In this Episode of the Secure Your Retirement Podcast, Radon and Murs discuss the essential elements involved in Transitioning into Retirement and how to ensure you make a smooth and confident shift into this next stage of life. They walk through practical retirement planning steps that cover everything from creating a reliable retirement income strategy, navigating tax-efficient withdrawals, preparing for healthcare costs, and protecting against common retirement risks like market volatility. The Peace of Mind Pathway—a comprehensive process developed by the team—serves as a guide to address all the complex moving parts of retirement planning.

Listen in to learn about crucial financial decisions such as Roth conversions explained, managing Healthcare before Medicare, effective Medicare planning, and Long-term care planning options that protect your assets. Radon and Murs also explore investment strategies like the Bucket investment strategy and how to guard against Sequence of returns risk. Plus, they dive into sophisticated tax strategies like utilizing Donor advised funds, the Direct indexing strategy, and optimizing Charitable giving in retirement. This episode is a masterclass for anyone who wants to plan for retirement, live confidently, and secure your retirement.

In this episode, find out:

·     How to design a reliable retirement withdrawal strategy using the bucket system.

·     Why Roth conversions may offer powerful long-term tax benefits.

·     The importance of strategic tax withholding and year-by-year tax planning.

·     How to evaluate your healthcare options before Medicare and address future Medicare planning.

·     What to consider for Long-term care planning and protecting your retirement savings.

Tweetable Quotes:

“Transitioning into retirement isn’t just about stopping work — it’s about creating a sustainable income plan that gives you peace of mind.” – Murs Tariq

“Every great retirement plan needs nurturing, because life happens and adjustments are always part of the journey.” – Radon Stancil

Resources:

If you are in or nearing retirement and you want to gain clarity on what questions you should be asking, learn what the biggest retirement myths are, and identify what you can do to achieve peace of mind for your retirement, get started today by requesting our complimentary video course, Four Steps to Secure Your Retirement!

To access the course, simply visit POMWealth.net/podcast.

Here’s the full transcript:

Welcome back to Secure Your Retirement Podcast, we are glad that you are tuning in with us today. 

We’ve got an episode that’s going to go in a lot of different places today by design 

and it’s all-around transitioning into retirement with peace of mind. 

If you’ve been listening to us for a while, there’s a handful of topics that we 

cover retirement and creating a successful retirement is not easy and we definitely 

don’t want to hope or guess as to all the different elements and the decisions that 

we have to make. 

with our clients so he gets a lot of different experiences, different situations 

thrown at him and but at the end of the day a successful retirement plan comes 

down to a handful of things that really need to be thought about well and decisions 

that need to be made in a timely manner as well as encompassing this concept of a 

retirement focused financial plan. So, Nick, thanks for being here. Absolutely heavy to 

be here. All right, so let’s open this up and just kind of talk the goal here in 

the next 20 minutes or so is to walk through a handful of things that we look at 

as we’re helping someone think through what the retirement’s going to look like, 

transition into retirement, and then obviously enjoy retirement. So, let’s take the 

first topic here, Nick, because you know, for a long time we work, we save, and 

goes into the 401 (k) at the end of the day, we receive a paycheck after you know 

benefits are taken out of that paycheck taxes, 401 (k) savings are taken out and 

then we get some money in the bank, and we learn to kind of live within that and 

it just comes regularly. Every other week in most cases we’re getting money coming 

in the door and we’re checking all the boxes of savings so we’re not too worried 

or concerned about where the money is coming from as long as we’re working. What we 

know naturally happens is as we approach retirement and we get into retirement, 

there’s this shift in thinking that becomes sometimes anxiety inducing if we haven’t 

thought through it well enough, which is, whoa, wait a second, I was earning and 

there’s a company that was paying me where my business was providing my income and 

now I’ve retired and that’s not there anymore. So now it’s all about what have I 

of a pair for retirement and how am I going to recreate this paycheck, which can 

be a little bit nerve wracking if we haven’t thought it through or if we’ve delayed 

