Most retirement advice quietly assumes you have a spouse, two sources of income, two social

security checks, someone to split expenses with. But what if it's just you? For singles,

the rules are different. The margin for error is much smaller, but the potential freedom is much

larger. So today I'm going to walk you through three steps to build a retirement plan that gives you

confidence, not because you have a backup plan, but because you are the plan. And to do this most effective, I'm going to tell you right now what those three steps are, but then I'm going to show you how those apply to a sample case study. So you can understand the nuance here and how each of these steps ties into each other and most importantly, how these steps are going to be different for a single individual than for someone that's married. But step number one is design your freedom number. Step number two is map your reliable income

sources. And step number three is build a portfolio with purpose. Let's jump into a case study here

to show you what this looks like. So let's jump into Tina's sample case study so we can actually

illustrate these concepts in practice. So here's Tina. She is 62 years old today. She has some money in the bank. You can see she has about $2.1, $2.2.2 million in investment accounts. By the way, if you have $2 million, if you have $200,000, if you have $20 million, these steps are going to be the same. The framework is going to be the same. So don't let these specific numbers get in the way of understanding the framework involved with looking at this. She has an investment account

and you can see right here, this investment account for her. This is all an individual stock

position from her employer. So there's some planning points around there that we're going to get to

in a second. Tina also has a 401k and a Roth IRA and then she owns her home outright. So I mentioned step number one was design your freedom number. We just looked at investment accounts, but that's not step number one. That's just giving you an overview of where Tina is today. In the same way, you know where you are today. Your first step is know your freedom number. So what do I mean by that? Your freedom number says, don't start

with the spreadsheets. Start with what do you want life to look like? What do you doing in retirement? Are you traveling? If so, as a domestic, is it international? Are you participating in social clubs? Are you doing a lot of volunteering? Are you spending time with friends and family? What does retirement look like? Before jumping into of the numbers, start thinking about what does true freedom feel like? Once you know what that

feels like, mean, the things you're doing, the people you're with, the things you're able to do, then we can work backwards into what that freedom number looks like. So for Tina, you can see right here, there's not a whole lot going on. A lot of people they get here and they just think, I'm going to throw out a number.

In Tina's example, $6,000 per month is what she wants to live on in retirement. If you look at the things that we could be thinking about, though, how do we think about health care? How do we think about long-term care? Is she sending a child through college? Is there a new vehicle purchase? Is there vacations? Is there a wedding for a child or a grandchild?

Is there a property purchase, asset purchase, gifts, personal gifts, charitable gifts, all these are types

of things that Tina could include in her freedom number, that you can include in your freedom

number to say, here's what I want my retirement to look like. That is step one, specifically

if you are single, this is your version. This is what you want retirement to look like. If you're a married couple, both of you are having to say in this. And hopefully there's a lot of alignment there, but sometimes things look differently. If you are single, you can fully control exactly what you want this number to look like because you have full control over exactly what you want to do in your retirement years. So what we're trying to determine is what's the true cost of the life that you want, not just the cost of some calculator output. So for Tina, I'm keeping this very basic for right now. $6,000 per month is what she thought. We're going to add some stuff in to show you at the end of this, how this changes the projections based upon designing a new freedom amount. But to start, here's her goals. This is step number one, understanding what it will cost. Step number two for you is map your reliable income. So what do I mean by this? Well, in the same way Tina right here has an income, you probably have an income while you are working. You have a salary that's covering all of your

goals. What you need to think about, though, is what happens when you're not working any longer?

Well, you have your portfolio, of course, you have your savings, but before we get to that,

we need to understand what do you have coming in from Social Security, from pension, from

annuities, from rental income, potentially. So what are those sources of income that are coming

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