I’m Max Makhnyk, a fee-only financial planner in Spokane. I work with people who are a few years from retiring or recently retired, and with widows and widowers who aren’t quite sure what to do next.
Your accounts are held at Charles Schwab, in your name.
For most of your working life, the rules were pretty simple. You picked a percentage for your 401(k), picked a fund, and left it alone for 30 or 40 years.
Retirement is a little bit different, because the big decisions tend to show up all at once, usually within about a year and a half of each other:
Each of these changes the answer to the others, so they really need to be decided together, as one plan, and that’s the part I help with.
We work out how much you can comfortably spend each month, which accounts to pull from each year, and when to start Social Security and any pension. Then I test the plan against a bad market and a long life before you rely on it.
The years between your last paycheck and the year the IRS starts requiring withdrawals from your IRA (73 or 75, depending on the year you were born) are often some of the lowest-tax years of your retirement. Used well, those years can lower the taxes you pay for the rest of retirement.
Maybe you have two old 401(k)s, an IRA, the 457 nobody has opened since 2011, and your spouse’s plan that the two of you have never looked at side by side. I bring what makes sense into one place at Schwab, with one plan behind it, so you get fewer statements and a much clearer picture.
A lot of retirement plans assume both of you will be around for the whole thing. So every plan I build has a second version with its own numbers, showing what happens to your income once one of you passes away.
Here’s a simplified example of how big that change can be:
| Yearly income | While you’re both living | After one of you passes away |
|---|---|---|
| Larger Social Security check | $26,000 | $26,000 |
| Smaller Social Security check | $22,000 | Stops |
| Taken from savings | $22,000 | $22,000 |
| Total income per year | $70,000 | $48,000 |
Hypothetical example for illustration only. It is not a projection for any client, and your numbers will be different.
The survivor typically keeps the larger of the two Social Security checks, and the smaller one goes away. That’s a drop of almost a third, while bills like property taxes, insurance, and utilities usually stay about the same.
On top of that, taxes change too, because the year after, the survivor starts filing as a single person, with narrower tax brackets. A lot of couples only find this out afterward, and I would much rather the two of you see it now, while you still have time to change it.
Most of my clients are within about five years of retiring, or retired within the last five to ten. The rest are widows and widowers, usually somewhere around a year out, once the paperwork has settled down and the bigger questions start to come up.
You don’t need any experience with financial advisors, and you don’t need to know the vocabulary. If you’ve never worked with anyone before, that’s completely fine, and it’s pretty common among careful savers.
I’m based in Spokane and work with folks across the Inland Northwest, in person or by phone or video.
For ongoing investment management, my minimum is $250,000. There’s no minimum at all for a one-time written plan, so if you have a pension decision to make and about $90,000 in a 403(b), a plan may be the only thing you ever need from me.
Your accounts are held at Charles Schwab, in your own name. I manage the investments and deduct my advisory fee, which shows up on every Schwab statement.
Beyond that fee, the only place I can send your money is your own bank account, using an authorization you sign with Schwab ahead of time. I can’t send it to myself or to anyone else. You can log in and see every account, every trade, and every fee, any time you like.
The first call is free and takes about 30 minutes. You tell me what’s going on, I’ll answer whatever you’d like to ask, and I’ll tell you plainly whether I can help and what I’d look at first. Nothing gets decided on that call, and there’s nothing you need to prepare.
Schedule a free call