Retirement Income Planning
Retirement Income Planning for $1M+ Households
Build a sustainable, tax-aware retirement income plan designed around your real cash flow, account mix, withdrawal sequencing, Social Security timing, and long-term resilience.
Retirement income planning is the work of turning a balance sheet into a paycheck — and doing it in a way that survives a 30-year horizon, a wide range of market outcomes, and a tax code that keeps moving. Most households arrive at retirement with the right amount of money and the wrong order of operations.
The right order of operations is the whole game. Pulling from the taxable account first when a low-tax window is wide open is a quiet six-figure mistake. Drawing from the Roth too early can be just as expensive. Compound Advisory's job is to make those calls explicit, model them out, and update them every year as your numbers and the tax code change.
A real retirement income plan answers six questions every year: how much you can spend, where each dollar comes from, what tax bracket the household will land in, how Social Security and Medicare interact with those decisions, what the portfolio needs to do to support the withdrawal pattern, and what changes if markets cooperate or do not. The answers shift annually. The plan has to shift with them.
What We Plan
- Withdrawal sequencing across taxable, traditional, and Roth accounts
- Multi-year tax-bracket and IRMAA planning
- Social Security claiming age, spousal coordination, and survivor benefits
- Required Minimum Distribution (RMD) modeling and Roth conversion windows
- Cash reserves, bond ladders, and bucket strategies for sequence-of-returns risk
- Annuity review — when one fits and (much more often) when it does not
How the Engagement Works
We start with a Retirement Clarity Assessment to look at the full picture. If the engagement makes sense, we build the multi-year income plan, coordinate the implementation across custodians, and update it every year as taxes, markets, and your household evolve. Planning is not a one-time deliverable — it is a living model.
Compound Advisory is fee-only. We are paid by you, not by product companies, and we hold no proprietary funds, annuities, or insurance contracts. The fee is transparent, billed quarterly, and disclosed up front. There are no sub-account fees, no platform fees, and no embedded commissions.
Once an engagement is in place, the household receives a written income plan and a tax projection inside the first 90 days. Implementation across custodians follows. Annual reviews happen every year; mid-year check-ins happen when a market move, a Medicare year, or a tax change makes one useful. There is no minimum communication cadence — we are responsive on the household's schedule, not ours.
Who This Is For
Most households we work with are five to ten years on either side of retirement, holding between $1M and $25M in investable assets. The common thread is complexity — multiple account types, meaningful Social Security and Medicare decisions, a tax situation that benefits from multi-year planning, and a household that wants the planning relationship to lead the investment relationship rather than the other way around.
If your situation is simpler — a single 401(k), a single income source, no equity compensation, no business interest — there are excellent lower-cost solutions and we will tell you so. We do not try to sell engagements that do not earn their keep.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How is retirement income planning different from investment management?
Investment management is about how the portfolio is allocated and rebalanced. Retirement income planning decides which account each dollar of income comes from, in what tax year, in what order, and how it interacts with Social Security, Medicare, and required distributions. They are different jobs.
How do you decide between Roth conversions and tax-deferred drawdowns?
We model the marginal tax cost of each decision across the next 10-20 years, including the IRMAA bracket impact and the eventual RMD pressure. The right answer is rarely the same for two households, even if their balance sheets look similar.
Do you use annuities for retirement income?
Rarely. A simple immediate annuity can fit a specific household at the right age and rate environment, but most products marketed as retirement income solutions are insurance commissions wearing a planning label. We will tell you when one fits and we will tell you when one does not — we earn nothing either way.