thinking about it. So, Nick, start us off and just help us understand, 

you know, in your experience, sitting with clients, walking through strategy, and this 

phrase of your investments now have to become that paycheck, what are your thoughts 

there? Yeah, so I can 100 % say that it is nerve -wracking for many people and, 

you know, transitioning from working for so many years to actually spending what 

you’ve saved is an emotional hurdle for many people and it’s just something that 

you’ve never done before; we’ve never done before. So, it is something that we talk 

about a lot with our clients. It gets back to having a financial plan and why it’s 

so important, not only before retirement but transitioning into it in terms of 

knowing where income is going to come from, the best place is to take it and 

basically, how to strategize and structure that income to make sure we’re doing it in 

the best way possible. So, we, and we’ve talked about this a few times in past 

videos, the way we look at a structured income plan is ultimately 

as a savings or a buffer in our planet all times. The second bucket is the market 

bucket. So that’s going to be really long -term money. That’s really for market 

growth. And there is going to be associated risks there with investing in the stock 

market. And then the third bucket, which really gets into how we structure and how 

we can rely on A certain bucket for stable income is getting into that safety 

income bucket. That’s the third bucket, and that helps us really to protect against 

downside risk, but it also provides a good rate of return. The goal is better than 

essentially money markets right now, but no risk. So, we’re avoiding the risk of 

downside and the risk of really having to rely on that money during a down year, 

but also having that money available for the, we like to say, we can say medium 

term. So, over the next year, there’s money in there and going forward so that we’re 

not relying on a bad market year and not being in stuck in that situation. Right. 

I like that. So, you know, picture for a second, you’ve got, you’ve got money in a 

safe place like Nick was talking about that’s going to earn a decent rate of return 

not exposed to market risk and that’s where we’re drawing our money off of and then 

we now have our growth bucket or our market money that’s got longer -term growth and 

the only way it gets longer -term growth is because we’re not really needing to tap 

into it as often because we’ve got separation of our monies are doing different 

things for us at different times and creating cash flow without the worry of the 

market crumbling, which we feel like, you know, there’s a threat of that happening 

every other week. So, Nick, one thing that does come up in our world, and it’s a 

concept or a risk that we talk about, which is sequence of returns risk. 

Can you in a nutshell just explain what that is and why this strategy kind of 

alleviates a lot of that risk? Yeah, so what sequence of returns risk is, 

is ultimately the risk that right after you retire and start withdrawing on your 

funds, the stock market or returns in general have a bad run of many years were 

they could be down. So, think of years or time periods like the early 2000s, really 

2007 to 2009, even 2018 to 2020 when there was some longer -term volatility in the 

market, these are all years where, if you retire right before those years, there 

could be significant negative effects of your long -term plan. And so the safety 

bucket really helps to protect against those risks. If we can basically tie away 

some of the money or at least allocate it to a place that can’t be down. That 

allows for us to rely on that money going forward and there’s no risk of that 

money going down. So, the longevity is longer compared to if you were drawing on 

those funds as accounts are going down in years like the early 2000s, 

2007 to 2009 times like that. Yeah, there’s been so many studies done on this 

concept of sequence of returns risk and every single one of them pretty much comes 

back and says you want to try to find ways to avoid it. So, this system of having 

a safety bucket and a growth bucket does a really good job of alleviating that 

risk. You can’t get rid of it all together, but we can do a pretty good job of 

minimizing it pretty significantly. So, when we are drawing on our money, 

we’re creating our own paycheck now and that paycheck has to last the next 20, 30, 

40 years. 

Naturally, the next question becomes all around taxation, right? We’ve done a good 

job. If we’ve done a good job of saving, we’ve amassed some wealth into different 

types of accounts, your IRAs that are pre -taxed, your Roth IRAs that are tax -free, 

your taxable accounts that are your brokerage -style accounts that you deal with 

capital gains and interests and dividends that get taxed in a whole different way, 

and then cash in the bank are kind of the sources. 

