As a Retirement Income Specialist, I spend most of my time identifying opportunities within people’s life plans that can ultimately add hundreds of thousands to their cash flow and net worth during their drawdown years. When you know what you are looking for, the opportunities are easy to find. The “trick” is not a function of barely legal tax avoidance schemes but more about using your best guess about the future to find ways of generating incremental cash flow.

Here are some of the most common roadblocks to retirement success:

• NOT realizing that you may live longer than you think
• NOT knowing how to convert your accumulated savings into a sustainable cash flow
• NOT having an actionable, flexible and tested retirement life plan that you really believe in and are totally behind
• NOT capitalizing on the fact that you will pass through three distinct periods in retirement: your Go-Go Years, your Slow-Go Years and your No-Go Years. Where and how much money you spend during each of these phases will vary dramatically
• NOT actively looking for opportunities to reduce income taxes during retirement
• NOT taking advantage of these annual cash flow fluctuations to set up tax reduction and volatility protection
• NOT understanding how and when “Dollar Cost Averaging” turns to “Dollar Cost Ravaging”
• NOT taking advantage of opportunities to create hundreds of thousands of incremental dollars of retirement cash flow because you relied on conventional (outdated) wisdom