Financial Advisor in Waterford, CT

What we do for Waterford retirees and pre-retirees

• Retirement Planning — retirement readiness analysis, scenario planning, and bringing a lifetime of separate pieces — an old 401(k), a pension, a brokerage account, an insurance policy — together into one coordinated plan.
• Retirement Income — an academically grounded approach built on income guardrails and investment buckets, taking every income source into account so the portfolio is not doing work that Social Security or a pension already does.
• Tax Planning — reviewing your annual return, planning Roth conversions each year, coordinating the timing of different income streams, and watching the thresholds that would otherwise spike your Medicare premiums later.
• Social Security Strategy — analyzing your filing age against your actual plan, understanding how your other income affects the benefit, and protecting a spouse's survivor benefit.
• Investment Management — keeping investment cost low, focusing on quality, and building the mix around the income you actually need rather than an abstract risk score — with tax efficiency decided at the holding level.
• Coordinated coverage review — we review existing policies as part of the plan and introduce you to qualified outside resources when something should be shopped. We do not sell insurance.

Building the portfolio around the income

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.

Planning in New London County

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.

A question we get a lot here

What happens to this when we're gone? Connecticut has its own estate tax on top of the federal one, and the thresholds move, so exposure is worth reviewing periodically rather than assuming a number you read years ago still applies. Beneficiary designations pass outside your will and quietly override an otherwise sound estate plan when they go stale — so they get audited as part of the plan, and we coordinate with your attorney rather than replacing them.

Other things that come up often around Waterford

The order you spend from. Most households arrive with three kinds of money — taxable, tax-deferred, and Roth — and no plan for which one funds which year. There is no universal answer, because the right order changes with your bracket, whether you are converting, whether you are on marketplace coverage before Medicare, and what your future required distributions look like. It is a decision that gets made annually, with the return in front of us.

Required minimum distributions. At some point the IRS stops letting a tax-deferred balance sit. Required minimum distributions arrive whether you need the income or not, and for households who saved diligently into a 401(k) for thirty years they can push you into a higher bracket in retirement than you were in while working. The planning happens in the years before they start, not in the year they do.

Spending it once you have permission to. A surprising amount of the work is not about whether the money lasts — it is about giving people a defensible reason to spend it. Decades of saving builds a habit that does not switch off, and plenty of retirees underspend their way through the healthiest years they will have. A plan with guardrails is as much about permission as it is about restraint.

What happens to the 401(k) when you actually retire. Leaving it, rolling it, or taking it in stages are all defensible depending on the plan's costs, what it holds, and what you need the money to do. What is rarely defensible is deciding by default because a form arrived in the mail. It is worth a deliberate look in the months before your last day, while you still have options the plan may close afterward.

Working alongside your CPA and attorney. We do tax planning, not tax preparation. Your CPA files what already happened; our job is what happens next — which account funds this year, how much to convert, which thresholds to stay under. The same applies on the estate side: we handle the financial and tax work and coordinate with your attorney on the documents rather than replacing either of them.