Retirement & Estate Planning Insights: Build Your Legacy

In Episode 22 of The Intentional Exit Podcast, Rebecca Schriver confronts one of the most consequential — and most overlooked — risks in retirement planning: the gap between what families intend to leave behind and what their beneficiaries actually receive. Most people believe that once they’ve saved and invested, the work is done. The money is there. The family will

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In Episode 21 of The Intentional Exit Podcast, Rebecca Schriver confronts one of the most common assumptions in estate planning — that having a will or a trust is enough to protect your family. Most people have one or the other. Very few understand the real difference between them. And almost no one realizes how wide the gap between the

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Most people treat estate planning like a one-time errand. They visit an attorney, sign a will or trust, file the documents away, and move on — confident that their family is protected. It’s an understandable assumption. But in my work with pre-retirees and retirees, I’ve seen the painful reality that contradicts it too many times: families with every legal document

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Somewhere along the way, insurance picks up a reputation for being something you pay into and never really use. By the time people are approaching retirement, many have quietly written it off. They’ve built their savings, watched their investments grow, and decided that insurance has served its purpose — if it ever did. What follows that decision is rarely immediate

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The belief that retirement brings a lighter tax burden is one of the most persistent assumptions in personal finance. It makes intuitive sense: the paycheck stops, income drops, and taxes follow. For some retirees this holds true. For many others, it does not — and the gap between expectation and reality can cost tens of thousands of dollars over the

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Most people approach retirement with a single number in mind — a dollar amount in their savings account that signals it’s time to stop working. What that number doesn’t reveal is how the money inside it will actually function across the next 20, 30, or even 40 years of their life. I’ve watched families reach that milestone only to discover

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Spend enough time in financial planning and you start to see a pattern. The clients who retire well are rarely the ones with the most money. They’re the ones whose money is organized. They’ve thought through how each dollar is supposed to work, where it comes from, what it’s designed to do, and how all the pieces connect. Their retirement

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Episode 15 of The Intentional Exit addresses one of retirement’s most persistent and costly blind spots: the belief that a retirement account balance — however large — is the same thing as a retirement income plan. Host Rebecca Schriver has sat across the table from people who retired with $3 million and felt like a wreck, and others who retired

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In Episode 14 of The Intentional Exit Podcast, Rebecca Schriver exposes one of retirement’s most overlooked financial risks: the hidden capital gains tax traps that can quietly erase a significant portion of your wealth. Many investors, business owners, and landowners assume that making money on an investment is always a win. But without proper planning, the tax bill that follows

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In Episode 13 of The Intentional Exit Podcast, Rebecca Schriver reveals the retirement planning blind spot that affects nearly everyone approaching the distribution phase: the silent cost of “safe” money. While most people instinctively move their savings into CDs or money markets when markets get volatile, they may be trading one risk for another — one that’s quieter, slower, and

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