You’ve saved carefully. Now let’s turn it into a retirement plan.

You know how to earn money. Nobody practices retirement.

Before starting Averton Wealth I spent five years doing retirement and income planning at a local credit union, almost entirely with people who were unsure what to do next. Most of them had already retired and needed to know how to make their money last without taking on more risk than they could live with.

If you are within about five years of retiring or recently stopped, the work is turning a pile of accounts into one income plan, one tax strategy, and one investment allocation, with a separate scenario run for whichever of you outlives the other.

Couple walking a wooded trail

What this usually looks like

A 401(k) from the current job and one or two from previous ones. An IRA. Maybe a pension, maybe a 403(b) or a 457. CDs that made a lot of sense when rates were higher. A brokerage account. A spouse’s plan that neither of you has really looked at together.

None of it is wrong. It just was never designed as one plan, because it wasn’t designed at all. It accumulated.

The work is deciding what each piece is for, and then making the pieces agree with each other.

Questions people ask before retirement

Can I actually afford to retire, or am I guessing?

You find out by testing your situation, not by looking at the balance. I run your actual spending against your income sources year by year, then stress it three ways: a bad market in the first few years, inflation running above what you assumed, and a long-term care event late in the plan. If the plan survives all three, you have a rather clear answer. If it only survives the base case, we have some additional work to do.

The account balance on its own tells you almost nothing. You always hear you need $1,000,000 or more to retire, but two households with $1,000,000 can get opposite answers depending on when they claim Social Security, whether there is a pension and how it was elected, what they actually spend versus what they believe they spend, and how much of that $1,000,000 sits in accounts the IRS loves to tax.

Which accounts should I spend from first in retirement?

The common default is taxable first, then traditional, then Roth last. It is a reasonable starting point and it is frequently wrong. The better answer usually involves drawing from more than one account type in the same year, deliberately filling a tax bracket to the top rather than either wasting the low brackets or spilling into the next one.

This matters most in the years between your last paycheck and your first required distribution, because that is when your income is low and the timing is entirely under your control. The sequence you choose there compounds for the next twenty-five years. Two households with identical portfolios and identical spending can end up in meaningfully different places on lifetime tax paid.

Should I convert to a Roth IRA before I claim Social Security?

Frequently yes, if you stop working before 70 and hold a large traditional IRA. The stretch between your last paycheck and the year Social Security and required distributions both begin is usually the lowest-income period of your adult life, which makes it the cheapest time you will ever have to move money out of a pre-tax account.

It is not automatic, and the amount matters more than the decision. A conversion raises your income in the year you do it, which can push your Medicare IRMAA surcharge two years later, change how much of any Social Security you are already collecting becomes taxable, and stack on top of capital gains. I model the conversion year by year to a specific bracket ceiling rather than converting a round number and hoping.

What should I do with money sitting in CDs?

Every dollar to your name should have a specific purpose, and I will help you decide what job each dollar has before deciding where it goes. Money you will spend in the next one to two years belongs in cash, a CD, or a short Treasury, and the exact rate matters less than people think. Money you will not touch for a decade is being asked to do a job a CD cannot do, and the shortfall never shows up as a loss on a statement.

Many people moved large balances into CDs and high-yield savings accounts when rates were near 5% and never revisited it once rates came down. That was a sound decision at the time; it just was not meant to be permanent. People are often afraid of what a bad cycle does to the stock market, but inflation does something very similar to a CD over fifteen years. It just does it quietly and without a headline, like death by a thousand cuts.

What happens if the market drops the year I retire?

The technical name is sequence of returns risk, and we have a strategy for that as well. The same average annual return, delivered in a different order, can be the difference between money lasting thirty years and running out in eighteen. The defense is structural rather than predictive: hold enough in stable assets that you are never selling stocks into a decline to pay the grocery bill.

In practice that means one to three years of spending parked somewhere that does not move, plus a written rule for when and how you refill it. The rule matters more than the exact number of years, because the entire point is that the decision was made while you were calm.

Will my spouse be okay financially if something happens to me?

Usually yes, but almost never without changing something first. The three gaps I find most often are a pension elected as single-life to get the higher payment, a Social Security claiming order that permanently shrinks the survivor benefit, and beneficiary designations set during a job change in 1998 and never looked at since. Beneficiary forms override your will.

The income drop surprises most couples. One Social Security check stops for good, the survivor keeps the larger of the two, and the filing status becomes single the following year, which compresses the brackets on the income that remains. I put your household’s actual numbers in front of both of you rather than describing the effect in general terms. If it has already happened, start instead with financial planning after the loss of a spouse.

The decisions you only get to make once

Most retirement decisions can be adjusted later. A few can’t.

  • A pension election

    Once filed, it’s generally permanent, and it determines what your spouse receives for the rest of their life.

  • Social Security timing

    Your claiming decision sets the survivor benefit that whoever lives longer will depend on.

  • The window between retiring and RMDs

    For most people it’s the best tax planning opportunity they’ll ever get, and it closes on a schedule.

  • Beneficiary designations

    They override your will. Almost nobody checks them.

There is no revision cycle on any of these.

Two people talking over coffee

How I work with you

  1. First call

    Thirty minutes. You describe what you have and roughly when you want to stop working. I tell you whether the situation needs a plan or an answer to one question.

  2. The plan

    A written document with the Social Security analysis, the pension election comparison, a year-by-year conversion schedule if conversions make sense, the withdrawal sequence, and the survivor scenario run separately for each of you.

  3. Filing and moving

    Consolidating the old accounts, getting the allocation in place, and getting the elections actually filed. This is where plans usually die, so I do not hand you a PDF and wish you luck.

  4. Every year after

    Tax planning before December rather than after, a beneficiary check, and a rerun of the plan when something changes. Something changes most years.

Planning for the household you’ll have

Every plan includes a survivor scenario run separately for each of you: the income, the pension under the election you chose, the filing status change, and what the surviving spouse would need to do and in what order. Both of you sit through it, while both of you can still change the inputs.

If you’re reading this because that already happened, here is financial planning after the loss of a spouse

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