Planning For Retirement: A General Overview

Abstract

Kevin Paul Kelly and Associates is a financial planning finn owned and operated by Mr. Kevin Paul Kelly. Kevin is a Certified Lawyer, JD, and a Certified Financial Planner, CFP. Roger Buller, CFP, Wayne Toteff, CFP, Ron Ostezan, and Jim Poteet, all work under Kevin's corporate license. The purpose of Kevin Paul Kelly and Associates is to provide clients with sound financial advice, and also to provide them a means of trading various security products. Typically these two services, categorized under the description of Financial Planning, are subdivided into five primary components: insurance planning, investment planning, retirement planning, tax planning, and estate planning. During my internship with Kevin P. Kelly and Associates, I was privileged to get a taste of all five components. While beginning to understand the distinguishing features of each component, I was also exposed to many of the different aspects in running a small independent broker-dealership. Many of these broker-dealer aspects dealt with the numerous regulations imposed on the security industry by the government and the NASD. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, throughout my internship, I experienced the inner workings of a small, privately held business, an experience worth much more then anything I could learned from enrolling in a class. Among all of the experiences and information I learned during my internship, I consider the most interesting aspects to be from the retirement planning component of financial planning. For whatever reasons, perhaps it was due to hearing buzzwords like "40l(k)" and "stock options" over the years, I decided to further research this topic. After a short time I began to realize how vast this topic was. Consisting of countless options, retirement planning is a never-ending field. To simplify the field, the following paper explains several different aspects of retirement planning. Composed of two main sections, Retirement Basics and Specific Plans, the following paper is a general overview on retirement planning. To narrow the topic of retirement planning down, I focused on information that a college graduate should be knowledgeable of, so as to better their chances of a worry-free retirement. One should keep in mind that every aspect could, and should, be further researched. Thus, the following pages are geared towards someone who is just stepping into the "real world," and lacks knowledge of the retirement planning genre.