Retiring in Three Years: How to Choose an Integrated Firm

Why three years is different

For most of a working life, financial decisions can be made one at a time without much cost. Contribute to the plan, hold the allocation, adjust when something changes. The pieces sit far enough apart that handling them separately works.

That stops being true roughly three years before a retirement date, for a specific structural reason: the decisions start to depend on each other. The claiming decision for Social Security sets a floor under taxable income. Taxable income determines how much room exists for a conversion. Conversion income affects Medicare premium tiers two years forward. Premiums are a fixed cost the income plan has to carry. And the income plan determines how much of the portfolio needs to be liquid in the first few years, which reaches back into the allocation.

Handle any one of those in isolation and the answer can be locally right and globally wrong. Three years is also, practically speaking, about how long it takes to do the work: to model several claiming and conversion sequences, to restructure an allocation without forcing sales into a bad quarter, and to get estate documents drafted, funded, and reconciled against beneficiary forms.

Where the disciplines collide

A complete plan at this stage has to hold five things at once. What matters is less that a firm offers all five than that it can describe how each one constrains the others.

• Investment management. The job changes from accumulation to producing a durable withdrawal stream, which makes the order of returns in the first several years matter more than the average return over thirty.
• Tax planning. Withdrawal sequencing across taxable, tax-deferred, and tax-free accounts, plus conversion timing during any low-income years, modeled in advance rather than reconstructed at filing.
• Income design. Deciding what the paycheck looks like, where each piece comes from, and how it adjusts if markets move against you early.
• Coverage. Health coverage between the retirement date and Medicare eligibility, then the Medicare enrollment decisions themselves, then the question of extended care.
• Estate coordination. Documents drafted by an attorney, then funded, titled, and reconciled against beneficiary designations on every account and policy.

The last of those is where plans quietly fail. Industry estimates suggest a substantial share of trusts are never fully funded, and a trust holding nothing performs none of the functions it was drafted to perform. Because beneficiary forms control regardless of what a will says, a single mismatch between a form and an estate document can send assets somewhere the documents never intended. Neither problem is a drafting failure. Both are follow-through failures, which is to say they are administrative, unglamorous, and easy to postpone.

The coverage bridge to Medicare

If the retirement date lands before age 65, there is a gap to cross, and it is the piece most often left until the end. The available routes are generally employer continuation coverage for a limited period, an individual marketplace plan, a retiree health benefit where an employer still offers one, or coverage through a spouse who is still working.

What makes this a planning question rather than an administrative one is that marketplace premium assistance is calculated from income rather than from assets. A household with substantial savings can still qualify depending on the taxable income it reports, which means the same decisions that drive tax planning also drive the cost of coverage. A conversion executed in a bridge year can raise income enough to change what the household pays for health insurance that year. Those two decisions therefore have to be modeled together or one of them will be made blind.

At 65 the questions change rather than disappear. Enrollment timing carries lasting consequences if it is missed, the choice between supplemental structures is difficult to reverse later, and premium tiers are set from income reported two years earlier, which reaches back into the bridge years you have just planned. Extended care is the separate question underneath all of it, and it is one where the honest answer is often that the household needs to decide how much of the risk it intends to carry itself.

A three-year sequence

There is no universal calendar, but the work does have a natural order, because some decisions cannot be made until others are modeled. This is the shape it usually takes.

This is a general sequence, not a recommendation for any particular household. The right order depends on your circumstances, your employer's plan rules, and your CPA's read on your tax position.

Evaluating a firm

Start with what is verifiable. Look the firm up by CRD number through the SEC adviser search or FINRA BrokerCheck, read the Form ADV Part 2A brochure for services and conflicts, and confirm any professional designation through the body that issues it.

Then get precise about two things that marketing tends to blur. The first is fiduciary standard, which attaches to services rather than to firms. When providing investment advisory services, a Registered Investment Adviser is subject to its fiduciary obligations under applicable investment adviser law. Insurance and annuity placement sits under state insurance regulation and is typically commission compensated. A firm can be entirely honest and still operate under both, and a firm with an affiliated insurance agency is accurately described as fee-based rather than fee-only.

The second is compensation. Ask for it itemized by service line rather than summarized, including anything paid by a third party. The point is not that one model is correct. It is that you should be able to state, in a sentence, how the firm makes money from each piece of your plan.

Then ask the operational questions.

• Which of your services carry a fiduciary duty and which do not? Ask for the answer in writing.
• Will I receive a written income plan, and can I see the structure of one with the client details removed?
• How do you decide the order of withdrawals, and what changes that order when markets move?
• How do you analyze Social Security claiming for a couple with different earnings records?
• How do you plan coverage between my retirement date and Medicare, and who handles that?
• How and when do you coordinate with my CPA and my estate attorney?
• Is trust funding paperwork prepared internally, and who coordinates the review of beneficiary designations?
• Who personally builds the plan, and is the process the same regardless of which advisor I sit with?

Red flags

None of these is proof of anything on its own, and any of them may have a reasonable explanation. Each is simply a prompt to ask a further question before deciding.

• A specific product is recommended before a plan exists, particularly one with a surrender period.
• The firm will not put in writing which of its services carry a fiduciary duty.
• Compensation is described in general terms and not itemized when you ask.
• A withdrawal approach is asserted without any modeling behind it, and no framework is named for adjusting it.
• Returns are described in terms that imply upside without downside.
• Tax planning is treated as somebody else's job rather than as an input to portfolio decisions.
• The practice is built around a single product provider.
• No documented review cadence exists once the plan is delivered.

How Avinci is structured

Avinci Wealth Management is a Registered Investment Adviser registered in California, Arizona, Illinois, Texas, and Nevada, firm CRD #327780. The headquarters is at 23929 Valencia Blvd, Suite 404 in Santa Clarita, with additional offices in Beverly Hills and Woodland Hills. Insurance and annuity products are placed through our affiliate, Lucas Insurance Services, which earns commissions on the products it places, and that relationship is disclosed on every page of this site and in our client agreements.

The Retirement Blueprint is the documented four-step process that produces a single plan document covering investments, tax, income, insurance, and estate coordination, and founder Lindahl Lucas personally oversees the development of each plan. The insurance brokerage opened in 1987 and securities licensing followed in 2005, which is why protection and income decisions are examined together here rather than in series.

On the pieces that require another license, our role is coordination rather than execution. Estate documents are drafted by your attorney, and As part of the planning process, Avinci may assist with administrative coordination related to trust funding paperwork, account titling, and beneficiary designations. Legal determinations regarding trusts, estate documents, ownership, and titling should be reviewed with your attorney. Returns are prepared by your CPA, and Avinci models the tax scenarios that inform what gets executed. Insurance and annuity evaluation and multi-year tax planning are handled by the same team that manages the portfolio.

Clients meet at any of the three offices or by secure video, and plan documents are available through a secure client portal. The firm serves households across the Santa Clarita Valley, the San Fernando Valley and the Westside, and Ventura County.