So, let’s talk about, Nick, some of the, I guess we could call it the hotter 

strategies that we are definitely talking about with our clients right now, the first 

being Roth conversions. And I’ll just set this up a little bit to say, Roth 

conversions, our opinion is that everyone should look at a Roth conversion, 

but it doesn’t make sense for everyone to actually do a Roth conversion. 

To us, this is a year-by-year conversation that we have in our annual tax strategy 

meetings with our clients. Some years it makes sense, some years it doesn’t, and 

there’s limiting factors that we are definitely going to consider. So, walk us through 

Roth conversions and why they can be so powerful in long -term tax planning? 

– Yeah, so ultimately, just to start, what a Roth conversion is, is taking pre -tax 

money and then paying taxes on that money to get it ultimately into a Roth IRA. 

So it goes from IRA, which is pre -tax to Roth IRA, and then you’re paying taxes 

during that transition and then you can grow tax -free. So, There is ultimately a 

time period where it takes to get to, so that actually makes sense to do, 

but when transitioning into retirement, these are the years, especially really between 

60 and 70 years old before required minimum distribution start, where it’s incredibly 

important not to 100 % do them, like Merced, but At least analyze what the long 

-term potential benefits could be so for many people or for let me say this some 

for some people it can save hundreds of thousands to To more than that by the time 

they’re in their 80s or 90s for other people it might not make sense so it’s very 

situational and it’s based on different scenarios and Income and withdrawal strategies 

so, they’re all kind of interconnected, but that is it can be a very powerful tax 

strategy and something that for anyone who is retired they would definitely want to 

analyze and make sure that they can strategize around that. Yeah, the idea of 

getting money in a tax -free place opens up flexibility. It makes legacy a lot 

smoother, that transition if you leave assets behind for them to inherit inherited 

tax -free is always a benefit to them. But we have to make the decision to pay 

some tax along the way and doesn’t make sense. That’s a big question. Those are 

things that we try to work through with our clients throughout the planning process. 

So, another one that I think gets overlooked is withholdings. So again, we’re creating 

our own paycheck, right? When we were working and receiving a paycheck, the 

withholdings or the taxes were kind of taken care of for us. It it came right out 

of the paycheck. Well, a lot of times what people don’t realize is you can do the 

exact same thing in retirement. So, Nick, walk us through with holdings, 

how they work and how we help people establish what the right amount is. – Yeah, so 

for many of our clients, 

we are, and especially if they are retired, we’re analyzing their withholdings. We’re 

making sure that for one, they are under payment penalties, which is essentially not 

withholding enough throughout the year. And at that point, the IRS would tack 

on some penalties for not paying your taxes on time throughout the year. But also, 

we’re looking at each different account and how it all kind of comes together in 

terms of what we are, what we are withdrawing from, and how it might have a 

positive effect long term. For one of the examples that we’ve come across recently 

is basically during our tax strategy meetings, we’re working with some clients who 

have sold real estate, whether it be, we can say it’s this year, in that example, 

for this person, there was not necessarily a need to pay an estimated tax on some 

of the gains that they made on real estate. So instead of paying that tax or 

withholding anything from the sale, we’ve been able to basically, 

we’ve identified that they were able to keep some of those proceeds in the bank, 

earning a little bit of interest so that we can analyze that and when those taxes 

are due, we can pay those when they file. So, things like that, analyzing 

withholdings, what we can do with some of that money before either the withdrawal 

happens or during the year, so we can take the most, or we can have the most 

benefit is something that we’re wanting to look at. – Yeah, and the IRS, the simple 

way of looking at it is when that taxable transaction happens, so whether that’s a 

withdrawal from an IRA, that’s a taxable transaction, or there’s a sale of property, 

like Nick mentioned, when that happens, the IRS expects to get their tax revenue 

from it when it happens. Not later on, not at the end of the year, not at come 

April tax time. If we wait that long, that’s where penalties can come into play. 

