Income That Lasts as Long as You Do
We help you plan how savings, Social Security, pensions and business income will cover your spending throughout retirement.
The Decisions That Matter Most
We work through these questions with you before retirement and revisit them as your circumstances change.
Which Account to Draw From First
Taxable, tax-deferred or Roth. The order changes your lifetime tax bill, and the right answer moves as your income and the brackets do.
When to Claim Social Security
Early, at full retirement age, or at seventy is a separate decision for each spouse, and the survivor benefit usually matters more than the monthly figure people compare.
What Happens If One of You Dies
A household loses a Social Security check, may lose a pension, and files single the following year at compressed brackets. We include that change in the plan.
What Healthcare Actually Costs
Medicare premiums, supplements, and the income thresholds that raise them based on what you earned two years earlier.
When the Business Is the Retirement Plan
An owner’s retirement often depends on a sale that has not happened yet, or on income the company has to keep paying. We work out what the household needs and how much of it the business has to supply. Then we plan the sale or the step back around that number.
Sale proceeds count toward the income that sets your Medicare premium and the tax on your Social Security, so both are planned around the year the business changes hands.
Succession and exit planningThe Years You Control
Retirement is the one stretch of life where you control your taxable income, because you choose where it comes from. That control ends with required minimum distributions and the year a surviving spouse starts filing single.
Roth conversions, harvesting into low brackets, and staying under the Medicare thresholds are all decided in the years before those dates.
Planning for Care Costs
Extended care is the largest uninsured cost most retired households carry. The question that matters is what happens to the spouse still living at home while it is being paid for.
We compare ways to pay for care, including insurance and your own savings. To review how you have planned for care and other retirement needs, the Storehouse Test takes about ninety seconds.
Guaranteed, or Market-Dependent
We look at which income sources cover your regular spending and which depend on investment returns.
Guaranteed Income
The money that arrives whether or not the market cooperates: Social Security, a pension if you have one, and anything else you hold that pays for life.
Market-Dependent Income
Withdrawals from invested accounts. Higher expected return, and exposed to sequence risk: the same average return in a different order produces a very different outcome.
Covering Essential Spending
How much of your essential spending should be covered by income that cannot fall. That helps you assess how much market risk to take with the rest.
We plan around the accounts you already hold and coordinate with whoever manages them. We do not manage investment accounts ourselves.
Common Questions
When should I claim Social Security?
For a married couple the higher earner is not really choosing their own benefit. They are setting what the surviving spouse lives on. That, and the effect on your taxable income, usually matter more than the break-even age most calculators compute.
Which account should I draw from first?
Taxable, tax-deferred or Roth, and the order changes your lifetime tax bill materially. The right answer moves as your income and the brackets do, so it is a decision made more than once rather than settled at retirement.
What is IRMAA?
An income-related surcharge on Medicare premiums, calculated from your income two years earlier. It works as a series of steps, so crossing a threshold by a single dollar costs the whole step.
Talk Through Your Retirement Questions
We will tell you plainly whether it is one we can help with, and if it is not, who can. Thirty minutes, nothing to prepare.