In this Episode of the Secure Your Retirement Podcast, Radon and Murs discuss how retirement planning must evolve once you transition from working to living off your savings. They explore why retirement is not a “set it and forget it” phase, but rather a critical shift from accumulation to distribution—where retirement income planning, retirement cash flow, and tax strategies for retirement become the primary focus. This conversation highlights how thoughtful financial planning for retirement can help reduce stress and give you confidence as you plan for retirement. 

Listen in to learn about how to build a flexible and sustainable retirement distribution strategy, avoid costly mistakes like sequence of returns risk, and implement proven retirement planning tips such as the retirement bucket strategy. Radon and Murs also discuss how ongoing adjustments in your retirement financial plan, including retirement tax planning, retirement healthcare planning, and estate planning in retirement, can help you retire comfortably and truly secure your retirement. 

In this episode, find out: 

• How to transition from saving to spending with a clear retirement income planning approach  
• Why a well-structured retirement distribution strategy is key to managing taxes and longevity  
• How the retirement bucket strategy helps protect against sequence of returns risk  
• The importance of creating a sustainable retirement cash flow and revisiting it annually  
• How retirement tax planning, retirement healthcare planning, and estate planning in retirement all work together in a complete plan  

Tweetable Quotes: 

“Retirement planning doesn’t stop when you retire—it evolves into a strategy focused on turning your savings into reliable income for life.” – Radon Stancil 

“The biggest challenge in retirement isn’t building wealth—it’s creating a sustainable income plan that reduces stress and adapts as life changes.” – Murs Tariq 

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 everyone to Secure Your Retirement. We are very happy to be able to have another conversation with you around this idea of retirement planning. And really what we’re going to talk about today is this evolution from work to not working. I always set that up because I think it’s an emotional roller coaster for people. Just think about it for a second. You’re going to work for decades. Most people are going to work for decades, and then they do these steps. They save money. 

They’re really good savers, or they become really good savers. So, they put a lot of money away in their 401ks, IRAs, their brokerage accounts. They try to do things like paying their house off. And that’s the focus. The focus is, you know, have you got kids? Make sure that they get raised and they go to school. And so, all of my planning is, hey, how do I save? How do I put this money away? And all those kinds of things. 

But then when we get to retirement, the planning doesn’t stop there. It actually just changes. Because now I’m going to have to do things very different than I ever did them before. So, think about the concept. I now make it to retirement, and now instead of saving and doing those things and paying the house off and putting the kids through school and doing all that kind of stuff, today now it’s going to say, well, how do I take what I’ve built and make that last my lifetime? 

I got to make it create an income stream. I got to make it last. I got to make it help make sure that I can take care of my healthcare needs, all these different little layers. So, the planning does not stop. It just changes in that environment. So, what we want to talk about today is, you know, what should we be planning for? What should we be thinking about? 

Because let’s say that right now, you’re five years out from retirement, 10 years out from retirement. I don’t care, 15 years out from retirement. Getting your head right now saying, you know what, when I get to retirement, I kind of got the layout or I’ve got the outline as to what I’m going to do when I get to retirement so I understand how to do it. Otherwise, it will be not only an emotional roller coaster, it’ll be very, very stressful. 

So, Murs, let’s go right into this. What is it that you see and what is it that you’ve experienced as you’ve been working doing this now for quite a few years and working with people that are right in this phase of close to or in retirement? 

Yeah, I mean, what you said is something that we see quite often. And I think one of the biggest reasons as to why people come and engage in a conversation with us is because whether they have an advisor or they’ve done a good job of accumulating assets and wealth themselves, they kind of get to a point where they say, you know what, I feel like I’ve done a pretty good job, but I don’t know what to do from here. 

And if they have an advisor, they kind of acknowledge that their advisor is not really giving them the retirement planning advice. They’re really just there for investments and investment growth. And while that’s really important, we believe that there’s a whole lot more that goes into building a successful retirement plan. 

In fact, we call it the five critical areas that we believe, if we check those boxes, those five critical areas around risk, income, taxation, healthcare, and estate planning—if we check all those boxes off and we’ve got them all figured out—then we believe that you can have a very successful and comfortable retirement plan. 

But a lot of times people just get so busy and bogged down with the day-to-day of working the job, taking care of the family, stocking money away into the plans, and we’re kind of on autopilot. And then we get close—five years, two years, one year out from retirement—and think, oh my gosh, how do I do this now? 

I think I’ve got enough to retire. I know I’ve got enough to retire, but I don’t know how all of these other things play out in a true retirement plan. Questions come up all the time around, you know, I’ve built all these different types of buckets when it comes to assets and IRAs and Roth and taxable accounts, but how do I pull that money? 

