Built for professionals within five to ten years of retirement, executives with complex compensation, and affluent families with substantial taxable portfolios. If your balance sheet includes pensions, deferred compensation, RSUs, concentrated positions, real estate, or business interests, a generic retirement projection is not planning. It is a brochure.
Wealthstone was founded on the conviction that the plan is the work. A retirement projection can be produced in an afternoon. A plan that holds up across thirty years of markets, tax law, and changes of mind cannot. That depth is a function of how many households each advisor carries, which is why the firm holds a boutique advisor-to-client ratio.
The ratio buys time: enough to build the plan around your circumstances rather than a template, and enough afterward to keep working from it. We monitor it, revisit it as your life and the tax code change, and use it to make the decisions retirement actually puts in front of you. Owning a document and navigating by a plan are different things.
Clients rarely ask about asset allocation first. They ask these. If your current plan cannot answer them in writing, it is incomplete.
Not a guess against an average. A dated answer, stress-tested against your actual spending, taxes, and market sequences.
A sustainable annual figure with guardrails, not a static 4% rule that ignores your tax location and pension income.
Bracket management, capital gains harvesting, charitable positioning, and account sequencing, coordinated across decades.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. The answer depends on your conversion corridor, IRMAA exposure, and your heirs' brackets, not a rule of thumb.
Taxable accounts, IRAs, Roth accounts, pensions, Social Security, and real estate are one system. Managed separately, they leak.
A bad market in your first five retirement years does more damage than one in year twenty. Structure has to absorb it before it happens.
Withdrawals should come from the right pocket in the right year, so the growth engine keeps running underneath the income.
A five-part engagement that converts a complex balance sheet into a written, dated, tax-aware retirement operating plan. Every step produces a deliverable you can hold.
Every account, every entitlement, every future cash flow on one page: taxable portfolios, IRAs and 401(k)s, Roth accounts, RSU vesting schedules, deferred compensation payouts, pensions, Social Security, rental real estate, and business interests. You cannot sequence what you have not mapped.
Which account, which year, which bracket. We design the order of withdrawals across taxable, tax-deferred, and tax-free accounts so that each dollar of spending is sourced at the lowest available lifetime tax cost, not simply the most convenient one.
The years between your last paycheck and the arrival of RMDs and Social Security are often the lowest-bracket years of your adult life. We model how much to convert, in which years, to fill those brackets deliberately instead of surrendering them.
Cash reserve laddering so early-retirement withdrawals never depend on a good market, and a guardrail spending policy that defines in advance when spending flexes up or down. The goal is income that survives bad sequences without panic decisions.
Retirement plans decay without maintenance. Annual bracket management, RMD planning, conversion true-ups, beneficiary and estate coordination, and a standing review cadence so the plan reflects the tax code and your life as both change.
Each area below is a distinct body of work within a Wealthstone retirement engagement. Deep-dive pages are being published throughout the full build.
Turning a portfolio into a paycheck: reserve ladders, distribution cadence, and guardrail policies.
Coming in full buildCorridor design, bracket filling, IRMAA awareness, and an illustrative conversion calculator.
Explore the page →Sequencing withdrawals across taxable, deferred, and Roth accounts by year and bracket.
Coming in full buildClaiming age, spousal coordination, and how benefits interact with conversions and brackets.
Coming in full buildPayout schedules, lump sum versus annuity analysis, and stacking risk with other income.
Coming in full buildAsset location, decumulation-era allocation, and keeping compounding intact under withdrawals.
Coming in full buildPre-65 coverage bridges and managing income so Medicare surcharges do not tax your plan twice.
Coming in full buildEight questions, three minutes, no email required. The Retirement Readiness Assessment scores the structural strength of your current plan across tax location, withdrawal design, conversion planning, and spending confidence, then shows you the specific gaps most worth closing.
Take the Assessment →Scored instantly. Results are educational, not advice.
No. Portfolio management is one component of the Blueprint, and often not the most valuable one. The engagement centers on tax-aware withdrawal architecture, Roth conversion planning, income design, and coordination of pensions, deferred compensation, Social Security, and real estate. Investments execute the plan; they are not the plan.
The highest-leverage window is five to ten years before retirement. That is when deferred comp elections, equity vesting, asset location, and pre-retirement savings placement can still be shaped rather than merely reported on. Starting at retirement is workable; starting before it is better, because several of the largest decisions become irreversible once you separate from your employer.
It depends entirely on the spread between the bracket you convert at today and the bracket you, your surviving spouse, or your heirs would otherwise pay later, plus the years of tax-free compounding in between. For some households the estimated benefit is substantial; for others, converting would be a mistake. We model it against your numbers rather than asserting a universal answer, and our Roth Conversion Planning page includes an illustrative calculator.
They are usually the most consequential inputs in the entire plan. Vesting schedules and deferred comp payouts stack ordinary income into specific years, which changes which years are viable for conversions, when to claim Social Security, and how withdrawals should be sequenced. We map every tranche and payout year before any other recommendation is made. Concentrated positions get their own workstream, coordinated with our concentrated stock practice.
Wealthstone is a fee-only registered investment adviser. We charge a transparent advisory fee and accept no commissions, no product compensation, and no third-party payments. Fee structure is discussed openly in the first conversation, before any commitment.
The Blueprint begins as an analysis of your existing structure wherever it sits. Most clients ultimately consolidate because coordinated execution is where the plan compounds, but the sequencing decision is yours and is never a precondition for the initial work.
A written, tax-aware plan for the next thirty years starts with one conversation.
