolio to be depleted prematurely. There’s no way to determine the optimum split between stocks and bonds unless you can predict the future, so the key is to be flexible with your spending and never follow any rigid rules. You also want to avoid staying away from stocks completely, because one of the biggest enemies for retirees is inflation. Price increases don’t seem like a huge problem now, but there will be a time when the eroding effects of inflation are noticeable again. Almost every retiree will need some stock exposure to fight off the wealth destroying power of inflation.

What is your strategy to withdraw money to meet daily expenses? You spent years accumulating the assets to retire and employing investment strategies to grow your nest egg. Most people spend too much time thinking about how to tweak their portfolio for maximum gains and too little time optimizing how they will withdraw their assets in a tax efficient manner. You need to give just as much throught to the withdrawal phase. Decide how much you need to spend regularly and where the funds will come from. Without a paycheck and with your assets spread between pre-tax, post-tax and taxable accounts, you want to know exactly how to take money out without paying more in taxes than is absolutely necessary.

What do you plan to do with your assets? The flip side of not outliving your money is the opportunity to leave money to your heirs once you pass away. You could leave it to your children or grandchildren, donate the sum to charity or something else. Put together a plan to make sure your cash gets used in a way you approve of. You may also want to start gifting while you are still alive so you get to see the fruits of your contributions.

What do you plan to do every day? Finances are an essential part of retirement, but this question may be the most important one to answer. It’s easy to start relaxing and slow down once you retire because no one is pushing you to stay active. However, those who don’t keep busy could see their health erode, and no one wants to age prematurely. By staying active, you will have the energy to pursue physically demanding activities, but leisurely ones will be more enjoyable with fewer aches and pains as well. Staying active can make even being a couch potato more enjoyable.

As you linger over that first coffee of retirement, hopefully you are off to your next activity with a perfectly clear idea of where the money to fund daily life is going to come from. You’ve already spent years contemplating retirement’s toughest questions. It’s now time to enjoy it.

Filed Under: Basic Retirement Planning, Retirement News, Torrid Tech Talk

Redesigning Your Practices

January 30, 2016 by suzies Leave a Comment

Few situations can zap your enthusiasm like not having enough time in the day for your to-do list. Unless you get control of your schedule, you could burn a lot of energy without getting the results you want.

Performance matters. In 2014, 52 percent of compensation adjustments were based on performance, according to a PayScale study.

Writing in MONEY.com, productivity coach Casey Moore says your daily rhythms should be maintained, like doing projects in the a.m. if you’re an early riser.

Stay on track and build breaks into your day to help your brain refresh.

Tame your in-box. Average office workers spend 2.6 hours a day reading and answering email. Laura Stack author of What to Do When There’s Too Much to Do recommends setting up sound alerts to define which emails need immediate attention (the boss’s). Using filters in Outlook or Gmail, funnel away messages that are less pressing will help you avoid interruptions and avoid the need to constantly monitor your in-box.

You can multitask if you do it right. Researchers at Stanford have found that doing two things at once is a brain drain. But Bob Pozen of MIT’s Sloan School of Management says it’s OK to pair the right activities. Physical chores like tidying up while checking voicemail pair well. Or you could listen to a conference call while sorting your email.

Open office chatter can be a productivity killer. You can collectively develop a nonverbal signal (hat, headphone, sign) that discourages interruptions. Then decide what issues are worth the break-in, such as a client problem.

Filed Under: Financial Advisors, Torrid Tech Talk

Wages Bounce Back But With Modest Gains

January 28, 2016 by suzies Leave a Comment

After a time of few if any raises, the demand for labor has risen enough to compel some employers to pay more to hire or retain workers.

The gains are modest, but they should slowly accelerate as unemployment falls further and competition for quality workers increases. Wage gains are now at about 3 percent compared with 2.2 percent previously.

The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that gains are the strongest in construction with a 3.8 percent increase. The wages of professional and business-service workers have risen by 3 percent.

There are now just 1.5 unemployed job seekers for every opening, down from 6.8 in 2009. Economists say that U.S. and global economic fundaments should lead to higher wages.

