The ideas from the podcast and our workshops, in writing. Each piece takes one structural risk in retirement income or estate planning and works through it plainly.
Your will says what you want to happen. For retirement accounts, annuities, and life insurance, a different document decides what actually happens, and the two don't always agree.
Read the article →Sixteen episodes built toward one test. Here is the worst-year rule for essential expenses, the two-number check for permission to spend, and why a number alone was never the plan.
Read the article →Spending too little feels safe, but cash yielding below inflation, a portfolio with no real growth, and income that never gets drawn can produce a shortfall just as real as overspending does.
Read the article →An income floor that covers every essential expense at 65 can quietly stop covering your life by 80. The math of inflation, and the specific structure that accounts for it instead of hoping it doesn't matter.
Read the article →An annuity illustration is a contract document, not a sales brochure. Here are the five places to look before deciding whether a specific product fits a specific problem.
Read the article →Account value and income account value are not the same number, they do not move together, and the gap between them is where most of the confusion about income riders starts.
Read the article →Single-life or joint-and-survivor pension payments look like a simple form to fill out. The choice is permanent, and almost no one runs the numbers for the spouse left behind before they make it.
Read the article →When a married couple becomes a widow or widower, Social Security doesn't combine their two checks into one larger payment. It keeps the higher one and drops the lower one. The math behind that shift is worth understanding before either spouse files.
Read the article →The age you file for Social Security doesn't just set your own income. For married couples, it can set your spouse's income for every year they outlive you.
Read the article →How much you withdraw in retirement gets plenty of attention. Which account you withdraw from first, second, and last gets almost none — and the order can be worth more than a good investment year.
Read the article →A required minimum distribution isn't a fixed event at 73. It's the output of a calculation built in the years before it, during a window that closes the moment RMDs begin.
Read the article →You know your advisory fee. You probably don't know the other two layers stacked underneath it, or what all three add up to over two decades of retirement.
Read the article →Planning to age 85 feels cautious, but for a 65-year-old couple it's closer to a coin flip. A structural fix changes the math without requiring anyone to predict how long they'll live.
Read the article →Two retirees can have identical average returns and identical withdrawals and still end up hundreds of thousands of dollars apart. The difference comes down to one thing: the order the returns arrived.
Read the article →A couple with $780,000 and a reassuring Monte Carlo projection still had a $2,050 monthly gap in their guaranteed income. Here is what that gap does, year by year, if it never gets closed.
Read the article →Signing a trust and funding a trust are two different events. Here is what funding actually means, and why skipping it leaves your plan unfinished.
Read the article →Most people assume a floor that covers most of their expenses is good enough. It isn't. A gap of any size changes what the floor actually is.
Read the article →Hitting your retirement number doesn't mean your income is covered. A $780,000 portfolio with an 89% probability of success still had a $2,050 monthly gap in guaranteed income.
Read the article →The years before retirement are the most flexible planning window you will ever have. Once you retire, the same decisions become reactive instead of proactive.
Read the article →The word "annuity" shuts down more planning conversations than almost anything else in retirement income. Here is the mechanism itself, explained plainly, so you can evaluate the instrument instead of reacting to its reputation.
Read the article →A retirement plan can look solid while both spouses are alive, then collapse the day one of them dies. Here's the mechanics behind that drop, and the worked example that shows how to close it.
Read the article →Most people retire having done everything right with saving and investing. Then the real question arrives: where does the income actually come from, and what happens to it when the market drops?
Read the article →Read Enough to Know?
The Income Standard Review measures this exact structural risk against your actual numbers. 45–60 minutes. No cost. No pitch.
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