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Three Steps to Improve Your Financial Planning

In: Business and Management

Submitted By lucasna
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QUARTERLY NEWS AND TOOLS FROM TIAA-CREF | SPRING 2005

Three Steps To Improve Your Financial Planning
Understand your savings and investment habits Create a winning budget Find the right retirement product for your needs

What’s the future of Medicare?

COMMENT
BERT SCOTT

Designing Products to Meet Your Financial Needs

T

hroughout our 87-year history, TIAA-CREF has been an innovator in the retirement investment field. We created the variable annuity, pioneered the use of real estate and foreign investing in pension plans and helped bring inflation-linked bonds to America. But stay tuned; there’s more to come. As the leader of TIAA-CREF’s Product Management area, I am proud to be part of the team that will be bringing you our newest products and services. At Product Management, TIAACREF’s “manufacturing” center, top-notch professionals develop new investment and insurance products and make sure those we already offer are still working for you. In a continually changing financial services marketplace, our mission remains simple: to provide the tools you need to help reach your financial goals. A large part of our work involves listening to you. This enables us to know what you need now, and what you may need down the road. So we begin the product design process by asking questions: What do you, our clients, want to accomplish? ■ How will those goals change over time? ■ What do you like about what’s currently available to you? ■ What do you need that we don’t offer?


As we study your answers, patterns emerge that guide us in creating new financial products and improving existing ones. Once we know what you’re seeking, we collaborate with our investment and administration colleagues to make sure the products we design do what they’re intended to do: Serve you. Over the next one to two years, look for enhanced products and services provided through

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