The Labor Department’s gauge of average hourly earnings for all jobs in all categories recently posted a 2.5 percent gain.

But Chicago-based staffing company LaSalle Network tells Bloomberg Businessweek that they see increases in specific positions and specific areas, not increases across the board. Economists calculate that a robust increase in labor productivity is a missing factor. Gains in productivity, the dollar value of goods and services a worker produces in one hour, have averaged 1.3 percent since 2007.

Roberto Perli, a partner at Cornerstone Macro, a research firm, says that in spite of this, wages seem poised to accelerate.

Filed Under: Torrid Tech Talk Tagged With: rise, wages

Perseverance – Top Quality of Business Owners

January 27, 2016 by suzies Leave a Comment

Hello again and Happy New Year! Wishing you much success in your practice this year.

It’s time for all of us to revisit our goals both personal and professional. What goals have you already set for 2016? I often talk to advisors about their goals for bringing on new clients, growing their practice, having better time management, finally hiring new people, etc.

The trick to setting goals is to be “specific”. It’s not just about “getting new clients”. For example, getting more specific…”I want to add 5 new clients each month in 2016 for a total of 60 new clients”. Then break that goal down into the “how” you are going to make that happen.

Remember that you can’t keep doing the same old thing and expect new and better results (assuming the same old thing isn’t really working). You have to try new things. Some will fail miserably. Some will work great. Some will fall in between there somewhere.

Did you know that” perseverance” is one of the top qualities of business owners? Being able to persevere, adjust, change courses, and try new things to reach your goals.

Setting AND revisiting your goals AND working on them all are required to ACHIEVE them. Let me tell you a story about Torrid. About 3 years ago I set a goal to redo our website. It was a bit dated and a little cluttered. Too much information on the home page. It was overwhelming for people to look at. I realized we needed a complete redesign.

In 2013 I investigated our options. We have our own web developers and thought about just having them do it all, but most of them are better “coders” than “designers”. And I wanted fresh ideas anyway. By the end of 2013 I knew we wanted to use WordPress, but that was about it. I didn’t keep pushing towards the goal hard enough. I kept procrastinating and putting it off.

In 2014 it was still on the goals list. The website was still looking bad. This time I broke it down into steps. First, I ran a web design contest on 99designs.com. I described what I wanted and let the designers battle it out. It took way longer than I thought to just pick a winning design and get it tweaked.

Once the winner emerged, they just gave us the photoshop design files. We then had to convert it to actual HTML and images for the web pages. That is a bit of a special skill, so we hired a contractor to do that part. That took a couple of months right there. By this point we were already into 2015!

I doubled down determined to get this new website done. I hired another firm that was going to convert it to a WordPress template. They did that… in about 4 months. But the navigation wasn’t right. The images needed all kinds of sprucing. And on top of that, we still had to set it up on our server AND move over all the content we wanted to still keep.

Still focused, but taking a lot of time, I had to hire yet another firm that would move everything from the development firm to our server. Now luckily our own people manage our web servers and could set up the site and the WordPress and all that goes with it. These new guys moved over the template and tweaked it until we liked it, including the navigation. Then they moved over all of our pages. It took a lot of work to get that done.

Our new site rolled out in the Fall of 2015, almost 3 years after I first set the goal! So sometimes we have to “persevere”, but none of it would have happened if we hadn’t set the goal and pursued it relentlessly.

There are many ways to design a website and in retrospect I picked the “custom website” route, which is the longest, hardest, and most expensive route. Regardless we did finally hit our goal and more importantly learned many lessons on the journey.

On the “success” side of goal setting, if you didn’t see the webinar we had one in December with advisor Bill Schultheis. His firm Soundmark Financial grew 700% from $80 million to $550 million in AUM over about a 9 year period. Talk about setting goals and hitting them! If you haven’t heard his story you can see it at

www.DoubleYourAUM.com.

