Retirement Income Planning
Retirement Income Planning for $1M+ Households
Build a sustainable, tax-aware retirement income plan designed around your real cash flow, account mix, withdrawal sequencing, Social Security timing, and long-term resilience.
Retirement income planning is the job of turning a balance sheet into a paycheck. The paycheck has to survive a 30-year horizon, a wide range of markets, and a tax code that keeps moving. Most households arrive at retirement with the right amount of money and the wrong order of operations.
The order of operations is the whole game. Pulling from the taxable account first when a low-tax window is wide open is a quiet six-figure mistake. Drawing from the Roth too early can be just as expensive. Our job is to make those calls explicit, model them out, and update them every year as your numbers and the tax code change.
A real income plan answers six questions every year. How much can you spend. Where does each dollar come from. What bracket does the household land in. How do Social Security and Medicare interact with those decisions. What does the portfolio need to do to support the withdrawal pattern. And what changes if markets cooperate, or do not. The answers shift annually. The plan has to shift with them.
What We Plan
- Withdrawal sequencing across taxable, traditional, and Roth accounts
- Multi-year tax-bracket and IRMAA planning
- Social Security claiming age, spousal coordination, and survivor benefits
- Required Minimum Distribution (RMD) modeling and Roth conversion windows
- Cash reserves, bond ladders, and bucket strategies for sequence-of-returns risk
- Annuity review — when one fits and (much more often) when it does not
How the Engagement Works
We start with a Retirement Clarity Assessment. We look at the full picture. If the engagement makes sense, we build the multi-year income plan, implement it across custodians, and update it every year as taxes, markets, and your household change. A plan is not a binder. It is a living model.
We are fee-only. You pay us. Product companies do not. We hold no proprietary funds, no annuities, no insurance contracts. The fee is transparent, billed quarterly, disclosed up front. No sub-account fees, no platform fees, no embedded commissions.
Once we are engaged, the household gets a written income plan and a tax projection inside the first 90 days. Implementation follows. Annual reviews happen every year. Mid-year check-ins happen when a market move, a Medicare year, or a tax change makes one worth doing. We are responsive on your schedule, not ours.
Who This Is For
Most households we work with are five to ten years on either side of retirement, with $1M to $25M in investable assets. The common thread is complexity — multiple account types, meaningful Social Security and Medicare decisions, a tax picture that benefits from multi-year planning, and a household that wants the planning to lead the investing instead of the other way around.
If your situation is simpler — one 401(k), one income source, no equity compensation, no business interest — there are excellent lower-cost options and we will tell you so. We do not sell engagements that do not earn their keep.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How is retirement income planning different from investment management?
Investment management is about how the portfolio is allocated and rebalanced. Retirement income planning decides which account each dollar of income comes from, in what tax year, in what order, and how it interacts with Social Security, Medicare, and required distributions. They are different jobs.
How do you decide between Roth conversions and tax-deferred drawdowns?
We model the marginal tax cost of each decision across the next 10-20 years, including the IRMAA bracket impact and the eventual RMD pressure. The right answer is rarely the same for two households, even if their balance sheets look similar.
Do you use annuities for retirement income?
Rarely. A simple immediate annuity can fit a specific household at the right age and rate environment, but most products marketed as retirement income solutions are insurance commissions wearing a planning label. We will tell you when one fits and we will tell you when one does not — we earn nothing either way.