Retirement Planning
Building Retirement Income That
Lasts Through Market Cycles
A paycheck stops the day you retire, but the bills do not. Here is the
framework we use in San Antonio to turn a portfolio into income you can
actually plan around — through good markets and bad.
Reagan Wagner
CEO, President & Managing Principal
August 18, 2026 · 9 min read
For thirty or forty years, retirement is a number you are trying to reach. Then, almost overnight, it becomes a question you have to answer every single month: how much can I safely spend? Most of the anxiety we see in first meetings with pre-retirees is not about whether they saved enough — it is that no one has ever shown them how the saving becomes a paycheck.
Start with the income floor, not the balance
We begin every retirement conversation by separating your spending into two buckets: the essentials that must be covered no matter what markets do, and the discretionary spending you would happily flex in a bad year. The essentials become your income floor. We build that floor out of the most reliable sources you have — Social Security timing, any pension, and a laddered allocation designed to fund near-term withdrawals without selling into a downturn.
“The goal is not to beat a benchmark. It is to make sure a bad year in the market never forces a bad decision at the kitchen table.”
Sequence-of-returns risk is the real enemy
Two retirees can earn the same average return over thirty years and end up in completely different places, purely because of the order those returns arrived. A steep loss in the first few years of retirement — while you are withdrawing — is far more damaging than the same loss a decade in. That is why we hold one to three years of planned withdrawals in stable, liquid assets, so a down market becomes something you wait out rather than something you sell into.
- Cover essential spending with the most dependable income sources first.
- Keep one to three years of withdrawals insulated from market volatility.
- Coordinate Social Security timing with your tax picture, not in isolation.
- Revisit the withdrawal rate annually — a plan is a living document, not a one-time calculation.
