Retirement income
How do you turn a lifetime of saving into a paycheck?
Retirement income planning replaces your paycheck out of accounts you spent a career filling. We decide how much you withdraw each year and which accounts the money comes from. Then we coordinate those withdrawals with Social Security and any pension, so the total stays dependable and the tax bill stays low.
Sound familiar?
- You saved well for thirty years and now have to reverse the habit, which is harder than anyone warned you.
- You have money in four or five places and no clear sense of which one to spend first.
- You want to know the honest number you can spend each year without lying awake about it.
- You would like to take the whole family somewhere memorable, but you cannot tell whether that is responsible or reckless.
See how the paycheck gets built
How I work through it
- 01
Start with what the life costs
Before any portfolio math, we figure out what you spend now and what changes when work stops. Travel goes up early. Healthcare goes up later. You will not spend a smooth inflation-adjusted line, and a plan built on one is a plan you cannot follow.
- 02
Fill the gap in the right order
Social Security and any pension cover part of the number. The rest comes from your accounts, and the sequence matters. Which account funds a given year determines your tax bill that year and the size of your RMD problem later.
- 03
Keep the next few years boring
Money you plan to spend soon has no business in a market that can fall 30 percent. Near-term spending sits in something stable, so a bad year never forces you to sell good investments at the wrong time.
- 04
Revisit it as the life changes
A withdrawal plan built once and filed away stops being true within a year. We adjust as markets, spending, and health change.
What you get
If you are working with an advisor now and none of this sounds familiar, that is worth a conversation.
- A monthly income figure you can spend without flinching, with the reasoning behind it
- A written withdrawal order across every account you own
- A cash reserve sized to your spending so a down market never forces a sale
- Coordination of pension elections, Social Security timing, and portfolio withdrawals as one decision
- A plan for the healthcare years between retiring and Medicare at 65
- Annual updates as spending and markets move
What this means for you
One deposit, on a schedule, like a paycheck
The complexity stays on my side. What you see is money arriving in your checking account on a day you can count on.
Permission to spend it
Most people I meet have saved well and feel guilty spending any of it. Once the arithmetic shows the money lasts, they book the trip.
A market drop stops being an emergency
When the next few years of spending are already set aside, a bad quarter becomes news rather than a decision.
A hypothetical example
What this looks like in practice
A new retiree needs $9,000 a month. Her pension covers $3,200 and she is delaying Social Security until 70, so the portfolio funds $5,800 for now. We hold two years of that in cash and short bonds, draw first from her taxable brokerage account to keep taxable income low enough for Roth conversions, and rebalance from whatever has done well. At 70, Social Security switches on and the portfolio's share of the paycheck drops.
This is a hypothetical example for illustration only. It does not represent an actual client and is not a guarantee of future results. Your situation, tax brackets, and outcomes will differ.
Questions I get about this
The old rule of thumb is 4 percent of your starting balance, adjusted for inflation. It is a useful sanity check and a poor plan. Your real number depends on when Social Security starts, whether you have a pension, how your spending changes across retirement, and what you want to leave behind. For most families I work with the honest answer lands somewhere between 3.5 and 5.5 percent, and it moves over time.
Conventional order is taxable, then tax-deferred, then Roth. In practice the better answer usually blends them, keeping your taxable income low enough to make room for Roth conversions in the same years you are spending.
If you retire before 65 you need a bridge, usually a marketplace plan. Those premiums are based on income, which means the same year you might want a large Roth conversion could be the year a subsidy disappears. Those two decisions have to be made together.
These decisions do not sit still
Change one and the others move. That is the argument for handling them together rather than one specialist at a time.
Let's find out if I can help.
The first conversation is 30 minutes on the phone, and you bring nothing to it. You describe what you are trying to sort out, and I tell you straight whether this is the kind of work I do well.