I’ve witnessed situations where people make a choice without being thorough, only to have a real mess on their hands. The financial planning process I use breaks the answer down into five steps, so you minimize headaches.

We build the actual numbers in your financial plan with you: what your life costs across all three buckets, what guaranteed income you have, what your gap really is, and what your portfolio has to do to cover it for the next twenty-five or thirty years.

Every retirement plan runs into one hard question: how much can you actually spend, and how do you make it last? Here are the strategies that answer it, with worked examples so you better understand how each is calculated, and how to pick the one that fits your life.