Retirement Income Planning

How I Think About Risk

Take the least amount of risk necessary to reach your goals. That's the whole approach. I'm not trying to beat the market or chase down the next hot stock. My job is figuring out what your money actually needs to do for you, then building a retirement income plan that gets you there without taking on risk you don't need to take.

Most People Have Never Actually Answered This

Sit down and ask yourself what your real investment goals are, in actual dollars, by actual year. Most people can't answer that. They put money into a 401(k) or an IRA, assume the market will cooperate, and hope whoever's managing it knows what they're doing. Now ask how your portfolio has actually performed over the last 5, 10, or 20 years, and see if you can give a real number back. If you can't, that's worth paying attention to. A plan you can't measure was never really a plan.

What "Least Risk" Looks Like in Practice

This isn't about pulling everything into cash or avoiding the market altogether. It starts with your actual number: what retirement costs you, year by year, for the rest of your life. From there, I only take on the risk it actually takes to hit that number, not whatever risk your portfolio happened to accumulate over the years because that's how it was set up a long time ago. For most clients that means splitting money into buckets. Some stays safe and liquid for near-term spending. Some stays invested for long-term growth. And often a portion sits in principal-protected tools that grow without being exposed to a bad year hitting at the worst possible time.

Timing Matters As Much As the Total

Two retirees can hold the exact same portfolio and earn the exact same average return over twenty years and still end up in very different financial positions, purely because of when the good years and bad years happened relative to when they started drawing income. That's called sequence-of-returns risk, and it's one of the most overlooked risks in retirement income planning. You didn't really feel it while you were still working and adding money in. It becomes real fast the moment you start taking money out.

Nobody Knows What's Coming

I don't know if the market's going to post double-digit returns next year. Neither does anyone else, no matter how confident they sound. Nobody can call the next downturn, the next event that rattles oil prices, or how the next election changes policy. The DALBAR studies have shown for years that the average mutual fund investor earns meaningfully less than the market itself over time, not because the funds underperform, but because investors buy high, sell low, chase whatever's hot, and panic at exactly the wrong moment. Having an actual plan, and having someone in your corner during the moments that tempt you to abandon it, is often worth more than any single investment pick.

Since nobody can predict the future, I lean on tools built to take that guesswork off the table: strategies that let your money grow, and come out, tax-free when you're ready to use it. See how that plays out on the Fixed Indexed Annuities and Retirement Life pages.

What a Real Plan Actually Covers

Financial planning isn't one product recommendation. It's a set of decisions that all affect each other:

• Income strategy: the order withdrawals come out of your accounts, to manage your tax bill and reduce sequence-of-returns risk.
• Social Security timing: when to claim, since it changes your income, and often your spouse's, for the rest of your life.
• Tax positioning: coordinating with tax planning so a decision in one account doesn't create a tax bill in another.
• Protection: making sure a bad market year, a lawsuit, or a long-term care event can't undo everything else. See asset protection.

Frequently Asked Questions