The process
We build you a Comprehensive Retirement Roadmap — a complete plan for turning what you saved into income that lasts. It is step one of how we work. Step two, if you want it, is having our team run that plan with you.
Book your discovery callBuilding your savings is hard, but it’s simple: spend less than you earn, invest the difference, repeat for thirty years. One number goes up.
Living off those savings is the harder skill, and almost no one prepares you for it. Now the number has to come down — in the right order, without triggering taxes you didn’t expect, without crossing the income lines that raise your Medicare premiums, while Social Security timing, required withdrawals, and market drops all interact at once. You’re doing it for the first time, with money you can’t easily earn back.
Most people hear “you’re good to go” from the advisor who helped them save, the moment their balance is big enough. That’s a statement about capability — whether you have enough. It says nothing about ability — whether you know how to turn it into a paycheck that lasts the rest of your life.
Picture a rocket. Capability is the rocket itself: fueled, engines ready, enough thrust to reach the moon. Ability is knowing how to fly it — the pre-flight checklist, reading the instruments, what to do when something fails at altitude. A full tank doesn’t get you to the moon. Training does.
Most retirees are handed a fueled rocket and a thumbs-up, and told it’s a flight plan.
Every client starts the same way — with a plan. Where it goes from there is your choice.
Over about four months, we build your complete plan: how much you can safely spend, which accounts to draw from and in what order, how to keep taxes and Medicare costs down, and what happens when the market drops or life changes. We make it detailed enough that you could run it yourself — on purpose. By the end, you’ll know exactly what executing a retirement income plan takes, so you can decide with open eyes whether to do it alone or have our team do it with you.
Your roadmap works through 21 questions across three areas — the ones that decide whether your money lasts and how much of it you get to enjoy.
How much you can safely spend, where each month’s money comes from, and how that paycheck adjusts when markets rise or fall so you’re never guessing.
The order you draw from your accounts, whether and when to convert to Roth, and how to stay under the income thresholds that raise your Medicare premiums and your tax bill. These sequencing decisions are worth tens of thousands of dollars over a retirement.
An early death, a long-term care event, a bad market in your first years of retirement. We stress-test the plan against what actually derails retirements, so you know it holds before you need it to.
This is where about three out of four of our clients land. We take over running the plan, year after year, as the tax rules change, as markets move, as your life changes. You live your retirement. We handle the execution.
We’re upfront about all three.
The plan is yours to keep, and it’s complete enough to execute on your own. Some clients do exactly that.
It’s your plan — bring it wherever you like.
Move to step two and hand the execution to our team.
About three out of four clients choose the third option, almost always for the same reason. Once they’ve seen everything that goes into running the plan year after year — the tax decisions, the withdrawal adjustments, the way one choice changes the next — they’d rather have a team that’s done it thousands of times handle it than do it for the first time with their own money on the line.
Your roadmap works through 21 questions across three areas — the ones that decide whether your money lasts and how much of it you get to enjoy.
How much you can safely spend, where each month’s money comes from, and how that paycheck adjusts when markets rise or fall so you’re never guessing.
The order you draw from your accounts, whether and when to convert to Roth, and how to stay under the income thresholds that raise your Medicare premiums and your tax bill. These sequencing decisions are worth tens of thousands of dollars over a retirement.
An early death, a long-term care event, a bad market in your first years of retirement. We stress-test the plan against what actually derails retirements, so you know it holds before you need it to.
You have the rocket. We fly it with you — for the next thirty years, not just the first four months. What you’re hiring us for isn’t stock picking. It’s execution: doing the tax and withdrawal work correctly every year, so the plan you paid for actually happens.
How the ongoing relationship works →Our job is to help you live rich — not die rich.
We don’t want you to trust us because we sound confident. We want you to understand your own plan well enough to know it’s right — which is why the roadmap shows you the reasoning, not just the answer. Confidence that survives a bad market comes from understanding, not from faith in an advisor.
Step two is a wealth management relationship: we’re paid a percentage of the money we manage for you. That’s the exact incentive that pushes many advisors to keep clients spending as little as possible — the more that stays in the account, the more the advisor earns. We’re telling you that plainly, because our job is the opposite. We show you how much you can safely spend, and we give you permission to actually live on the money you spent a lifetime saving.
Here’s the number that drives us: over the next five years, we’ve set a goal to help 5,000 clients build retirement income plans that give them the confidence to spend $600 million of their own money that a conventional 4%-rule plan would have told them to leave untouched. We charge a wealth management fee, and every year we work to prove it doesn’t change the answer to the only question that matters — how much can you spend, and enjoy your life?
