Virtual retirement planning

You spent thirty years learning to accumulate money. Now you have to learn to spend it, and nobody ever taught that part.

The problem nobody warns you about

I have sat across from people with two million dollars who could not bring themselves to spend five thousand on a trip.

That is not irrationality. It is training. They spent forty years learning that saving was responsible and spending was not, and they got very good at it. Then retirement arrives and the rules invert overnight.

Retirement is not the end of your paycheck. It is the point where your entire relationship with money has to change, and almost nothing in the previous four decades prepared you for it.

The question underneath every other question

Do I have enough, and can I make a mistake I will not recover from?

That is what people are actually asking when they ask about withdrawal rates. The number matters less than the second half of the sentence. During your working years a bad decision had thirty years to heal. It does not anymore.

That change, more than any tax rule or product, is what makes this stage different.

Why your investment return stops being the useful number

Here is something that surprises people. The closer you get to retirement, the less your investment return tells you about whether you are doing well.

Two retirees can earn exactly the same average return over twenty years and end up in very different places. The difference can be when the bad years happened. Take a sharp loss in year two while you are drawing income, and you are selling shares into a decline to fund your life. The same loss in year eighteen barely registers.

The industry calls this sequence-of-returns risk. What it means in practice is that your withdrawal plan matters at least as much as your portfolio, and most people have spent all their attention on the portfolio.

There are ways to build around it. What is right depends entirely on your situation, which is why this page cannot tell you the answer.

What we work on

Retirement income. Turning a pile of accounts into a paycheck, and knowing which account to draw from first.

Social Security timing. When to claim, and how that interacts with everything else. There is no universally correct answer.

Tax planning. Roth conversions, bracket management, the years between retiring and starting Social Security. A Roth conversion can lower lifetime taxes in some circumstances and create an unnecessary bill in others. The question is always whether paying tax now improves the larger plan.

Medicare and healthcare costs. Including the part of the bill people consistently underestimate.

Sequence risk and withdrawal strategy. Structuring so a bad early stretch does not become permanent.

Longevity. Planning for a life that runs longer than the average.

Estate decisions. Coordinated with your attorney, not improvised.

Fees. Because at this stage what you pay compounds against you as reliably as returns compound for you.

What a flat fee means when you are the one with the assets

This is where the arithmetic gets pointed.

If you have accumulated $2 million, a 1% advisory fee is $20,000 a year, and it goes up every year the portfolio does. Mine is $10,000 and it does not.

You are also not penalized for doing exactly what you spent your career doing. Sell the house, inherit from a parent, roll over the 401(k): none of it changes the fee. And when the portfolio falls, which it will, my compensation does not fall with it, so I have no reason to be anything less than straight with you about it.

What happens next

Step 1 — A virtual conversation. 30 minutes, no charge, no pitch.

Step 2 — Your plan and your fee, in writing.

Step 3 — The work. Five contacts a year at minimum, two deep-dive reviews, and a phone that gets answered.