Financial Planning for High Earners-The Stability Lane Most People Skip

If you earn $400,000 or more, much of the standard financial advice you encounter was written for someone with a very different set of circumstances. You can max the 401(k), buy index funds, and hold a 60/40 portfolio and still end up with a plan built almost entirely out of a single material: market-correlated growth assets. The discipline isn't the problem. The construction is. A useful way to look at your plan is to divide it into two lanes. The growth lane is everything priced by public markets — stocks, most bonds, real estate, anything subject to economic forces beyond your control. The stability lane is the part of your balance sheet whose job is to hold its value and be available on your schedule, regardless of what equities are doing. For most high earners, the stability lane is empty, and that matters more than it sounds. Sequence-of-returns risk — the order in which good and bad years arrive — can be the difference between finishing retirement with millions and running out of money, even when the average return is identical. Having two or three years of spending available from a non-correlated source means you stop selling equities into a decline, which is the only job the stability lane has to do. Taxes layer onto this in ways that get overlooked. The 3.8% Net Investment Income Tax kicks in at $250,000 of modified adjusted gross income for a married couple and hasn't moved since 2013. IRMAA — the income-related Medicare surcharge — operates as a cliff, not a ramp, with a two-year lookback that catches more high earners than you'd think. Both become easier to manage when part of your retirement income comes from sources that don't add to MAGI, such as cash value life insurance loans or certain annuity payments. The argument isn't that you should swap your portfolio for insurance products. It's that an all-growth plan has no lever to pull when these cliffs and surtaxes come into view. _______________________________ If you want to talk through whether your plan has a working stability lane — and what it would take to build one — you can schedule a 30-minute call or write us a message. No pitch, just a conversation about how the pieces fit together for your situation.