Safety-First Approach
Determining Your Retirement Need
Modern Retirement Theory teaches us that retirement is an absolute goal, not a relative one—you want to retire and stay retired.
Successful planning starts with a clear picture of your individual spending needs—not generic rules of thumb or outdated replacement ratios. We organize your retirement using what we call the Core 4 Foundations: the Base Fund, Contingency Fund, Discretionary Fund, and Legacy Fund. Together, they form a framework that guides every decision we make and keeps your plan aligned with real life.
Our process reflects
proactive planning and wise stewardship of every resource, drawing on
85+ years of combined advisor experience, decades of
Nobel Prize–winning research, and thousands of hours of training. At every step, we focus on one objective:
to determine the optimal strategy that matches the timing of your future financial goals with the most effective use of your investments and other assets.
The Framework: Modern Retirement Theory
Every retirement is different—but every retirement has the same four jobs to do. Modern Retirement Theory organizes those jobs into the Core 4 Foundations. Each fund has a specific purpose, and each is matched to the right kind of resources at the right time in your retirement.
Base Fund
Your Base Fund covers the non-negotiable expenses that keep your lifestyle intact—housing, utilities, food, insurance, and healthcare premiums. Our goal is to match these Base Expenses with secure, stable, and sustainable income sources that remain dependable throughout your retirement horizon.
This is where our Safety-First investment approach comes in. We dedicate fixed income securities to create predictable cash flows, so your essential needs are met regardless of market conditions.
Contingency Fund
The Contingency Fund prepares you for uncertainties that can disrupt even the strongest plan: long-term care needs, sequence-of-returns risk, sudden inflation spikes, changes in tax law, or large unexpected expenses.
By planning for contingencies upfront, we build
resilience into your strategy, giving you resources to draw on without compromising your Base Fund or selling growth assets at an inopportune time.
Discretionary Fund
Your Discretionary Fund represents the lifestyle choices that add joy and flexibility to retirement—travel, hobbies, generosity, or home improvements. These goals are important, but because they are not tied to essential living costs, they can adapt during market downturns.
That flexibility allows your growth portfolio to stay invested for the long term, reducing the risk of selling at a loss to fund an expense that can wait.
Legacy Fund
Your Legacy Fund helps you think intentionally about the impact you want to leave—whether through gifts to family, charitable causes, or multi-generational planning.
It connects your values, goals, and resources so we can design tax-aware strategies for giving during your lifetime and at death, all while preserving the stability of your broader retirement plan.
The Process: Building Your Plan from the Ground Up
The Core 4 Foundations tell us what your retirement plan needs to accomplish. The next step is figuring out what those funds actually look like for you. That is not guesswork—it is a comprehensive, data-driven process.
We start with the full picture.
We gather detailed information on all your income sources (Social Security, pensions, rental income), your current expenses, your assets, and your liabilities. The goal is a complete financial picture before we plan a single thing.
We listen to what you want retirement to look like.
Numbers only matter when they connect to a life. We have in-depth conversations about your goals: When do you want to retire? What does your ideal retirement look like? What legacy do you want to leave? Do you plan to downsize, travel extensively, or help family members? Those answers shape how the Core 4 Foundations get funded.
We model your plan with precision.
We input everything into our specialized financial planning software, applying different inflation rates depending on the type of expense—because healthcare costs do not inflate at the same rate as general living expenses. We make informed income tax assumptions based on your unique situation and projected tax brackets.
We stress-test the plan.
The software generates detailed projections showing how your plan performs across different market scenarios and time horizons. We review the output together, run “what-if” scenarios, and refine the plan until you have a clear, actionable roadmap that reflects your reality—not generic assumptions.
What Comes Next
Once we have mapped your retirement through the Core 4 Foundations, we use the full Branning Wealth toolbox to determine the best way to implement your strategy. Modern Retirement Theory begins with understanding expenses, but it becomes the decision-making framework for every part of your retirement planning.
We evaluate each decision through the lens of your Base, Contingency, Discretionary, and Legacy Funds and ask:
- How does this affect long-term stability?
- What is the most effective tool to address it?
- How can we match this goal to the right resource at the right time?