This interview is with Clint Haynes, Financial Planner, NextGen Wealth.
How did your path evolve from investment management into holistic retirement planning, and what experiences most shaped how you guide clients through the transition into retirement?
When starting out in the industry, it seemed like investment management was everything. While that was a differentiator way back in the day, investment management today has been almost commoditized. If that’s all you’re offering, there really isn’t much value.
With that being the case, I wanted to touch on all areas of my clients’ financial lives, from investments to estate planning to retirement income planning and so much more. That’s where I thought we could add the most value.
Eventually, that led us to help clients transition into retirement and to my book, “Retirement the Right Way,” where we dig into pleasure, purpose, and peace of mind in retirement and create a plan around them based on each client’s wants and desires.
Building on that shift, when someone is in their early-to-mid 50s, what are the first three actions you ask them to take in the next 30 days to put a real retirement transition plan in motion?
- What are you retiring to rather than what are you retiring from?
- What is going to motivate you to wake up every single day?
- How are you going to fill all of the free time that you now have?
Once a plan is in motion, what tax-aware income strategy have you found most effective in the first 5–10 years of retirement, and how do you decide when to use tools like Roth conversions, QCDs, or a guardrails withdrawal approach?
Every client situation is different, so it really depends on the client. However, we have a number of tools in our toolbox, such as:
- Roth conversions,
- health savings accounts,
- the healthcare tax credit (if retiring prior to Medicare), and
- qualified charitable distributions (if eligible).
These tools allow us to withdraw funds as tax-efficiently as possible. It’s really a balancing act of all these levers and creating a plan on which ones to pull and when.
Staying with income coordination, how do you align Social Security timing with 401(k)/IRA withdrawals to manage longevity and sequence risk for a client?
Here is how we manage these factors:
1. Delaying Social Security to Manage Longevity Risk
We emphasize that Social Security is the primary tool for managing longevity risk because it provides inflation-adjusted income for life.
- The Strategy: We often recommend delaying Social Security benefits—ideally until age 70—to maximize the monthly payout. For every year you wait past your Full Retirement Age (FRA), your benefit increases by approximately 8% per year (up to a 24% total increase).
- The Benefit: By securing a higher “floor” of guaranteed, inflation-protected income, a client reduces the risk of outliving their assets if they live into their 90s or beyond.
2. Using 401(k)/IRA Withdrawals as a “Bridge”
To allow Social Security to grow, we suggest using retirement accounts to “bridge” the income gap in the early years of retirement.
- The Strategy: Instead of taking Social Security at 62 or 67, a client may withdraw more heavily from their 401(k) or IRA during those initial years.
- Tax Efficiency: This “gap” period (between retirement and age 70/RMD age) also creates a window for Roth Conversions. By pulling from traditional IRAs early, clients can reduce the size of future Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs) and potentially stay in a lower tax bracket overall.
3. Mitigating Sequence of Returns Risk
Sequence risk is the danger of a market downturn occurring early in retirement when a client is withdrawing from their portfolio. We manage this through a coordinated approach:
- Reducing Portfolio Reliance: By eventually having a maximized Social Security check, the client becomes less dependent on selling investment assets to pay for basic living expenses.
- Multiple Income Streams: We advocate for having “diverse income streams” (Social Security, 401(k), pensions, etc.) so that during a market crash, a client can lean on guaranteed sources (like Social Security) rather than being forced to sell stocks at a loss to generate cash.
- Flexible Withdrawals: By coordinating the timing, we can adjust which bucket (taxable, tax-deferred, or tax-free) is tapped into during a down market to preserve the portfolio’s longevity.
On day-to-day spending, when a one-time splurge starts drifting into a recurring expense, what conversation and monitoring process do you use to preserve lifestyle satisfaction without breaking the plan’s guardrails?
Since we don’t have access to line-by-line spending for our clients, it really comes down to the regular conversations we have with them or if we start to notice they are requesting a lot of one-off distributions.
We annually monitor every client’s retirement income strategy based on their distributions. If lifestyle creep is going to affect the longevity of their retirement income, we’ll set up a time to have a conversation.
While these conversations may not be the most pleasant for the client to hear, they are extremely important to ensure the longevity of their accounts.
Looking beyond income, you’ve said estate planning should be integrated early—what simple checklist or first-meeting framework do you use to align retirement goals, beneficiary designations, and tax-efficient legacy plans?
We’ve developed a financial planning process called the COLLAB Financial Planning Process. This is our one-of-a-kind process that takes into account and covers every area of a client’s financial life.
This process can take anywhere from 8 to 12 months, depending on the client’s complexity. It is a rigorous and detailed process, but it ensures we don’t miss anything along the way.
Many of your clients care about health, community, and giving back—drawing on your interests in fitness (P90X/Insanity), Kansas City sports, and poverty alleviation, how do you help retirees design a weekly routine that builds purpose and connection beyond the portfolio?
While we do our best to help our clients plan a weekly routine and a purpose for retirement, we’ve partnered with a professional coach who specializes in retirement transitions. She does an amazing job with the course she has created for singles or couples to help them transition into retirement, covering all areas to ensure emotional fulfillment and peace of mind.
Finally, on technology, what does your current tech stack look like for delivering retirement and tax planning, and what one consumer-facing tool do you recommend retirees use to track spending and guardrails between reviews?
I am definitely a technology dork, so I’m always seeking out new tools that I feel can fulfill a need. We have everything from retirement income planning software to tax planning software to estate planning software, and everything in between. While these aren’t client-facing, we do provide clients with a financial dashboard that truly encompasses all of their financial life into a single dashboard.