It doesn't matter if you have $1 million, $5 million, $10 million, or even more in your investment portfolio.

You're not going to feel financially secure until you have a plan in place that shows you how to optimize that and not just optimize it, but optimize it in a way that allows you to fully fund everything that's most important to you.

I think one of the biggest hangups most people have is thinking that once they reach some net worth or some portfolio value, that's when they're going to feel more confident.

That's when they're going to have more peace of mind. I'm here to tell you that's not the case.

Does not matter how much money you have in your portfolio, financial security doesn't come from

a number. It comes from having a plan. So today I'm going to walk through

a real-life scenario to show you how to think about your planning as you prepare for retirement.

This is another episode of Ready for Retirement. I'm your host, James Cannell, and I'm here to

teach you how to get the most of the life with your money. And now, on to the episode. A lot of education around retirement

planning and investments, it's fairly abstract. In general, here's what you should do, or here's

a principle that you should follow, which is helpful in many instances, but sometimes an actual

example, something that's concrete and you can use to almost view yourself in,

that's what's actually going to help you see what's important when it comes to your own

planning. So we're going to go through an actual question today that a listener submitted,

and I'm going to walk through it and say, what's the framework or what's the order of things

that I want to make sure there's a plan for based upon real numbers. So this is from Peter. Peter is a

listener and Peter submitted this question. He said, I am 64 years old and my wife is 60 and she's

retired. We have combined retirement accounts of $2.5 million. Mine is $2.1 million and my wife's is

$400,000. Mine is in a 70-30 stock and bond mix. And my wife's isn't an 80-20 stock in bonds mix.

We have $600,000 in cash and CDs, which we plan on living off of and not touching our

retirement accounts for six to seven years.

We also have $50,000 in a Roth IRA.

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