Filed Under: Business Advice, Financial Advisors, Torrid Tech Talk Tagged With: Goals, Perseverance, Torrid-Tech.com

Time to Say Thanks…

November 30, 2015 by suzies Leave a Comment

Hope you and your family have a great Thanksgiving!

It’s hard to believe that November is here already, which means we are approaching the end of the year.

In this month’s article I just wanted to write about the first and major part of the word Thanksgiving, which is “THANKS” – to be “Thankful”.

The definition of thankful is someone feeling or showing gratitude. When you are pleased and grateful for what you have, this is an example of a time when you are thankful. If you are a person of faith then our “Thankfulness” is often directed to thanking our creator.

I’m truly thankful for my wife, Melissa, who is a smart, beautiful amazing Godly woman and the outstanding mother of our 4 children. She is always encouraging me in my roles as a father, a husband, a business owner, and a coach.

I’m thankful for our 4 children. Zac (23) is in vet school at the Univ. of Georgia. Lexi (21) is married now but in her senior year at the Univ. of South Carolina. Josh (16) is a Junior and Aaron (15) is a freshman at Fellowship Christian School in Roswell. Anyone with kids knows that they each have their own special gifts, qualities, likes, and dislikes.

As they grow up and gravitate toward “something” in life, I then can connect the dots back to other things in their life. Zac, for instance always had a love for critters. At the beach he’d look for crabs. At the park he would look for snakes and bugs. In school, he always liked science. It makes sense he wanted to be a veterinarian!

I’m thankful for my in-laws. Unlike most “in-laws” they support me as if they were my own parents. They visit us often and get to spend quality time with their grand kids. They both try to instill wisdom in our children and love them unconditionally.

I’m thankful for Torrid Tech and the journey that has gotten us to where we are today. We have been blessed with some amazing creative juices from many people. Our current team is clicking on all cylinders and I am so thankful for everyone that is contributing to our success.

I’m thankful for good health and the same for our family. Sure there’s the bum knees and occasional doctor’s visits but overall we have been blessed to be healthy for the most part.

I’m thankful for all of the great customers and clients of Torrid Technologies. Without YOU our customers we would just be an empty ghost town with tumble weeds blowing around. When our phones ring, I try to remember how blessed we are to have them ring. THANK YOU THANK YOU!

I could fill pages more about “Thankfulness”, but I’d like to turn it over to you. What are you thankful for? It’s a great exercise to put a little bit of joy into the holiday fuel tank. So remember all of these things when giving thanks around your Thanksgiving table. THANKS, Happy Planning and HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!!!!!!!!!!!

Filed Under: Personal Travel and Holidays, Torrid Tech Talk

Need A Little Motivation?

October 14, 2015 by suzies Leave a Comment

I bet you can think of at least 5 excuses to not exercise without even breaking a sweat…pun intended!

Need an excuse to keep going? See if any of these ideas will help you step up your exercise routine.

Triathlon participants were recently interviewed by The Wall Street Journal, which asked for time-saving exercise and training tips. Here are a few.

★Stay in the living room. Triathletes often train inside on a bike trainer. They say using their brain while on a stationary bike improves their ability to do mental work. Sometimes their biking coincides with favorite

TV shows or movies. And it’s also time spent with family.

★ Work on the phone. One athlete thinks of work ideas while running and uses the phone’s voice memo feature to save them. Or he goes over phone notes for a meeting so he’s prepared. Then he showers and goes into the meeting.
★ Get help with busy work. When training for a triathlon, one mom sorts clean clothes into a basket for each of her children. They are responsible for folding them or hanging them up.
★ Exercise outside on/around the practice field. This same mom drives her kids to football or soccer practice, then spends their practice time jogging around the field or in the neighborhood.
★ If you have time for only one thing, run. Experts say it will build endurance for several other sports.
★ Make one-dish meals. Many athletes use spare time to cut up vegetables and dinner ingredients so they can just put them into the slow cooker.Maybe one of these suggestions will help you when your feeling lazy or like you just “don’t have time”.

