The saving years end on a Friday. The spending years begin on a Monday. Your household has spent thirty years saving money and now needs to know how to take it out without draining the supply faster than what’s sustainable.
We build a plan that answers two questions plainly. Before retirement: how much is enough, and what does the path look like to get there. In retirement: how much can your household spend, which accounts should the money come from, and in which order.
The model we create together stays open year over year and can be revisited and adjusted whenever your life or the markets shift.
Pre-retirees and recent retirees
Pre-retirees within roughly ten years of retirement who want to know if they “have enough” before deciding when to retire.
Recent retirees who have stepped away from a paycheck and need a sustainable withdrawal plan that holds up across markets they cannot predict.
The plan is built in front of you
You’ll see the model on screen as it’s created, and you can watch the numbers shift when any assumption changes. Most planning meetings end with a report handed across a desk. This one ends with a plan you helped build and can revisit over and over again.
Frequently asked
We model your household in financial planning software using the savings rate, current balances, projected expenses (regular and discretionary), Social Security claim age, pension if any, and a reasonable range of return assumptions. The model projects the household’s position year by year and flags where the math gets tight. We run the model with you in the room, change the assumptions when you ask, and can revisit it annually as life changes.
We structure your withdrawals so a planned amount lands in your checking account on a set schedule, just as a paycheck used to. The withdrawals come from the accounts that make sense given your tax picture in that year, often a mix of taxable and retirement-account sources. The paycheck format takes the psychological friction out of pulling from your investments.
Sequence of returns risk is one of the harder problems in retirement planning, because a poor first decade can do more damage than the same decade later. We address it through the allocation, the withdrawal rate, and the order in which accounts are tapped. We also model the household against rougher market scenarios so the plan does not depend on markets cooperating.
The plan does not get torn up annually, but it gets revisited. Most years, the adjustments are minor and stay at the edges of the existing plan. They get more substantial when something material shifts: a sale, an inheritance, a health change, a relocation, or a meaningful market move. The annual review is the scheduled check-in; the calls in between are where the smaller adjustments happen.
This is one of the more common conversations we have with long-tenured retirees. We sometimes set up a specific travel account for retirees who have trouble spending what they have saved; earmarking the money for the trip often helps the household actually take it. We would rather have the conversation about spending the money than the alternative.
