Describe your advisory process and the client information you need before a retirement planning meeting. Makeform turns it into an organized questionnaire for goals, household details, assets, liabilities, income, expected retirement spending, time horizon, and risk tolerance, ready for you to review and edit.
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Sample prompts for the builder
Choose a starting prompt, tailor it to your discovery process, or send it to the Makeform builder. The field structure is an example for editing.
Audience
Individuals and couples preparing for an initial planning meeting
Format
Multi-section intake with conditional household questions
Prompt size
268 chars
Example questionnaire structure
Multi-section intake with conditional household questions
Who is included in this retirement plan?
Target retirement age for each person
Accounts, approximate balances, and as-of dates
Expected monthly retirement spending
Which documents can you provide?
Suggested routing tags
New client
Needs documents
Ready for review
Separate current balances from recurring contributions and ask for an as-of date, so the advisor can tell what each number represents.
Step 1
Set scope
household, meeting stage, and planning horizon
Step 2
Collect
goals, cash flow, accounts, debts, and coverage
Step 3
Clarify
branch into partner details and changed circumstances
Step 4
Prepare
review answers and missing documents before the meeting
Better discovery
Gather household facts and personal priorities before the planning conversation.
Reveal partner, pension, business, dependent, or relocation questions only when relevant.
Record dates, ownership, account type, and contributions beside each asset value.
Capture desired outcomes, difficult trade-offs, and concerns in the client's words.
Use cases
Use broad discovery, change-focused annual review, or detailed pre-retirement cash flow.
Inventory goals, family responsibilities, income, assets, debts, coverage, and documents.
Open follow-ups for selected changes such as work, savings, property, or timing.
Focus on timing, spending, income, benefits, coverage transitions, reserves, and large expenses.
Combine time horizon, ranked priorities, neutral scenarios, and open explanation.
Questionnaire workflow
Shape generated fields around the meeting stage and your review process.
Identify the meeting stage, household members, and information categories.
Use your terminology, require essentials, allow unknowns, and separate partner details.
Reveal pension, partner, and change details only when applicable.
Route responses and review missing values, unclear dates, and promised documents.
Choose an intake method
Keep facts, estimates, documents, and priorities organized while skipping irrelevant questions.
Field guide
Collect enough detail to prepare the conversation, but label estimates clearly and let clients say when information is unavailable. Your review determines what needs clarification.
Household
Capture who the plan covers, each person's work status and retirement timing, and family responsibilities that affect household goals.
Goals
Ask what retirement should enable, which priorities compete, and what uncertainty could change the desired timing or lifestyle.
Cash flow
Separate today's income and spending from expected retirement income and expenses. Give estimates a frequency and date.
Balance sheet
Label every asset by type, owner, approximate value, and value date. Record debts with payments and expected payoff timing.
Protection and documents
Inventory existing coverage and planning documents, their last review dates, and which files the client can provide.
Risk tolerance
Treat time horizon, income reliance, response to declines, and prior experience as separate inputs, with space for explanation.
Related tools
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Open toolCollect life-coverage information for the discovery inventory.
Open toolFAQ
Practical answers for financial advisors building a consistent pre-meeting discovery process.
It is a structured intake for retirement discovery. It gathers household facts, goals, timing, cash flow, assets, debts, coverage, documents, and risk-tolerance responses so the advisor can prepare follow-up questions.
Include household details, goals, retirement dates, cash flow, expected income, assets, liabilities, coverage, document status, large expenses, time horizon, risk scenarios, and an upload checklist. Label financial values with ownership and as-of dates.
Match the length to the meeting. Initial discovery needs broad sections; an annual review can start with a change checklist. Conditional logic hides partner, pension, property, business, or coverage follow-ups until relevant.
Use several neutral inputs: withdrawal timing, reliance on portfolio income, prior experience, responses to hypothetical declines, and ranked goals. Add open text so clients can explain answers that a scale misses.
Yes. Add separate fields for each partner's work, retirement date, income, accounts, and benefit estimates, with shared household spending and goals. Reveal the second set only when joint planning is selected.
Yes. Add uploads beside a checklist for statements, pension summaries, benefit estimates, and coverage documents. Offer not available and will provide later choices so missing files have a clear status.
Yes. Makeform offers unlimited free forms and responses. Generate, edit, publish, and reuse questionnaires without a response cap; the paid tier removes the Makeform badge.
Replace generic labels, require only essential fields, add not-known choices, test every conditional path, and confirm submission routing. Test both a single-client and joint response before sharing the link.
Turn discovery into a prepared conversation.