Filed Under: Torrid Tech Talk

Medicare Confusion

October 14, 2015 by suzies Leave a Comment

I was listening to a local Atlanta show today that stated 70% of Americans don’t understand Medicare.

Then came the nugget of gold: UnitedHealthcare has been working to make all the ins & outs of the program easier to understand.

Maybe you know just the client that could benefit from this easy to comprehend FREE resource.

Check out the “Show Me Guide” from UnitedHealthcare at MedicareMadeClear.com or by clicking HERE.

Filed Under: Basic Retirement Planning, Financial Advisors, Pensions or Defined Benefits, Retirement News, Torrid Tech Talk, Uncategorized

Marketing Your Way Across The World

September 29, 2015 by suzies Leave a Comment

Not Georgia but Greece in Mykenos

Hi, I hope you and your family had a great summer. Wishing you and yours a wonderful Fall! Here in Atlanta we still have some heat but it’s starting to finally cool down at night. Hayrides, pumpkins and apple cider are here! North Georgia is simply a delight in the Fall with college football dominating the scene.

So it’s an odd contrast to talk about traveling overseas for this article, but I needed to continue this thread while it’s fresh on my mind. As I mentioned last month, my wife and I were blessed to visit Italy for our 24th anniversary trip over the summer. We were also able to take a short cruise to Croatia and Greece on the same trip.

What is the tie to “marketing” you might ask? Well, first of all I wanted to reiterate that 10 years ago we would never have been able to even afford this kind of trip. The ONE THING that has made the most difference in Torrid over the last 10 years is a focus on “marketing”.

Over the last 10 years I have been studying marketing, learning from marketing gurus, reading books, attending marketing conferences, trying new marketing methods and generally taking the job of “marketing” seriously. Something I knew little about and didn’t realize how important it was until I saw the “results” slowly producing fruit.

For financial advisors, you got into the business probably because you like people, or are good with finances. You are a technician and can operate your financial practice just fine. But without a consistent focus on “marketing”, you just can’t grow your practice fast enough.

Along the Waterfront in Split Croatia

More and better marketing is what has allowed my wife and I to take the trip this summer to Italy and Greece. It was the “key” to make that happen. Without the marketing, the growth in our customer base and revenue would not be occurring. This allowed us the freedom and the financial resources to take the trip.

Now onto the trip so you can live vicariously for the duration of this article… Our first cruise stop was Split, Croatia – a place I never thought we’d visit in a million years. This city was a delight. Imagine stone streets and historic buildings facing a clean harbor surrounded by flowering plants and glorious mountains. Roman ruins, walls and towers gave a unique character to an easily walkable “town”. The food and wine were worth the visit.

The Blue Domes are Churches in Santorini

Our first port in Greece was the scenic Santorini. We booked a bus tour to get a feel for the island. The views from everywhere were spectacular. Part of the tour we walked up to the top of a town to see houses and blue domed churches up close. Afterwards we took a taxi to a beach and enjoyed the seafood while relaxing by the ocean.

The next day we were in Mykonos. Wanting to avoid the crowds we shied away from the ship excursions and instead took a taxi to a nearby beach that the driver recommended. We set up at Atlantis hotel and beach with chairs and umbrellas. The water was crystal clear. The seafood once again delicious. Without all that “marketing stuff” we would never have been there.

After a day at sea we then visited Katakolon. I know we stopped here so people could visit the ruins of Olympia. We just weren’t interested in it and instead took an excursion bus to a beach. Unfortunately the beach wasn’t that great and was crawling with people selling stuff which made it hard to relax. Our intuition in Mykonos to take a taxi off the beaten path would have been best repeated here.

When we were getting married in 1991, Greece was our dream honeymoon. Due to the Gulf War breaking out we couldn’t go, and instead had a wonderful trip to France. So it had been a long time dream to finally make it to Greece. We were so glad we were blessed with this chance. Santorini was certainly the jewel of this leg of our trip.

Do you have a place that you’ve dreamed of going? What plans have you put in place to get there? Spending time focused on your “marketing” to grow your practice should be at the top of your “to do” list…you will be well rewarded for your efforts.