A plan should make sense to you before anyone acts on it
The order below is the order we work in, because each stage changes the one after it. What you want the money to do determines what it has to pay for. What it has to pay for determines how it is invested. How it is invested determines which tax moves are worth making.
Somewhere in the middle are the decisions with two reasonable answers. Those get the most time, and they are why this is a conversation rather than a questionnaire.
Understand you
The first meeting has very little to do with your statements. What you want these years to look like. Who else depends on this money. What you are actually worried about, which is rarely the thing people open with. What you would do with more, and what you would not do at any price.
We ask enough to understand not just what you have, but what you want it to do. A statement cannot tell us that part.
Understand what the money has to pay for
Retirement gets clearer the moment two numbers are real: what you expect to spend, and what arrives whatever the market does — Social Security, a pension, rent, whatever you have. The difference between them is what the portfolio is being asked to fund.
We want the lumpy things too. The roof. The car. The wedding. The year you help one of the kids. For anyone retiring before 65, paying for health coverage until Medicare starts. Those are the items that quietly decide how much risk a plan can carry.
Before deciding how to invest the portfolio, we want to know what it is being asked to do. That work is retirement income planning, and it comes first for a reason.
Structure the investments around the plan
Now the portfolio has a job description. The money you will spend soon is held so that it does not depend on a good market. The money that is years away is invested for growth and given the time that requires.
Investments support the income plan, rather than the plan being built around a portfolio that already exists. That sounds obvious, but it is easy to reverse the order. The reasoning is set out in how we think about investing in retirement.
Work through the tradeoffs
Most of the decisions that matter have two reasonable answers. This is where we spend the most time, and where you should expect us to show our work.
Here is the shape every one of them takes.
A real planning decision
Delaying Social Security
- What you gain
- A larger benefit for the rest of your life, and a larger survivor benefit for whichever of you lives longer.
- What you give up
- More portfolio spending in the meantime — in the early years, which are often the ones people most want to spend in.
- What could change the answer
- Health. The difference between two earnings records. How much you can comfortably draw in the waiting years. What you believe about how long you will need the money.
We do not hand you that as a rule. We say which path we recommend and why, what the other one would have given you, and what would have to change for our answer to change. You should be able to explain the decision to someone else when we are done.
The same treatment applies to paying off the mortgage or keeping the money invested, to a concentrated stock position, to guaranteed income against flexibility, and to spending more now against leaving more later.
Fit the taxes into the plan
Taxes are planned alongside everything else rather than handled in the spring. Which accounts a year's spending comes from, whether a conversion earns its cost this year, when income is allowed to arrive, how giving is done — each of those touches the others.
The years when your income is unusually flexible are the ones worth paying attention to, and they do not last. That thinking is on how we think about taxes in retirement; what the work itself involves, including preparation and filing, is on tax planning and prep.
A tax move that makes the rest of the plan harder to live with is not a good tax move.
Implement it, then keep it current
We put the agreed recommendations in place and coordinate the moving parts: the custodian, the tax firm, the beneficiary forms, the paperwork nobody enjoys. You should not have to project-manage your own plan.
Then we meet on a schedule, and whenever something happens that does not wait for the schedule. Assumptions get updated. Spending gets revisited, because it never behaves exactly as forecast. The near-term money gets refilled when it makes sense to.
Markets move and lives change. The framework is built so that usually calls for an adjustment rather than a new philosophy.
The framework does not replace judgment.
It gives us a disciplined place to start. Your goals and your circumstances decide where we end up. Two households with almost identical numbers regularly end up with different plans, and that is the process working rather than failing.
See if this way of planning fits
A short call is usually enough to tell. You will get a straight answer about whether we are the right firm for what you are trying to do.
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