New London County · Connecticut
Fee-based fiduciary tax-sensitive retirement planning for Stonington pre-retirees and retirees age 50+.
We work with households who have $1 million or more in investable assets.
Skinner Wealth Strategies is a fee-based fiduciary financial advisor serving Stonington and the surrounding New London County communities. We work with people who have spent a career building savings and now need a plan for turning it into income. Our focus is tax-efficient retirement planning for pre-retirees and retirees — coordinating your investments, your taxes, and your retirement income as one plan instead of three separate problems.
Stonington Borough is one of the last working fishing villages in Connecticut, sitting right on the Rhode Island line.
Households we work with in Stonington — part of southeastern Connecticut — often have friends and neighbours in Mystic, Groton and Waterford weighing the same set of retirement decisions. Being a fair distance from Milford means we handle most of this work remotely, which suits clients who would rather not spend a morning driving.
Stonington sits roughly 80 minutes from our Milford office, so most clients out here work with us virtually — which, for this kind of planning, loses nothing. We meet clients in person at either our Milford or West Hartford office, or virtually — whichever fits your schedule.
We specialize in people over 50 who have more than $1 million in savings and who need help turning a life's work into a steady income stream for retirement, in a tax-sensitive way. When you have spent your career in saving mode, reorganizing those habits for a new phase of life is a genuine shift, and it is the shift we are built to help with.
The common thread is almost never a lack of savings. It is that the investments, the taxes, and the income have never been planned together — an investment manager here, a CPA there, and nobody owning the whole picture.
The same three steps for everyone, and the first two cost nothing:
A portfolio built to accumulate and a portfolio built to distribute are not the same portfolio, even when they hold similar things. While you are saving, a decline is an inconvenience and arguably an opportunity. Once you are drawing an income from it, the same decline is a forced sale. So the allocation stops being a question of abstract risk tolerance and becomes a question of funding dated, sequenced withdrawals: what has to be spendable in the next few years is held in short-duration assets, and only what is genuinely long-dated carries market risk. Mapping known income — Social Security, a pension — against required distributions and voluntary withdrawals also shows which years land in a lower bracket than the ones around them, and those are the years worth using for a conversion or a change in asset location.
Retirement income here starts with a chosen withdrawal rate and a dollar amount. Each year that amount adjusts for inflation, unless the portfolio has had a negative return over the prior twelve months. If strong performance pushes your withdrawal rate well below where it started, spending can increase; if a downturn pushes it well above, spending is trimmed. The point of setting the boundaries in advance is that you know before it happens what would cause your income to move and by how much — which is a very different experience from deciding what to do in the middle of a bad market.
Southeastern Connecticut has a heavy federal, defense, and utility employment base — Electric Boat, the submarine base, Millstone. That means federal retirement benefits, thrift savings plans, and defense-contractor pensions are a recurring thread, each with distribution rules that don't behave like a standard 401(k). It is a longer drive from either office, so most of this work happens virtually.
Can I stop working before 65, and what happens to health insurance? This answer changed this year, and not in a small way. The enhanced subsidies that softened the marketplace premium tax credit expired at the end of 2025, so for 2026 coverage the old cliff is back: cross 400% of the federal poverty level — roughly $62,600 for a single filer or $128,600 for a family of four — and the entire credit disappears. Not a reduced credit. All of it. Since the credit is driven by the income you realize rather than by your assets, that makes the size of a Roth conversion or an IRA withdrawal between 60 and 65 a materially bigger decision than it was two years ago.
Retiring before Medicare. For households leaving work before 65, health insurance is usually the deciding variable, and the rules moved this year. With the enhanced subsidies expired, the marketplace premium tax credit is once again an all-or-nothing threshold at 400% of the federal poverty level — approximately $62,600 single or $128,600 for a family of four. A dollar over and the credit is gone entirely, and the cap that used to limit how much excess advance credit you had to repay is gone too. Because the test is on realized income rather than net worth, the years between retiring and turning 65 are years where how you fund your spending sets what your coverage costs.
What the plan does in a bad market. The question worth answering before you retire is not what the portfolio returns in a good decade — it is what you do in a bad one. A guardrails approach defines in advance what triggers an adjustment and how large that adjustment is, so a market drop produces a known response rather than an improvised one.
Beneficiary designations. Beneficiary forms on retirement accounts and insurance policies pass outside your will, which means a form filled out before a marriage, a divorce, or a death quietly overrides an otherwise well-drafted estate plan. Reviewing them takes very little time and is one of the highest-value hours in the whole process.
Consolidating a career's worth of accounts. An old 401(k) from two employers ago, a rollover IRA, a pension election letter, a brokerage account someone opened in the nineties, and a life insurance policy nobody has looked at since. Almost every plan starts by finding all of it and deciding what still has a job to do. Consolidation is not the goal in itself — clarity about what each piece is for is.
The first five years of withdrawals. Sequence-of-returns risk is the reason two retirees with the same average return can end up in very different places: it matters enormously whether the bad years land early, while you are drawing income. We hold near-term spending in short-duration assets specifically so a downturn is funded from the reserve rather than by selling depressed holdings at the worst possible moment.
How We Plan
Three areas where the decisions made in the years before retirement tend to matter more than anything that happens inside the portfolio.
Required distributions start at 73 or 75 depending on when you were born, and they arrive whether you need the income or not. The damage is rarely the distribution itself — it is that it stacks on Social Security and pension income, increases how much of your Social Security is taxed, and can trip a Medicare surcharge that behaves as a genuine cliff rather than a bracket.
Connecticut exempts retirement income only below an AGI line, taxes Roth conversions in full at 2%–6.99% with no carve-out, and offers no preferential rate on long-term gains the way the federal system does. Its estate tax is also widely misdescribed: since 2023 it applies only to the excess over the exemption, not the whole estate.
The order returns arrive in matters more than the average — research puts the correlation with a sustainable withdrawal rate at roughly 0.80 against the first decade's real return, versus only 0.21 against the first year alone. Add unmanaged tax risk on a large deferred balance and two or three decades of inflation, and you have most of the structural damage we are asked to repair.
By the Numbers
A hypothetical illustration of the planning we do for Stonington households — with the arithmetic shown.
Worked example
A Guilford couple retiring at 62 needs $118,000 a year but has to hold Marketplace income under $84,600. Funding the gap from taxable sales and qualified Roth distributions — which produce no MAGI — preserves roughly $11,832 a year of premium assistance. Since the enhanced subsidies expired, crossing that line costs the entire credit, not a portion.
Hypothetical example — not an actual client.
See the full premium tax credit exampleWatch
Brian covers the questions we hear most from Connecticut households approaching retirement.
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A first conversation costs nothing and carries no obligation. We’ll learn about your situation and tell you honestly whether we can help.
Our planning work is built for households age 50+ with $1 million or more in investable assets. If that isn’t you yet, we’d rather say so now than on the call.
Skinner Wealth Strategies serves clients throughout Connecticut from offices in Milford and West Hartford. Meetings are available in person or virtually. This page is informational and is not a solicitation in any state where the representative is not registered.
