Retirement income, the workplace accounts nobody has looked at in years, college for the children, and what is left at the end.
What we look at
Money that has to last longer than you will. The unglamorous work that decides how the last third of your life actually goes.
The most common thing we find
Most people have left money behind at an old employer they moved on from — sitting in whatever the default fund was, quietly charged a fee, unlooked at for years. Finding out what is in there and what it is costing you is often the single highest-value hour of the whole conversation, and it costs you nothing to look.
Rolling it somewhere it can be managed deliberately is sometimes right and sometimes not. There are cases — an employer plan with institutional pricing, or a plan that lets you retire at fifty-five without penalty — where leaving it alone is the better answer. We will say so.
Traditional, Roth and, for the self-employed, SEP. The choice between paying tax now and paying it later is not a matter of taste; it depends on where your income sits today against where it is likely to sit when you draw on it.
Income you cannot outlive
A contract with an insurance company that turns a lump sum into income for a defined period or for life. Fixed annuities pay a set rate. Fixed indexed annuities credit interest based on a market index with a floor of zero, so a down market year does not produce a negative credit, though fees and early withdrawals can still reduce the value.
They are the right tool for the part of a retirement that has to be certain — the floor underneath the mortgage, the utilities and the groceries. They are the wrong tool for money you might need back in a hurry, because getting out early is expensive. Surrender periods are real and we will show you the schedule before you sign anything.
529 plans and the alternatives, including the trade-off nobody mentions: money in a 529 that is not spent on education comes out with a penalty, and how the account is owned affects financial-aid calculations.
Beneficiary designations that are still pointing at an ex-spouse. Accounts with no named beneficiary at all, heading for probate. A life policy sized for a mortgage that was paid off in 2014. This is fifteen minutes of work that regularly turns out to matter more than everything else on the list.
The order that matters
The question in retirement is not what rate of return you earned. It is whether the money arrives every month regardless of what the market did that year. A portfolio that averages a respectable return and drops thirty percent in the year you retire can fail while a duller one succeeds — because you were withdrawing from it while it was down.
So we start at the bottom: what has to be paid every month no matter what, and what is going to cover it with certainty. Everything above that line can afford to fluctuate. Everything below it cannot.
Plainly
Nothing on this page is a recommendation to buy any particular product, and none of it is tax advice. Product availability varies by state, by carrier and by your own circumstances. On anything with a tax consequence — a rollover, a Roth conversion, a withdrawal before fifty-nine and a half — talk to your tax preparer as well as to us.
Next step
No cost, no obligation, nothing sold on a first call. Twenty minutes on the phone and you will know whether there is anything here worth doing.