Retirement Planning Videos

Every video below answers one retirement question in a few minutes. Each one sits on the page that answers the same question in writing, so you can watch it, read it, or both.

Start here

These two explain how I approach retirement income and why.

• I reverse engineered retirement planning and hated the answer
  How a mortgage professional ended up taking retirement planning apart backward, three times, and kept getting the same answer.
• Why disciplined savers are afraid to spend in retirement
  The river and the lake. Two kinds of money that behave nothing alike, and why one of them is almost impossible to spend.

The decisions that set your income for life

These are the choices that move the number more than the market does.

• When should you claim Social Security?
  Most people give one of the biggest money decisions of their life about an afternoon. Here is what the timing actually changes.
• The Social Security bridge: retire earlier and still get the bigger check
  You retire on your schedule. The only thing you wait on is when you switch the benefit on.
• The 4% rule is not a plan, it is a worst case number
  Where the number came from, and why planning your life at your worst case means underspending in almost every year that is not the worst case.
• The retirement tax avalanche
  Why the largest tax bill of your life may still be ahead of you, and how it gets built quietly while nobody is watching.
• The widow’s penalty
  Income drops the year a spouse dies. Taxes usually rise the year after. What that combination does to the one left behind.
• Every bad thing you have heard about annuities, answered straight
  Every knock said out loud first. Which ones are fair, which ones are a smear, and the one that is true about me.

What your savings can actually produce

Same savings, different lives, very different answers.

• Is $600,000 enough to retire?
  Three couples with the same $600,000 and three different answers, run live on screen.
• Is $1 million enough to retire?
  Why the answer is not the market. It is the gap between what you will spend and what your guaranteed income already covers.

State and city examples

Worked examples for the states I am licensed in. State tax treatment changes the take home number, so the same savings do not land the same way everywhere.

• How much guaranteed income can $200,000 produce in Missouri?
  A worked example for a married couple in Missouri.
• How much guaranteed income can $300,000 produce in Kansas City?
  A worked example for the Kansas City metro.
• How much guaranteed income can $350,000 produce in Springfield, Missouri?
  A worked example for southwest Missouri.
• How much guaranteed income can $400,000 produce in St. Louis?
  A worked example for the St. Louis area.
• How much guaranteed income can $300,000 produce in Kansas?
  A worked example for Kansas, which now fully exempts Social Security from state income tax.¹
• How much guaranteed income can $300,000 produce in Nebraska?
  A worked example for Nebraska.
• How much guaranteed income can $250,000 produce in Iowa?
  A worked example for Iowa.
• How much guaranteed income can $400,000 produce in Florida?
  A worked example for Florida, which has no state income tax.

Want your own numbers?

The examples above are worked cases, not your case. If you want to see where you actually stand, start with the retirement income floor calculator or read what Lifestyle-First income planning is.