---
title: Successful Retirement Planning is Like Baking a Cake - Streamline Financial Planning
description: Retirement Planning is like baking a cake. Here's how.
---

## Successful Retirement Planning is Like Baking a Cake

 by [Dave Zoller, CFP®](https://streamlineplanning.com/blog/author/dave-zoller-cfp) | Jan 2, 2020 | [Retirement](https://streamlineplanning.com/blog/tag/retirement) |  0 comments

Have a written recipe for the exact next steps in your plan.

There are so many moving pieces to your life and your retirement plan. And because life changes, the recipe needs to be adjusted too.

Now, I use the word **recipe** because sometimes we compare creating a successful retirement plan to baking a cake.

What’s the easiest way to bake a cake? It’s to have that recipe and to have the ingredients and the exact next steps that you need to get to that end result. But your recipe for retirement is going to be made up of different ingredients than, say, your neighbors or your best friends. Everybody has a unique plan.

At Streamline, we’ve created hundreds of these retirement plans, and we know that there’s about 70 ingredients that we use when designing them. Most of the time, it only takes 10 to 15 ingredients to get an ideal outcome.

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