Goals-Based Planning When You Are Already Retired

Once you have retired, contributions are no longer a lever. What remains is the goal list itself, the order money comes out, how much sits outside the market, and which spending you are prepared to move. Goals-based planning after retirement is mostly about those four.

What changes once you have stopped working

Before retirement, an underfunded goal has an obvious response: save more, work a little longer, or adjust the target. Three levers, all of them available.

After retirement, the first two are mostly gone. The balance is what it is, and employment income has ended. That does not make planning less useful. It makes it a different exercise, focused on the levers you still hold rather than the ones you have handed back.

If you are new to the framing itself, start with what goals-based retirement planning is. This page assumes you already understand the idea and are applying it after the fact.

The funded ratio, in plain terms

The central question is whether what you have, plus what is coming in, covers what you have said you want. Practitioners call the comparison a funded ratio: the value of your resources set against the value of your goals.

You do not need the formula to use the idea. What matters is that it produces three distinct situations, and each one calls for a different conversation.

This page is general information, not tax or legal advice, and not a recommendation. Investing involves risk, including the potential loss of principal. Any projection depends on assumptions that will not hold exactly.

The first row is the one people are least prepared for. Being comfortably covered is good news that often goes unexamined, and the question it raises is a real one: if the list is already funded, why is the portfolio positioned as though it needs to grow aggressively?

The income gap, and what fills it

Start with the stable layer: Social Security, any pension, and any income contract already in place. Subtract it from your essential spending. What remains is the gap, and it is the number the portfolio actually has to cover.

That gap is more useful than any percentage withdrawal figure, because it is specific to you and it separates the spending that must be funded from the spending that would be nice to fund. Our page on turning savings into a monthly paycheck covers the mechanics of filling it.

Sorting spending into tiers

A goals framing after retirement usually sorts spending into three groups rather than two, because the middle one is where the real decisions live.

• Essential. Housing, food, insurance, healthcare, taxes. This does not flex, so it is funded from the most dependable sources available to you.
• Lifestyle. Travel, gifts, hobbies, the second home. Valued, and deferrable. This tier is what a plan actually adjusts in a bad year.
• Legacy. What you intend to leave, to people or causes. Longest horizon, and the tier most often left unstated until someone asks.

Writing them down in that order changes what a decline means. Instead of asking whether the plan still works, you are asking which lifestyle item moves this year, which is a far smaller question and one you have already thought about.

The levers you still have

• Which account the money comes from. The same spending funded from a traditional, Roth or taxable account produces different tax results. This is the largest lever most retirees have, and it is covered in our tax-efficient retirement planning work, done alongside your CPA.
• How much sits outside the market. A reserve does not prevent a decline. It decides whether a decline forces you to sell.
• Which spending flexes, and when. Named in advance, in writing, before the year you need it.
• Timing within the gap years. If you have not yet claimed Social Security, or have not yet reached required minimum distributions, those windows are still open.
• The goal list itself. It is allowed to change. A list written at 62 is rarely the list someone would write at 72.

What a review should cover

At least annually, and after anything that changes the picture. The projection gets rebuilt rather than glanced at. The goal list gets re-read aloud rather than assumed. And three things get checked specifically: whether the stable layer still covers the essential tier, whether the reserve is where you want it, and whether anything has happened that moves a goal between tiers.

Events worth an off-cycle conversation: a death or serious illness, a move to another state, a large one-off expense, a change in health that affects the long-term care question, or a year where income looks unusually high or low.

Doing this in Roeland Park

Roeland Park is a compact city on the Missouri border, close enough that many clients make the drive to our office in under ten minutes. The households we meet there are often already retired rather than approaching it, which is exactly the case this page is about: the accumulating is done, the balance is what it is, and the useful work is sorting what the money is for and deciding in advance which parts move if a year goes badly. That sits inside our retirement income planning. See the communities we serve across the Kansas City area.

CFG Wealth Management Inc. is an independent firm based in Prairie Village, Kansas, led by LaMont Chandler, CRD 2794744. We are not affiliated with cfgwmt.com or with any other firm operating under a similar name. LaMont holds FINRA Series 7, 24 and NASAA Series 63, 65 registrations and has been registered in the securities industry since 1996. He is registered in Kansas, Missouri, Texas and Idaho. Securities and advisory services are offered through Madison Avenue Securities, LLC, member FINRA and SIPC, and a registered investment advisor. CFG Wealth Management Inc. and Madison Avenue Securities are not affiliated companies. His record is available on FINRA BrokerCheck.

Common questions

Where this connects

• What goals-based retirement planning is covers the definition
• Goals-based retirement planning in Kansas City covers the method in depth
• How retirees turn savings into a monthly paycheck covers filling the gap
• Tax-efficient retirement planning covers withdrawal order
• More retirement planning insights