AFMG - American Financial Management Group

05/28/2026

05/21/2026

Reminder: Hope is NOT a plan

05/21/2026

When I'm asked what we do, I tend to surprise people by not answering "Make great investments" or "Help build huge wealth." Instead, I say, "I help people spend money."

And this is the unspoken problem with retirement income planning. Clients spend decades sacrificing, saving, delaying, and preparing for someday — but when someday finally arrives, few find it easy to switch to "spend mode."

I try to plant the seed of this switch by calling savings not "savings" but "future spending." The idea is to keep in everyone's thoughts that this money is designed to be used. It isn't a number to protect — it's a pile of experiences, dinners, trips, and memories that haven't happened yet. Reframing it that way matters because how you think about the money determines whether you ever actually touch it.

And apparently I'm not alone in this thinking.

"The true test of another man's intelligence is how much he agrees with you." By that measure, Dan Haylett is a genius because he just published a Substack discussing this very issue.

Dan covers a lot of ground that we work through in client meetings, but he has one line I am going to steal — correction, borrow — and I'll be giving him full credit every time I use it: "For the first time in your entire adult life, you are about to need permission from yourself, and you have absolutely no idea how to grant it."

Think about it. Up until now, your spending was constrained by someone else. As kids, it was our allowance, and when we got jobs, it was our paycheck (I'm ignoring credit cards and borrowing since why let details get in the way of a good analogy). Every significant purchase came pre-loaded with a structural alibi — you earned it, the bonus covered it, the salary justified it.

In retirement, however, we are the paymaster. It is up to ourselves to decide how much to spend, and that can be scary as hell.

This is exactly why the "future spending" reframe matters so much. If you've spent 30 years thinking of that account as savings — something to preserve, protect, and grow — the psychological leap to spending it is enormous. But if you've been thinking of it all along as future spending, just waiting to be deployed? That's a different relationship with the money entirely. At some point, the goal has to shift from protecting the money to actually using it to enjoy the life you spent 30 years building.

I'm not expecting this post to suddenly rewire your brain, but hopefully, it starts conditioning you to enjoy the retirement you imagined when you started this journey.

Dan's full piece is worth your time. Please read it here: https://buff.ly/1qDcKgP

Why the freest people still can't bring themselves to enjoy it

05/20/2026

Maybe, just maybe, relying on media narratives is not the best way to determine your financial prospects.

05/20/2026

The first sentence in describing most retirement vehicles (IRAs, Social Security, etc.) makes them sound straightforward. Unfortunately, that sentence is followed by copious amounts of exceptions and special situations that pile on the complexity.

Today's example is moving your 401(k) to an IRA. Moving the money typically involves just signing a form, and then the money moves.

But if you are RMD age, does that impact the transfer? Yes. The first dollars distributed from your retirement account in any RMD year are treated as your RMD, and RMDs can't be rolled over. So if you transfer your 401(k) to an IRA without taking the RMD first, you've just rolled over money that wasn't eligible to be rolled over. That creates an "excess contribution," which you can correct — but correcting it means pulling out the excess plus any earnings it generated while sitting in the IRA, and those earnings are taxable. Fixable, but not free.

This is why retirement planning gets frustrating for people. Not because the concepts are impossible, but because the rules rarely stop at the first sentence.

The Slott Report covers this very situation today. Can't imagine where I got the idea for this post from!
https://buff.ly/s4wpN8u

Most of you are probably familiar with the concept of the "required beginning date" (RBD). The RBD is the deadline for taking the first required minimum distribution (RMD) from an IRA or workplace retirement plan. If you’re a traditional IRA owner, your RBD is April 1 of the year following the yea...

05/14/2026

With retirement accounts, details matter.

If you take money from these accounts before age 59½, you'll normally owe an additional 10% tax on top of regular income tax. However, over the years, Congress has created several exceptions to this tax. If you meet the requirements (not always as easy as it may sound, but that's a rant for another day), then voila, no 10% tax. The income tax, however, does not disappear.

At last count (Congress can change the rules at any time), there are 21 exceptions to this extra tax. That's the good news.

The bad news: while 11 of them apply to all retirement accounts, the other 10 apply only to either IRAs or workplace plans (401(k), 403(b), etc.) — not both.

And it's on you to know which is which. Most custodians won't advise whether your specific distribution qualifies.

You may think that it doesn't really matter since it's all "retirement dollars", but there are plenty of failed appeals to the IRS, where the IRS essentially says, "tough cookies, the rules are the rules."

So if you need to tap your retirement account early, please double-check what you think you know — or what your buddy told you. The IRS is not the most forgiving organization in the world.

If you are interested, here is a link to the exceptions: https://buff.ly/6VoAie8

05/13/2026

https://babylonbee.com/news/doctor-breaks-bad-news-that-everything-youre-experiencing-is-normal-youre-just-40

OMAHA, NE — Local man John Falco received the tragic news today from his doctor that all the things happening to his body are completely normal, he's simply 40 years old now.

05/08/2026

What's the difference between planning FOR retirement and planning IN retirement?

Most people — and honestly, most advisors — treat retirement as a continuation of the accumulation phase. You worked hard, you saved diligently, and now you're just doing the same thing with a different account balance and no paycheck coming in. The goal shifts from "save more" to "don't run out," but the underlying logic stays the same.

It shouldn't.

The conversation is different — and so is how we measure success. When you're in your 30s and 40s, the goal is simple: number go up. Yes, tempered by risk tolerance, but the direction is the point. Growth is the mission. The software most advisors use in that phase reflects this. They're built around one central question: Am I on track? That's the right question when you're accumulating.

In retirement, we use different software entirely — because we're asking a different question. Not "am I on track?" but "what can I spend?" The portfolio isn't an investment account anymore. It's a paycheck generator. The measure of success isn't a probability score; it's whether your assets — Social Security, savings, any pension — are coordinated to fund your life reliably, month after month.

Same portfolio, potentially. Completely different job.

The sequence of your returns suddenly matters. This one catches people off guard. It's not IF markets go down, but WHEN markets go down.

During accumulation, a 30% market drop is painful but manageable — you keep contributing, you buy cheaper, you recover. In retirement, the same drop forces you to sell assets at depressed prices just to fund your regular expenses. The order in which you experience gains and losses in retirement can make or break an otherwise sound plan.

A client with great average returns but bad timing early in retirement can run out of money. A client with mediocre average returns but good early-year luck can be fine. None of that was true when they were saving.

The hardest part of planning isn't even math — it's permission. Many clients arrive at retirement having done everything right. They've saved well, they've planned carefully, and they genuinely cannot make themselves spend. The same discipline that built the pile now prevents them from using it.

We've sat across from people who can comfortably afford to take their grandchildren to Disney World and talk themselves out of it because what if something happens. That's not a financial problem. That's a psychology problem. And it's one that nobody warned them about during thirty years of being told to save more.

These aren't just phases of the same process. They're genuinely different disciplines — different risks, different psychology, different definitions of success.