And so, getting your withholdings in line is one just simple way to just create a 

lot of comfort in retirement, knowing that when April comes around and it’s time to 

file your taxes. Hopefully we’re breaking even and we’re not getting a big refund, 

which means that we pay too much in taxes and we’re not owing a lot, which means 

we may be exposed to some underpayment penalties. So, something big to think through 

as simple as it can be to pay tax and doing it the right way makes life a lot 

simpler. Another big strategy that we walk through on the tax side with clients is 

all around charitable giving strategies. And I’ll say this, we could care less one 

way or the other how charitably inclined our clients are, right? We have plenty of 

clients that love to give and they have plenty of reasons for that. We have clients 

that don’t really give and they kind of just spend their money on their families. 

Either way is fine. But if we are going to charitably be inclined and give money 

away, there’s ways that we want to do that to make sure we’re getting some decent 

tax benefit out of it as well. So, what are we talking about there with the 

strategies, Nick? Yeah, so there are two strategies in particular. The first one is 

called a qualified charitable distribution or for short a QCD. And so, what that 

looks like is ultimately someone has to be at least 70 and a half years old. And 

at that point, they’re able to make direct payments out of their IRA free tax 

accounts to a charity in order to either cover their RMDs, 

required distributions when they are of RMD age, or they can get funds at least 

paid to the charity of their choice in a tax -free manner from an account that’s 

never been taxed. So that’s one of the strategies. And then the other strategy is 

called a donor -advised fund. So, this is for essentially people who are looking to 

benefit from lumping a whole bunch of charitable distributions or charitable giving 

together into one year rather than splitting it up between multiple years. If we 

split it up or if we put it together into one year, in certain circumstances we 

can get a higher amount that we can deduct or itemize from our taxes in that one 

year which could save tax money significantly over that two -year period where you’d 

normally be paying either checks to the charity or QCDs sometimes it does make sense 

to look at can we group these charitable distributions together into one year and 

get a higher tax benefit. Right yeah simple numbers there so let’s say You give as 

a family on a cadence of let’s just say $10 ,000 a year to different charities and 

adds up to about $10 ,000. And maybe that $10 ,000 that you give is just not enough 

to overcome this standard deduction to get you in a place where you can itemize. 

Well, if we’re in the standard deduction and we’re giving charitably, we actually 

don’t get much benefit from those 

as the standard deduction takes away, takes a lot off of our income as it is, so 

you don’t get both. But if we’re in a place where we can push ourselves into 

itemization, the only way to do that is we have enough giving or enough expenses to 

get into itemization. So, let’s just take someone that gives 10 ,000 a year and like 

Nick was saying, we bunch it. So, we triple that or double that. So, we say, 

let’s put $20 ,000 or $30 ,000 or the next two or three years’ worth of charitable 

giving into this donor -advised type of a fund, that allows us to now say, 

“Hey, technically this year we gave $30 ,000 to this donor fund, 

which allows us to grab that as a deduction, which now pushes us into itemization, 

which could be tremendously beneficial for our tax return. Again, all depends on a 

handful of different things that you would want a tax focused type of strategist 

working with you on to make sure it even has benefit to you. But a lot of our 

clients have seen some good benefit from it. Again, you have to be in this 

charitable and client type of manner to take advantage of it. Okay, so let’s look 

at an investment strategy now that also does focus on tax benefits too. 

It’s called direct indexing with tax loss harvesting. 

And it has gained tremendous popularity over the last five years or so. One part of 

it is because technology has gotten so much better. The other, I think, is just 

because investors want better strategies and access to them. So, we use this strategy 

for our clients. Nick, take us through how this works in a nutshell and what type 

of money we use this with? Yeah, so very high level, you know, ultimately, the 

money that is utilized to successfully utilize this strategy is non-IRA money, 

or otherwise known as non-qualified money. So, this is money that is taxable when 

you are selling stock at a gain. And it’s also, if you’re selling stock at a loss, 

it can qualify as a loss on your tax return as well. So basically, we’re working 

with capital gains in these types of accounts. So, the way to direct indexing with 

tax loss harvesting works is we are essentially utilizing not one ETF to directly 

follow an index, but in this scenario, we’re utilizing different stocks. 

