Understanding What You'll Actually Need in Retirement
Modern Retirement Theory teaches us that retirement is an absolute goal, not a relative one—you want to retire and stay retired.
Successful planning starts with a clear picture of your individual spending needs—not generic rules of thumb or outdated replacement ratios. We organize your retirement using what we call the Core 4 Foundations: the Base Fund, Contingency Fund, Discretionary Fund, and Legacy Fund. Together, they form a framework that guides every decision we make and keeps your plan aligned with real life.
Our process reflects
proactive planning and wise stewardship of every resource, drawing on
85+ years of combined advisor experience, decades of
Nobel Prize–winning research, and thousands of hours of training. At every step, we focus on one objective:
to determine the optimal strategy that matches the timing of your future financial goals with the most effective use of your investments and other assets.
Modern Retirement Theory
Base Fund
Your Base Fund covers the non-negotiable expenses that keep your lifestyle intact—housing, utilities, food, insurance, and healthcare premiums. Our goal is to match these Base Expenses with secure, stable, and sustainable income sources that remain dependable throughout your retirement horizon.
This is where our Safety-First investment approach comes in. We dedicate fixed income securities to create predictable cash flows, so your essential needs are met regardless of market conditions.
Contingency Fund
The Contingency Fund prepares you for uncertainties that can disrupt even the strongest plan: long-term care needs, sequence-of-returns risk, sudden inflation spikes, changes in tax law, or large unexpected expenses.
By planning for contingencies upfront, we build
resilience into your strategy, giving you resources to draw on without compromising your Base Fund or selling growth assets at an inopportune time.
Discretionary Fund
Your Discretionary Fund represents the lifestyle choices that add joy and flexibility to retirement—travel, hobbies, generosity, or home improvements. These goals are important, but because they are not tied to essential living costs, they can adapt during market downturns.
That flexibility allows your growth portfolio to stay invested for the long term, reducing the risk of selling at a loss to fund an expense that can wait.
Legacy Fund
Your Legacy Fund helps you think intentionally about the impact you want to leave—whether through gifts to family, charitable causes, or multi-generational planning.
It connects your values, goals, and resources so we can design tax-aware strategies for giving during your lifetime and at death, all while preserving the stability of your broader retirement plan.
Next steps
Once we’ve mapped your retirement through the Core 4 Foundations, we use the full Branning Wealth toolbox to determine the best way to implement your strategy. MRT begins with understanding expenses, but it becomes the decision-making framework for every part of your retirement planning.
We evaluate each decision through the lens of your Base, Contingency, Discretionary, and Legacy Funds and ask:
- How does this affect long-term stability?
- What is the most effective tool to address it?
- How can we match this goal to the right resource at the right time?