Retirement planning includes analyzing complex situations containing many variables.
When dealing with situations like these, people often attempt to employ mental shortcuts called heuristics. It is, therefore, not uncommon for prospective clients to express their mental picture of how they expect their retirement years to play out based on heuristics. There are just too many variables to guess. The outcome of this analysis almost always surprises the client, sometimes in a positive way and other times in a very disappointing fashion. Many times we are surprised ourselves.