Turning a lifetime of savings into a paycheck.
"How do I actually pay myself from this pile of money?"
Nobody teaches you this. You spend forty years putting money in. Then one day the paychecks stop and you're supposed to figure out how to take money out — without running out, without paying too much in tax, without freaking out when the market drops.
Most people Google "safe withdrawal rate" and land on the 4% rule. It's a reasonable rule of thumb. It's also a forty-year-old study that was never meant to be a plan.
Here's how we actually do it.
Guardrails.
Not a single number.
Instead of one fixed withdrawal rate you hope works forever, we set a starting income and two guardrails — an upper and a lower. As markets and your balance move, we adjust the income accordingly.
Markets up a lot? You get a raise. Markets down hard for a while? We trim a bit — before anything dangerous happens. Most years, nothing changes. The point isn't to cut your income. The point is to know, in advance, exactly what we'd do if things got ugly — so you don't have to panic, and neither do we.
It's how a portfolio survives thirty years of unknown markets without you white-knuckling through every correction.
Upper guardrail
Starting income
Lower guardrail
Growth for more income.
The old "Growth & Income" portfolio was 60% stocks / 40% bonds and called it a day. The idea: de-risk at 65 because retirement is short.
Retirement isn't short anymore. A 65-year-old today has a real chance of needing income at 95. That's a thirty-year portfolio — and a thirty-year portfolio has to keep growing to keep paying.
So we flip the frame. We keep more in growth assets, longer — with enough safe money set aside to weather the bad years without selling at the worst time. More growth, intelligently sequenced, produces more income. Hence the name.
People who want their money to keep working as long as they do.
We'll be the first to say.
Want to see what this looks like with your numbers?
Bring what you have. We'll model traditional vs. Growth for More Income side by side — your income, your balance, your actual situation — and you can decide what you think.
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