Financial Planning for Retirement IV: Plan for Account Withdrawals

If you have multiple 401(k)s, IRAs, and brokerage accounts – or multiple financial professionals, as many high-net-worth people do – you’ll need to feel comfortable with the plan you’ve created to manage required minimum distributions and your retirement accounts, potentially through decades of retirement. How should those accounts be invested? Should you roll over IRAs? What’s the plan? Importantly, the plan must accommodate multiple objectives (current income plus capital appreciation) and goals (lifelong income; legacy), and it has to fit you – not anyone else.

Julie Jason, JD, LLM, developed her views on financial services over a lifelong career in law and management, starting out on Wall Street as a lawyer after earning her LLM from Columbia University. Twenty-five years ago, Jason founded her own Investment Counsel firm—Jackson, Grant, Investment Advisers, Inc. of Stamford, CT, a fiduciary boutique—where her team manages personal portfolios for high net worth families. A proponent of financial literacy, Ms. Jason writes for a broad audience of every financial means. Her award-winning weekly investor education column, which celebrated a 1,000 column milestone a few months ago, is syndicated by Andrews McMeel and is published locally in the Greenwich Time each Sunday and in a number of other Hearst newspapers.