Retirement Planning
Retirement Planning that Accounts for How You Actually Accumulated Wealth
For business owners, executives, and high earners, retirement is not just a savings problem. It is a coordination problem.
Most people think about retirement planning as a savings question: "Am I saving enough?" For many of the clients we serve, the more important questions are about coordination, sequencing, and tax strategy:
- When should you take Social Security, and how does that decision interact with your other income?
- How do you unwind a business or diversify out of concentrated stock in a tax-efficient way?
- What is the right sequence for drawing down accounts across taxable, tax-deferred, and tax-free buckets?
- What does your income look like in retirement, and what will the tax bill actually be?
These questions require a planning process that extends well beyond saving and accumulation.
What Retirement Planning Looks Like at Helium
Pre-Retirement Planning
- Retirement readiness analysis - projecting cash flow in retirement based on real spending, asset base, expected returns, and withdrawal assumptions
- Tax diversification - building across taxable accounts, traditional retirement accounts, and Roth vehicles to preserve flexibility in retirement
- Roth conversion strategy - evaluating whether converting pre-tax dollars to Roth prior to retirement or RMD age makes sense for your situation
- Equity compensation unwinding - coordinating the exercise and sale of stock options, RSUs, or employer shares in a way that manages tax cost and concentration risk
- Business transition planning - if the business is part of the retirement plan, modeling the proceeds, tax implications, and reinvestment strategy as part of the broader picture
- Social Security optimization - analyzing claiming strategies in the context of your overall retirement income plan
- Medicare and healthcare planning - Medicare timing, and healthcare gap coverage before age 65
At and Through Retirement
- Distribution strategy - which accounts to draw from first, in what amounts, and with what tax implications
- Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs) - planning ahead to manage RMDs from large pre-tax accounts, including aggregation strategies and Qualified Charitable Distributions where applicable
- Sustainable withdrawal modeling - stress-testing your plan against inflation, longevity, and market variability
- Legacy and estate coordination - ensuring retirement accounts, beneficiary designations, and estate documents are aligned and up to date
For Business Owners
If your primary retirement asset is your business, as it is for many entrepreneurs, retirement planning looks fundamentally different. Diversification outside the business, pre-sale planning, and transition timing are often the most important retirement decisions you will make. We help owners think through those decisions well before they are under pressure.
For Corporate Executives
Executives often retire with a combination of 401(k) or pension income, deferred compensation, concentrated employer stock, and Social Security. Each component has different tax treatment and optimal timing. Coordinating sources of retirement income is a planning challenge that requires careful analysis and not a simple rule of thumb.
Retirement planning works best when it starts well before retirement.