It could be 50 to 100 different stocks to still follow the index. We can call it 

the S &P 500. So instead of 500 stocks, we’re utilizing around 50 to 100. 

But now, because we’re in so many different stocks, if one position is down, 

we can go and sell one of the losers in that group, realize losses, 

but then also still buy back different stocks to make sure we’re still following the 

index. So, we’re essentially following an index but accumulating losses and growing the 

account as tax -efficiently as possible. 

So that’s ultimately the strategy to get the non -IRAI account in a good place that 

can accumulate losses over time. Yeah, we had a client that is utilizing this 

strategy and basically what it came down to is the account itself earned about what 

the S &P 500 did for that period of time. So, let’s just make up a number and say 

the S &P was up 10 % and her account was up nine and a half. 

So, we expect that it’s going to kind of mirror the return of the index that we’re 

trying to track. But the funny thing that she said is how is it possible that I 

made money and I lost money at the same time, but my count value went up. At the 

end of the day, that’s what direct indexing with tax loss harvesting is, is that 

we’re indexing for the market growth and the index growth, but we’re able to 

strategically generate losses at the same time that’s going to benefit us in our tax 

return in a handful of ways. So, it’s a cool strategy. If you’ve got more questions 

around that, we’re always happy to chat. All right, let’s transition here to, you 

know, if you work for a company for a very long time, um, uh, Whether it’s through 

employer stock options, restricted stock units, all these different things and you get 

to a place where you’re significantly overweight in one company stock. 

So, let’s say you worked at IBM for a long time, and you got shares and shares and 

shares over the 30 years that you worked there, all of a sudden you may have a 

couple million bucks in IBM stock and that’s now 60, 70, 80 % of your worth, 

well, that is considered pretty high risk. If a lot of my worth is in one 

position, my future relies on that company to perform. So, getting out of that 

strategically or utilizing that strategically, those are things that we help people 

think through as well. So, what are a couple of those strategies, Nick, when we 

have, when we are just, have a concentrated stock position? Yeah, 

so, we utilize a few different strategies. Ultimately, it depends on someone’s 

scenario. So basically, what we can do in a certain scenario is we can come up with 

a strategic plan over a certain number of years to liquidate that specific stock. 

And so, some of the reasons why we might be doing that is like Merce mentioned, 

there’s some high risk there especially when transitioning into retirement. We want to 

make sure that the investment strategy is something that’s going to last long term 

and not be subject to a whole significant amount of risk where the plan might 

actually, not work down the road. So that’s one strategy, a staggered liquidation. The 

second strategy especially getting into retirement is for people with a large amount 

of stock or one stock that’s especially highly appreciated or grown a lot over the 

years is an option strategy. And so, an option strategy can be used to specifically 

generate income from that stock and that income you can utilize to live on during 

retirement. But also, an option strategy can be used to protect against some of the 

losses if that stock were to go down. So that’s another strategy that we can use. 

Also, a tax strategy. If you’re charitably inclined to fund the donor advice fund 

like we talked about earlier, it is tax efficient to take a highly appreciated stock 

and use that to fund into a donor advice fund. What that does and allows is for 

really no one to have to pay the capital gains tax on that highly appreciated 

stock. And then the amount that you donate that market value is the amount that you 

can go and utilize to itemize during your tax return. So, we talked about our 

thoughts on setting up the investment strategy, which is that bucketing aspect. We 

talked about tax strategies. Let’s go away from that for a second and let’s talk 

about health. And that’s a massive concern, right? The first is running out of 

money. The second is health issues in retirement. So, Nick, if I’ve got someone 

retiring prior to Medicare, which is age 65, what is it that we’re talking to them 

about? Yeah, so prior to Medicare, there are a few different strategies and things 

we want to be aware of. So, prior to Medicare, there are subsidies that we can 

utilize or that we can stay and make sure we can qualify for those based on our 

income. So, we’re always strategizing with clients whether it be different priorities. 

