What We Do
Tax-Efficient Retirement Income Planning — Built on a Proven Framework
The MRT Difference
RETIREMENT Built Around What You Can Control
Everything we do at Branning Wealth Management starts with one question: how do we build you a retirement income strategy that is designed to be predictable, regardless of what the market does?
The answer is
Modern Retirement Theory (MRT) — a proprietary retirement planning framework co-developed by
Jason Branning, CFP®, RICP®, and published in
The Journal of Financial Planning. MRT gives us a structured, evidence-based way to organize your retirement income, protect against risk, and keep your plan on track through every phase of retirement.
Understanding What You’ll Actually Need in Retirement
MRT begins with organizing your financial life into the Core 4 Funds: Base, Contingency, Discretionary, and Legacy. This structure gives purpose to your planning and helps us match the right strategies and investment tools to each part of your retirement life.
Your Base Fund
Predictable Income for Your Essential Expenses
Your Base Fund covers the non-negotiables — housing, healthcare, groceries, utilities, and everything else you depend on. Using a Safety-First approach, we build a bond ladder that delivers predictable income to cover these expenses, regardless of market conditions. This is the foundation of your retirement income plan: income you can count on, even when the market can’t cooperate.
Your Contingency Fund
A Buffer for Life’s Surprises
Long-term care costs. Market downturns at the wrong time. Unexpected home repairs. The Contingency Fund builds resilience into your plan so that when life surprises you, you’re not forced to sell growth assets at a loss or compromise the income that covers your essentials.
Your Discretionary Fund
Retirement on Your Terms
Travel. Hobbies. Helping grandchildren. Home upgrades. These are the goals that make retirement worth looking forward to. The Discretionary Fund funds your lifestyle while building in the flexibility to adjust when markets pull back — so your growth portfolio stays invested and compounding for the long term.
Your Legacy Fund
The Impact You Want to Leave
Your Legacy Fund reflects what matters most to you beyond your own retirement — family, causes, community. We help you approach charitable giving, estate planning, and family support with intention and tax efficiency, so your legacy is as meaningful as possible
Our Planning Process
Step 1: Map Your Full Financial Picture
We gather your income sources, expenses, assets, and retirement goals and build a complete picture of where you stand. No assumptions, no rules of thumb — just your actual numbers.
Step 2: Stress-Test the Plan
We run your plan through multiple scenarios — market downturns, inflation, changing tax laws, healthcare costs — and use our Critical Path analysis to identify exactly what could affect your retirement and how to address it.
Build Your Income Foundation
We create a bond ladder designed to fund your essential living expenses for the first several years of retirement. This Safety-First income foundation means you’re never forced to sell investments at the wrong time just to cover your bills.
Invest for Long-Term Growth
With your income foundation in place, we invest your remaining assets using Time-Targeted Growth portfolios aligned with when you’ll actually need the money. Each investment is connected to a time horizon — not an age-based guess.
Retirement Planning Built on Structure and Clarity
Our two-part approach — Safety-First income paired with Time-Targeted Growth — is designed to keep your retirement plan on track regardless of what the market does. Your near-term income is funded and protected. Your long-term assets have room to grow without being forced to liquidate at the wrong time.
Our proprietary Critical Path monitoring system tracks how your plan is performing relative to your goals, giving you a clear picture of where you stand and what adjustments, if any, could strengthen your position.
This is retirement income planning with a structure you can understand — and a process built to last.
How the Core 4 Shapes Everything We Do
Once we establish your Core 4 Funds, we draw on the full Branning Wealth toolbox to build the right strategy for each part of your retirement. MRT gives us the framework. Our tools help us execute the plan:
- Safety-First income planning
- Time-Targeted Growth portfolios
- Tax-efficient withdrawal strategies
- Social Security optimization
- Insurance analysis and long-term care planning
- Estate and legacy coordination
- Ongoing monitoring through Critical Path analysis
This toolbox is applied by a team of specialists, each with deep expertise in their area of your retirement plan.
Every decision you make in retirement—whether routine or unexpected—is evaluated through this structure. If a new expense or opportunity comes up, we ask:
- Which fund does this affect?
- How does it impact long-term stability?
- Which tool is best suited to address it?
This turns a complex retirement into a clear, manageable strategy.