Planning services
Retirement Income Planning
This is the work of turning what you saved into a paycheck: which accounts to draw from, in what order, and how to keep that income going through a long retirement.
Scope
What this area answers
The kinds of questions this part of the plan answers.
Which accounts should I draw from first?
When should I claim Social Security, and what changes if I wait?
How much can I spend each year without putting later years at risk?
Should more of my income be guaranteed for life, and at what cost?
What happens to household income if one spouse dies first?
How should withdrawals be handled in a year when markets are down?
The work
What this area involves
What the work actually consists of.
Mapping income sources
Social Security, pensions, retirement accounts, taxable accounts, anything else you hold. All of it in one place, so you can see the whole picture at once.
Withdrawal sequencing
The order you draw from your accounts changes both your tax bill and how long the money lasts. It is also one of the few things in retirement you control outright.
Social Security timing
Claiming early and claiming late lead to very different lifetime totals, and which suits you depends on your health, your marital status, and your other income. You see the tradeoffs before you choose.
Guaranteed income, including annuities
Some of your income is guaranteed for life already, from Social Security and any pension. Whether to guarantee more of it, with an annuity or otherwise, is a real question with real costs on both sides. Sean advises on annuities regularly, and you see what one would cost you in flexibility before you see it as a recommendation.
Stress testing
Your plan gets tested against a bad run of markets early on, because when the bad years land matters as much as the average return.
Survivor planning
When one spouse dies, a Social Security check stops and the survivor’s filing status changes. Sorting that out in advance is part of the work.
Context
Why this area matters
Saving rewards consistency. Drawing down is a different game. Every withdrawal carries a tax consequence and a sequencing consequence, and there’s less time to recover from a misstep.
That is why income planning is its own discipline. The decisions are not the ones that built the savings in the first place.
Common questions
About retirement income planning
There are rules of thumb, but every one of them rests on assumptions about your time horizon, your portfolio, and your spending that may not match you.
A better answer comes from your own numbers: what you need, what is guaranteed, what is not, and how the plan holds up if the early years go badly.
Related areas
The other four planning areas
Each one pulls on the others, so they get planned alongside each other.