Which naturally leads to, well, what’s that going to look like in the tax picture for me? And then volatility conversations come up. Here we’re sitting in 2026, and there’s a lot of stress on the table with things that are going on inside the U.S. and outside of the U.S. 

So, there’s a lot of things that evolve as we start to focus more and more on this shift from accumulation into more of this preservation and distribution phase of life, which is retirement. So, the plan shouldn’t stay static. We should have it evolving, and we should be paying attention to it every single year because life does change. 

So, let’s talk a little bit about this phase shift because it’s a big one. You spend decades accumulating, and now you have to flip a switch, in all essence, and start spending that money that you saved. 

Yeah, I think sometimes when we say stop or not focus on accumulation, sometimes people go, wait a minute, I still want my money to grow. So, what we’re not saying is that we don’t want the money to grow. What we’re saying is for most people, when you were working, that’s when you were able to fund the retirement plan and continue to put money away that way. 

Sometimes we know we have clients that are still saving even in retirement because they have really good pensions or they have really good—maybe they’ve got a big rental income from rental houses or office buildings or whatever it might be—and they still have money coming in. Well, that’s a good thing. 

But for most people, what we’ve done is once we’ve funded, saved, and we stop actually working—whether we sell our business or we stop working at our company—now we are shifting from an accumulation focus to a distribution focus. 

Meaning now I’m saying, okay, I’ve got money in different places. Most people are going to have money in about three types of areas. They’re going to have money in traditional either 401ks or IRAs, which means it’s all tax deferred. They’re going to have money in a Roth IRA—many are now funding Roth IRAs—which is now put in after tax and its tax free on the distribution. 

And then we, for a lot of folks, have a brokerage account, which is not inside of a tax-deferred vehicle of any kind. It’s just out there and it’s invested. And we say, okay, I got these three types of money. 

Where do I take money from? Because now it’s kind of like I want to take money. Well, what concerns do we have? I’m concerned about taxes. So, I’m trying to think, how do I maximize my tax benefits? 

And then I’ve got the problem of saying I don’t want to take money from an investment side if the investments are, say, down. So, I need to say, well, how am I structured? And we’re going to talk about that a little bit later in the podcast. Those are all my concerns around that. 

So, can you talk a little bit, Merce, about how we talk to clients about actually turning things into income? 

Yeah, I think this is where people start to get pretty uncomfortable with this idea. And unless you’re in this business or just have done a lot of research and you’re that DIY type of person, this is not your expertise. It wasn’t designed to be your expertise around building and living through a financial plan and a retirement plan. 

You did what you did, which is whatever career that you had that allowed you the ability to save and allowed you the ability to prep for retirement, building that wealth. And so, the stress starts to come in when we talk about how do we start turning this nest egg, these buckets of money that we’ve built up, turning them into income. 

How do we do that, and how do you decide which accounts to pull from? Radon just mentioned the Roth, the IRAs, the taxable accounts. Do we pull from one first? Do we do a combination of them? Do we pull from the pre-tax? 

That’s a stressful type of decision because you don’t want to make mistakes, especially as we are walking into retirement. Those first few years are rather critical. 

And then what naturally follows that is, well, how am I going to optimize my taxation? Am I making sure that I’m doing everything as efficiently as possible so that I have less stress in retirement, and I know that my family is going to be taken care of? And maybe I also have intentions of leaving a legacy behind. How do I structure for that? What are the best assets to leave behind? 

So, you can quickly see that it can snowball on us if we don’t have a plan in place, if we haven’t thought it through or worked with someone that can help you think it through. That stress can start to snowball on us to where we get to this place of indecision. 

In fact, I was in a meeting yesterday and the term they used was analysis paralysis. Very smart people, but they got to a place where they’ve looked into so many different avenues, so many different vehicles, and everything like this, and they’ve analyzed everything, and they’ve gotten to a place where they just can’t make a decision because there’s too many options. 

That’s a lot of what retirement planning is—there are a lot of ways to do this. But which is going to be the best for you and your family? 

So, we’ve heard many people say that the earning part and the saving part is actually, when you look back on it, the easy part. You kind of close your eyes and set a lot of things on automatic and you build that wealth over time, and you get very comfortable with those habits. 

It’s really the structuring and creating that income that most will say is the harder part or where the complexities that you really have to think through start to show up. 

So, we believe the first few years are very, very critical to get that right. 

So, Radon, let’s talk about the first few years as we walk into retirement. What are we, how are we structuring things and how do we avoid some of the pitfalls that do naturally come our way if we don’t think things through? 

Well, I think the biggest thing is that if I don’t have my strategy set up correctly, if I happen to retire in a good market and my money was all in growth-oriented scenarios, I’m going to do great. 

