Retirement Income Planning for Families Approaching Retirement
You spent decades building wealth. Now it needs to work for you.
Turning what you have saved into income that lasts requires an entirely different kind of plan. Most people don't have one.
Accumulation and Distribution Are Two Different Games
The strategies that helped you build wealth were designed for a specific purpose. Maximize contributions. Grow assets. Stay invested. And for decades that approach worked exactly as intended.
But retirement income planning operates by a completely different set of rules. The order in which you draw from your accounts matters enormously. The tax consequences of every withdrawal compound over time. A poorly timed market downturn in the first years of retirement can permanently damage a portfolio in ways that are nearly impossible to recover from. And the decisions you make in the five years before and after retirement have more impact on your long term financial security than almost any other period of your financial life.
Most financial plans were built for accumulation. Very few were built for what comes next.
A Retirement Income Plan Built Around Your Life
At Guided Wealth, retirement income planning is not a module we add to the end of a financial plan. It is the foundation everything else is built around for clients approaching this stage of life.
We start by building a complete picture of your financial life. Every account. Every income source. Every tax consideration. Every expense you anticipate and every one you haven't thought of yet. From there we build a retirement income strategy that addresses not just how much you have, but how and when to access it in a way that minimizes taxes, sustains your lifestyle, and protects your portfolio from the risks that matter most at this stage.
The result is a plan you can actually retire with confidence around. Not a projection built on assumptions. A strategy built around your life.
The Questions a Real Retirement Income Plan Answers
How do you draw income from multiple accounts in the right order to minimize your lifetime tax burden? When does it make sense to convert retirement accounts and what does that mean for your overall strategy? How do you protect your portfolio from a market downturn at exactly the wrong moment? What does a realistic income plan look like when healthcare costs, inflation, and longevity are all factored in? How do you make sure your income strategy and your estate plan are working together rather than against each other?
These are not hypothetical questions. They are the decisions that determine whether your retirement looks the way you planned it or the way you hoped it wouldn't.
The Five Years Before Retirement Are the Most Consequential
The decisions made in this window have an outsized and lasting impact on everything that follows. Getting them right compounds into decades of tax efficiency and durable income. Getting them wrong creates gaps that are difficult and sometimes impossible to close.
Most financial plans weren't designed with this window in mind. Ours was.
Is Your Plan Built for What Comes Next?
Most are not. Take our financial plan stress test and find out where yours stands.