So, if the priority is to make sure we qualify for a subsidy, when we are pre 

-Medicare, we can utilize different withdrawal strategies whether that’s taking from 

taxable accounts or using cash in the bank for a few years to make sure that maybe 

our health insurance pre-Medicare is not you know Thousands of dollars a month. 

Maybe it’s a few hundred if we keep our income down. That’s a strategy but also 

pre-Medicare with something to think about is uh rock conversion strategies and so 

instead of necessarily prioritizing um getting the subsidy we can also make sure 

income is utilized to convert at a low um tax rate for tax regrowth down the road. 

It’s kind of one of these things in retirement planning you got to pick what your 

primary objective is like he said if you want to get the biggest subsidy We need 

to keep income low someone else may say that now I want to work on rock 

conversions for my legacy Which means we’re going to naturally take our income up, which 

means we may not get some subsidies So unfortunately, we can’t have it all but we 

can guide ourselves in a in a leaning towards what our actual goal and priority is 

So, take us now into Medicare. I turned 65 What are the things I need to be 

thinking about as I’m approaching Medicare age and then into Medicare. And by the 

way, one thing that’s really nice for Nick and I and the advisors on the team is 

that we know a lot about this. But a few years ago, we were able to hire Shawn  

Southard, who you may have heard on this podcast before here is our health insurance 

professional that focuses on pre-Medicare and going into Medicare. 

So, he handles a lot of these conversations. But in a nutshell, Nick, what are we, 

what are we really thinking about as we approach Medicare? Yeah. So, from a tax and 

financial planning perspective, we are looking specifically at Medicare and the 

potential surcharges on Medicare when it comes to income generation. So, the Medicare 

surcharge is called ERMA. And what that basically is, is a charge that is generated 

basically, for making too much money in retirement or more than it’s about 200 ,000 

and it’s been going up over the last few years. So basically, whatever the priority 

is getting back to that, whether it is Roth conversions, whether it’s keeping income 

low, or if it’s just normal income that’s coming in the door we always want to 

make sure that we’re aware of any Medicare surcharges and that we’re making sure 

we’re planning around that Roth conversion planning gets into a lot about making sure 

our brackets are in the right spot. We know exactly or close to where the income 

is going to come out to be so that we’re staying under certain brackets or at 

least knowing where those Medicare surcharges are going to come into play. Yeah, and 

the rules around Medicare and the coverage itself are constantly evolving. A previous 

episode that we did with Sean Souther, he kind of walked through some of the 

changes that happened here in 2025 for Medicare prescription drug plans. So, if you 

haven’t listened to that one and you are of or approaching Medicare age, you 

definitely want to check that one out because it will apply. Okay, so the last 

topic, and I wish we could cover everything, but that would take us hours is I do 

want to touch on long term care because that’s a big fear for a lot of people. 

It’s also a lot of people make the statement of, well, it’s just so bad in the 

sense of being able to get covers. They ignore it or they’re worried about talking 

about it and we feel like we can’t afford it. I will tell you that that that was 

very much so a true statement about five years ago. I think today now more than 

ever with rates where they are with insurance companies realizing that a lot of 

mistakes have been made on certain types of policies they’ve come around and created 

a handful of different ways to make sure that we do cover this gap of long -term 

care. So, Nick, let’s kind of walk through and maybe just give some people the ideas 

that are out there for long -term care coverage to maybe just relax their fears a 

little bit and entice the conversation with their advisor or whoever that they work 

with. Yeah, so I’m going to go over four strategies to think about long -term care. 

And so, the first one is what we call self -funding or self -insuring. So, the way 

that looks is essentially based on someone’s financial plan, we can utilize assets to 

basically, cover those long -term care expenses down the road. So, this is not buying 

insurance, this is not buying any sort of long -term care or hybrid insurance 

which I’m going to get into. This is strictly using your own assets, savings, 

retirement accounts to pay for long -term care expenses. So that is really going to 

be based on someone’s ability to do that, but also, you know, potentially if they 

think that they will need long -term care down the road. So, it gets into, you know, 

some personal history, family history on if they think they might need that. So 

that’s number one. Number two is traditional long -term care insurance. That is the, 

you know, we can call it annual, semi -annual premium payment type insurance 

that you pay a certain amount each year, and you are covered for a certain amount 

of long -term care coverage down the road. So that type of insurance was very 

popular a few decades ago. Right now, a lot of it’s really not available or 

extremely expensive, but if you did buy that traditional long -term care down the 

road and you’re still paying for that, you’ve definitely seen those premiums go up. 

