Insights
Choosing a Retirement-Phase Adviser
Five questions do most of the work: What standard of conduct binds your advice, and will you put that in writing? How exactly are you paid on my account? Where can I read your Form ADV or Form CRS? What does your disciplinary record show? And how much of your practice is households already living on their savings?
Retirement Income Planning
Retirement income planning is the discipline of turning your savings into monthly income that lasts as long as you do. A real plan measures your income gap, covers your essential expenses with income that arrives regardless of markets, keeps the rest invested for growth, and gives you a spending number in dollars — not a probability of success.
Tax-Smart Retirement (Roth · RMDs · IRA Legacy)
A Roth conversion moves pre-tax retirement savings into a Roth IRA: you pay ordinary income tax on the converted amount now, and qualified withdrawals later are tax-free. Converting tends to cost the least in your lowest-income years — often the stretch after your last paycheck and before Social Security and required minimum distributions begin.
Investment Management
The single biggest mistake is letting the check come to you instead of going directly between institutions. A rollover done as a direct, trustee-to-trustee transfer avoids mandatory tax withholding and the 60-day deadline entirely. Done the other way — distribution paid to you first — your old plan is required to withhold 20% for taxes on the spot, even though you intend to roll over the full amount, and you're racing a 60-day clock to get it done.
Guaranteed & Fixed Income (Annuities as Fixed Income)
Both are fixed-income tools built for the same conservative job — but they carry the risk differently. A bond ladder gives you flexible, self-owned rungs of principal that mature on a schedule you control, with no protection against outliving the ladder itself. An annuity trades some of that flexibility for a guarantee that income keeps arriving for as long as you live, no matter how long that turns out to be.
Retirement Income Planning
The honest answer isn't a multiple of your salary or a withdrawal percentage — it's the size of your income gap. Add up what your life actually costs, subtract what Social Security and any pension already cover, and the difference is the number a real plan has to fund, for as long as you live.
Tax-Smart Retirement (Roth · RMDs · IRA Legacy)
Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs) generally start at age 73 for most retirees today (75 if you were born in 1960 or later), and the amount is fixed by IRS formula — your prior year-end account balance divided by an IRS life-expectancy factor. Miss one, and the shortfall can be taxed at 25%, dropping to 10% if you correct it within two years. The rules are strict, but the penalty is no longer the 50% it used to be, and the calculation itself leaves very little room for guesswork.
Managing Risk in the Retirement Phase
Sequence-of-returns risk is the danger that the order your investment returns arrive in — not just their average — determines whether your money lasts once you start withdrawing from it. Two portfolios can earn an identical average return over 20 years and end at completely different balances, because a withdrawal taken during a down year is gone for good, with nothing left to recover when the market turns back up.
Managing Risk in the Retirement Phase
It's a Medicare premium jump that can hit a surviving spouse two years after the other spouse dies — even if household income hasn't changed at all. It happens because every income threshold for Medicare's IRMAA surcharge is exactly half as wide for a single filer as it is for a married couple. Unlike most Medicare surcharge triggers, this one generally can't be appealed after the fact — the only real fix is planning before the first spouse passes away.
Guaranteed & Fixed Income (Annuities as Fixed Income)
A fixed indexed annuity is a fixed-income contract from an insurance company. Your principal is protected from market-index declines by contract guarantee, and interest is credited using a formula tied to an outside index — but your money is never actually invested in that index. Think of it as a bond alternative, not a stock-market product.
Social Security & Claiming Strategy
There's no single right age — but the math is not close. Claiming at 62 locks in about 70% of your full benefit for life; waiting until 70 locks in about 124%. That's a permanently larger check, nearly 77% bigger, for the rest of your life or your spouse's. The right age depends on your health, your other income, and whether a spouse will one day rely on your benefit — not on getting your money back as fast as possible.
Retirement Income Planning
Not if your plan is built around the real question: how long could you live, not how long you're likely to. At 65, half of all couples still have a spouse alive at 92. Anchor your essential expenses to guaranteed income and the guesswork disappears — you don't have to predict your own lifespan to know you're covered.
No jargon, no sales pitch
Every piece is reviewed and dated — plain-English explainers on the retirement, tax, and income questions that actually keep people up at night.