Retirement spending
Essential, flexible and legacy spending in today’s dollars.
TOP OF CLIMB · LEVEL 500
Convert accumulated wealth into a resilient lifetime plan.
The central risk changes from not saving enough to coordinating taxes, withdrawals, healthcare, legacy and major choices across decades.
INSTRUMENTS
Use numbers that can be verified.
Income floor
Social Security, pensions, annuities and other reliable income by start date and survivor amount.
Withdrawal map
Taxable, pre-tax and Roth balances, basis and planned order.
Contingency map
Long-term care, incapacity, survivor, market decline and family-support scenarios.
DECISION GATES
Work the constraint that controls the outcome.
| Condition | Evidence | Required move |
|---|---|---|
| Retirement is within five years | Sequence risk and tax windows now affect the plan. | Build a year-by-year income, cash and tax map before changing allocation. |
| Pension election is pending | Choice may be permanent and affect a survivor. | Compare lifetime and survivor cash flows, inflation terms, health and balance-sheet capacity. |
| Pre-tax balances dominate | Future withdrawals may create tax and Medicare-premium collisions. | Model partial conversions and charitable or withdrawal strategies across multiple years. |
| Legacy goals compete with spending | Gifts, inheritance and personal security share the same assets. | Fund lifetime resilience first, then define what is truly surplus. |
ORDER OF OPERATIONS
Complete the level in sequence.
Define the income floor
Match essential spending to reliable after-tax income and reserve capacity.
Build the retirement runway
Hold enough liquidity and high-quality assets to avoid forced sales during an early decline.
Coordinate the tax years
Model Social Security, pensions, conversions, gains, RMDs and Medicare thresholds together.
Run failure scenarios
Test early market decline, long life, care costs, death of either spouse and large family requests.