But if I happen to—let’s just imagine for a second that you had planned to retire and you’re working in 2007, and 2007 is doing really, really well, and you’re going, man, everything looks great. You’ve got no real strategy in place. You’re just all in the market. And you say, my goal is I’m going to retire at the end of 2008. 

So, it’s 2007, market’s fantastic, had a great run. And you say, honey, I’m retiring December 31st, 2008. That was not a really good year for you. 

And the reason why is because the markets took a big downturn just in that year. The markets dropped 35% in that year. From the top to the bottom, it was over 50% by the time you get to March of 2009. 

So that is what we call a sequence of return problem, meaning now all of a sudden, my accounts are down 30–40%, and I’m now saying I’m going to start retirement. 

Many people walked into 2008 with the idea of retiring and said, I can’t retire now. I got to wait for this to come back. 

And so, what we talk about is let’s not let our plan be dependent upon a good or bad market. Let’s just make sure that we are structured so that if I know that I’m going to retire in the next three, four, five, 10 years, how do I structure myself so that I still am going to grow my money, but I can actually have myself set up so that I can just retire? 

And if the market’s down, it’s not going to affect me, not going to change the plan. I’m still going to retire even if I walk into a 2008. 

And we talk about how to do this. We talk about our three buckets all the time. So, I think this would be a good place, Merce, just to kind of talk about the power of having the three-bucket strategy. 

Yeah, I think this is where having good structure as we walk into or prep for retirement is really going to be key. Because the last thing you want to do is walk into retirement and have that big sell-off, and now you’ve got a lot of tough decisions to make on how you’re going to spend, how you’re going to withdraw. 

And if we can just get away from having to make those tough decisions and just plan for the fact that there’s always going to be volatility in the markets, and we want one of these types of plans that can withstand them, that’s where the buckets come in. 

We’ve talked about the buckets quite a bit on this podcast, and it’s because we believe in them. We get to see them work every single day. 

And so, there’s three major buckets: the cash bucket—that’s kind of our short-term income needs—and then we’ve got our income and safety bucket, and then we have our growth bucket. 

Our growth bucket is the stock market that provides great returns over time but also has issues along the way. And we really want that growth bucket to be a true long-term vehicle that we’re not really tapping into every single month to get our cash flow. 

So then how do we get our cash flow? Well, we get it from the income and safety bucket. This bucket, we believe, should be principal protected. It should have the ability to earn a decent rate of return as well—better than inflation, better than bonds, something like that. 

But the key is that it’s principal protected so that if we walk into retirement and there is a 20% or 30% sell-off, well, if we’re structured properly, some of our assets are affected, but not all of our assets are affected. 

Our cash flow is still preserved. Our ability to live the way that we want to live is preserved. We’ve got our future income planned out for a significant period of time. 

So that’s, in a nutshell, what the bucketing idea is. It helps with income planning. It helps with clarity and predictability in our plan, which all of that helps reduce stress. 

Because the last thing you want to do is be forced to sell when the market is down. 

And the other thing that we see quite often is people get out of the market because of what they just experienced, and they never get back in. And then your retirement plan truly does start to struggle. 

So, Raiden, let’s talk a little bit about some of the core areas that we believe are really important when it comes to building out these plans and the things that we really need to focus on, especially at the beginning. 

Well, again, we kind of come back to this income plan. And that income plan is so important because when I’m working, my income plan is I work and I get income. 

When I retire, I say, well, now I got to put together an actual—I don’t like the word budget—we call it a spending plan. Budget sounds restrictive. Spending plan sounds like, okay, how am I going to spend money? 

And we talk to people about breaking it down into three categories for the most part. 

Number one, my essential needs—what I absolutely need every single month to make it. Meaning I got to eat, I got to pay the light bill, I’ve got to put gas in the car, all those different things. 

Then once I get through what it costs just to live, those are my essentials. 

Then on top of that, I’m going to say, well, my next category are my wants. What do I want? I would like to go out to eat, however often I want to go out to eat to a nice restaurant. I would like to go on vacation. I would like to get a new car from time to time. 

So, whatever those wants are, these are not necessities—just my wants. 

And then there’s a third layer. And the third layer a lot of times would be gifting or charity or whatever it might be. I call it giveaway money, meaning I don’t need this or my goal is that this will not be for me—it’s for somebody else. 

So those first two I think are really, really important. I need my essentials. I’d like to have my wants. I don’t think anybody who did a good job saving shouldn’t get some of their wants. 

We’ve got to put that together. 

This is not a set-it-and-forget-it scenario. What this is, is a moving target. 