But that is one of the strategies that we see as well and advise on. Number three 

is asset -based long -term care. So, the way that looks is essentially utilizing a 

lump sum of money to fund into an account, not a recurring amount like the 

traditional, but this is a lump sum that’s a one -time payment That’s going to 

provide a certain amount of long -term care down the road as well as a death 

benefit If you don’t utilize that long -term care benefit So that’s something that’s 

super important as well to think about and then the fourth one is a hybrid annuity. 

So, there are annuities out there that can provide a long -term care death benefit, 

but also, life insurance as a add -on to the policy. 

So, for someone who can pay for that, can qualify for life insurance as well as 

long -term care, that’s something that we analyze and think about and strategize with 

our clients as well. – Yeah, long -term care is, it’s a conversation that no one 

really likes having, but it’s a conversation that needs to be had at the very least 

to evaluate, can we afford to self -insure, or do we need to transfer some of that 

risk. Again, the options are way better today than they ever were, ever have been. 

So, I’m going to wrap this up here. And so, you know, we talked about a handful of 

topics, but there are still other ones out there like estate planning, like 

beneficiary designations and, you know, how you’re going to live, all these different 

things really kind of fall in our eyes under this umbrella of what we call the 

peace of mind pathway. And the peace of mind pathway is constructed of really three 

major elements or three major phases, the first being what we call a peace of mind 

roadmap. The roadmap is really what we just started talking to you about, which is 

we got to get all these things in order, which starts with the retirement focus 

financial plan that says, hey, here’s where we are today. Here’s where we want, 

where or when we want to retire and here’s what we want our retirement to look 

like. What are all the things that we need to think about in between like social 

security decisions, Medicare decisions, withdrawal strategy, tax strategy, estate 

planning, Medicare, long term care planning, the list goes on and on. So, we create 

this roadmap or this financial plan that guides us, guides us throughout our 

retirement. The second element of the pathway, once we have that roadmap created and 

everyone agrees that this is the right path that we want to take, we then go and 

our team goes into. 

of the pathway is our peace of mind nurture. So, in our office, 

what we do is two major meetings a year that we curate, that we want to see our 

clients for, which is a financial planning strategy meeting that’s kind of saying, 

hey, how’s this year shaping up for you? Are we retiring this year? What’s our 

withdrawals looking like? Are there big trips that we need to be aware of this year 

for cashflow, right? That’s financial planning. sell on a property or we buy in a 

new car, that’s financial planning. The second meeting of the year covers a lot of 

what we talked about, which is tax strategy. So does it make sense to do Roth 

conversion this year? Are we giving money away? Let’s make sure we do it the right 

way. Let’s make sure our withholdings are in line, all these things to make our tax 

life a little bit better, short term and long term. 

And so that’s what Nurture is, is that we spend all this time building out this 

roadmap. We spent all this time in implementing it. But what inherently happens is 

that we do want to make some changes along the way and that’s why we have to 

continue to nurture that plan. And every time there’s a change that is made in the 

plan, well now we go back and now we reassess the roadmap. We reimplement changes 

that need to be made and then we continue to nurture year over year. What I can 

honestly tell you is that I’ve never seen a plan that was built and didn’t have 

changes to it along the way, or didn’t have things come up that created roadblocks 

good or bad. And so that’s why we believe the pathway in a nutshell kind of covers 

all the basis for a successful retirement that I know everyone is looking for. 

So, Nick, thank you so much for hopping on and kind of walking everyone through some 

of the things that we’re thinking about as we help people think through and live 

through and have a successful retirement.