So, for example, many times when we’re building up the spending plan for a client who is about to retire, we put into there an extra amount of money for extra stuff in the first few years of retirement. 

So, let’s just imagine for a second I’m 65 years old. I’m going to retire. For that first 10 years, we’re going to put in an extra travel budget. Why? Well, I’m young. I want to go get all these things done. 

When I get into my late 70s, 80s, I might not feel like traveling as much. So why not go ahead and spend that money now, knowing that I’m not going to spend it later? 

And so, we’ll put that in for, say, 10 years of extra spending. 

But other things come up. We have clients come up and say they want to buy a very nice car. They want to go on a very nice vacation—I’m talking a very nice vacation. 

I had a client who just was here, and they said, bucket list for us—we want to go to Africa. We do not want to fly coach. We want to go business class. They wanted to go to some of the different places. They wanted to have guided tours and things like that. $50,000 is to do the trip. 

Now they said, hey, how does this look? 

Well, you know, that’s not every year we’re going to do that. This is a once-in-a-lifetime trip that they’re putting together. And so, we had to look at that. That’s a part of the spending plan. 

And then we might adjust that and go down the path of doing something else later. 

Murs, when we talk about these things, let’s talk about how we regularly revisit this concept. 

Yeah, so obviously there’s a lot to think through, and what we believe is every year is going to be different. 

So, what we do in reality is we run what we call financial planning strategy meetings every single year. And they’re usually taking place in the first half of the year so that we’ve got a good idea as to what, in this case, 2026 is going to look like based off of cash flow needs. 

What trips are we taking? Any issues with the house that we’re going to need cash to repair? Things that we can somewhat predict for the year—we want to build that into the plan. 

A lot of questions come up all the time throughout this process and this type of meeting. 

Are the withdrawals that we’re taking still efficient in the inflationary world that we live in right now? That’s a very big question. 

Everything costs a little bit more, it seems like, every single day. 

Are we pulling from the right accounts? Is our tax scenario optimized? Did the tax brackets move? Do we realize that they moved? Are we taking advantage of the tax brackets moving? 

And the list goes on and on as far as the things that we’re covering inside of this financial planning strategy meeting. 

But the key is that when we have these meetings, it provides comfort. It’s also a retest of the plan every single year. 

The more that we look at it, the more that we talk about it, the better we feel about it, and the reliability naturally starts to come into place there. 

But a big piece—and I say this all the time—is that a big reason as to why anyone would strike up a conversation with us is because we do it all, not just investment management, but all the things that come with a proper retirement plan, which is the income side, the tax strategy, the filing side, estate planning, all of that. 

I would say the second biggest reason, or almost equally as big, as to why people have conversations with us is because we’ve set up a system where we are rather proactive when it comes to tax planning and tax strategy. 

So, we’re talking a lot about income planning, right? And naturally, that’s going to result in conversations around tax. 

So, what do we need to be talking about on the tax side when it comes to building out these plans? 

Yeah, I think the big thing is, where am I taking my money from? We mentioned before there’s three or so different types of money that we could have. 

And the other thing is, it could affect a lot of different things. It could affect IRMAA on my Medicare. It could affect my taxes when it comes to my tax bracket. It could affect what I could or couldn’t do when it comes to funding different types of investments. 

And so, we believe that you should have an annual tax strategy. 

In fact, we have a director of financial planning and tax strategy, and that’s what she does every single year with our clients. 

And it makes a very, very big difference in how they do that—how you would take money, how you’ll play things out. 

I just wanted to kind of almost sum things up this way, Murs. We’ve talked about it now in the last couple episodes—we got our book, which is called The Peace of Mind Pathway. 

We walk through everything that we’ve talked about in this episode. We’re walking through every aspect of it. 

And we get to brag about the fact that it’s actually a number one bestseller on Amazon. 

But if you wanted this book to kind of say, hey, I want to learn about these strategies, I want to learn about how this works, feel free to go to our website, pomwealth.net. 

Go to the Contact Us page and just say, hey guys, I would like to get a book. We’ll send you a book absolutely free. 

I don’t know, Murs, anything else you want to sum up on this when we talk about this topic? 

No, I mean, there’s a lot. If we made the podcast two hours long, we’d just be scratching the surface. 

But we know that you guys are busy. You’re probably listening to us in the car, so we want to make it short and digestible. 

So, if you get the book or you want to have a conversation with us around what a real financial plan or retirement-focused financial plan looks like, we are happy to hop on a phone call with you. 

The easiest way to do so is go to our website, pomwealth.net. And over there, there’ll be a Contact Us section where you can put in your information and be able to schedule a call. 

And we’ll be happy to have those conversations with you. 

But until then, we appreciate you listening, and we will talk to you again next Monday.