Terian Consulting, Inc

Terian Consulting, Inc I am a Financial Strategist and I help business owners become lawsuit proof & create tax free income

09/15/2026

Step 1: Pull up your retirement account balance from around 2010, then your balance today.

Step 2: The difference is the climb. Fifteen years of contributions and compounding, and for most people it is a large number.

Step 3: Now ask the harder question. How much of that climb is actually yours to keep, and how much is still sitting in the market, exposed to the next bad year?

Step 4: A gain is only real once you have either spent it or moved it somewhere a downturn cannot reach. Until then it is on loan.

Step 5: Look at how many years you have until you retire. That is how many chances the market still has to hand some of that climb back before you get to use it.

Here's how this works.

The years right before and right after you retire are when a market drop does the most damage, because you have the most money at risk and the least time to make it back. People who retire comfortably tend to be the ones who, somewhere in their early sixties, moved a portion of that long climb off the table and stopped asking it to grow. Not all of it. Enough that a bad year became an annoyance instead of a delay.

Comment "RETIRE" and I'll send you the picture of what you have gained and what is still exposed ⤵️

09/14/2026

Picture your finances twenty years from now, after both you and your spouse are gone. The pension has stopped. It paid you, then a portion to your spouse, and then nothing. Social Security has stopped the same way. What your children actually receive is whatever is left in your IRA, your 401(k), and your other accounts on that day.

Here's how this works.

Two of the three legs most retirements stand on, the pension and Social Security, are income for your lifetime and your spouse's, and they are worth nothing to the next generation. That is not a flaw, it is how they were designed. But it means that if leaving something to your kids matters to you, it comes entirely from the invested accounts, and those are the same accounts you are spending from for thirty years.

There are structures that pass their full remaining balance straight through to a spouse and then to children, without the drop-off a pension has. Whether that belongs in your plan depends on how much the legacy piece matters to you relative to the income piece. But that tradeoff should be a decision you made on purpose, not a surprise your kids find later.

Comment "RETIRE" and I'll send you the version that shows what actually passes on ⤵️

09/13/2026

Step 1: Find the cap or the participation rate. This is how much of the market's gain the contract actually credits you in a good year. A low cap is the most common way a weak contract quietly underperforms.

Step 2: Find the surrender schedule. This is how many years your money is committed and what it costs to leave early. Anything past seven to ten years deserves a hard second look.

Step 3: Check whether there is a bonus on the front end, then read what you give up for it, usually a lower cap or a longer surrender period. Bonuses are rarely free.

Step 4: Look at the living-benefit rider and what it costs per year. It can be worth it, but you should know you are paying for it.

Step 5: Ask whether the contract credits interest on a lock-and-reset basis, meaning a gain in a good year is locked in and a bad year credits zero rather than a loss.

Here's how this works.

A fixed-indexed annuity is a tool. Like any tool there are well-built ones and poorly built ones, and the difference is entirely in those terms. People get burned when they buy on the pitch instead of the paperwork. If you can read those five things, you can tell a strong contract from a weak one before you ever sit across from someone selling it.

Comment "RETIRE" and I'll send you the annuity terms checklist ⤵️

09/12/2026

Step 1: Add up the balances of every tax-deferred retirement account you have, traditional IRA, 401(k), 403(b), SEP. Leave out Roth accounts, they are not subject to this.

Step 2: Take that total and divide it by 26.5. That is roughly your first required withdrawal at 73, using the IRS's own life-expectancy factor for that age.

Step 3: Notice that this number is a floor, not a ceiling. You can take more, but never less, and it rises as a percentage of the account every year after.

Step 4: Multiply your estimate by your current marginal tax rate to see the tax bill that one withdrawal creates.

Step 5: Look at the years between the day you stop working and the day you turn 73. For most people that stretch is a window of lower income, and it is the only time you get to move money out of these accounts on your own schedule instead of the government's.

Here's how this works.

Required minimum distributions are not optional, and the percentage the IRS makes you take grows every year. The people who handle them well are the ones who saw the number coming years out and used that lower-income window beforehand to reposition money on their own terms, a little at a time, instead of in forced chunks later.

Comment "RETIRE" and I'll send you the RMD projection worksheet ⤵️

09/11/2026

Step 1: Find your pension election paperwork, the form you filled out when you retired or enrolled, whichever one set the payout.

Step 2: Look for the survivor option. It will say something like single-life, or joint-and-survivor at 50 percent, 75 percent, or 100 percent.

Step 3: If it says single-life, the pension stops entirely the day you pass. Your spouse receives nothing from it.

Step 4: If it says joint-and-survivor at 50 percent, your spouse's income from that pension is cut in half at exactly the moment their Social Security also drops.

Step 5: Either way, write down the monthly number your spouse would actually receive, then compare it to what your household spends now.

Here's how this works.

A pension election feels like paperwork at the time. It is actually one of the largest financial decisions in a retirement, and most people make it quickly, without ever seeing the survivor math laid out in dollars. Once the election is locked it is usually locked for good, but there are ways to build around it if you know the gap is there before you need to. And no pension pays anything to your children. If leaving something to them matters, that has to come from somewhere else.

Comment "RETIRE" and I'll send you the pension-election breakdown ⤵️

09/10/2026

I worked with a couple who had a genuinely good retirement plan. Income covered, taxes reasonable, kids taken care of. About six years in, the husband had a stroke and needed full-time care. That ran them somewhere north of eight thousand dollars a month, none of it covered, drawn straight out of the accounts the income plan depended on.

Here's how this works.

Most people picture a care event as a health problem. Financially, it is an income problem. The money comes out of the same accounts that were supposed to pay the bills for the next twenty years, and it comes out fast. A plan that looks bulletproof against a bad market can still be wide open to a bad diagnosis.

There are structures that carry a living-benefit feature, access to a larger monthly amount if you end up needing terminal or long-term care, without buying a separate insurance policy for it. Whether that fits depends on your situation. But the question of what a care year would do to your income is one every plan should answer before it happens, not during.

Comment "RETIRE" and I'll send you the care-year stress test ⤵️

09/09/2026

I sat with a woman about a month after her husband died. She understood the pension. What blindsided her was that his Social Security payment simply ended, and only the larger of their two checks kept coming. Her monthly income fell by more than a third in the same weeks she was arranging a funeral.

Here's how this works.

While both spouses are living, a household collects two Social Security payments. When one person passes, the survivor keeps the higher amount and the other one goes away for good. The mortgage, the property tax, the insurance, the utilities, none of that drops by the same amount, or at all. The shortfall is real, it is knowable years ahead of time, and it is almost never in the projection someone got handed at 60.

Twenty-three years in, the first year I model for any couple is the one after a spouse is gone. That is the year a retirement plan is actually tested. If the income still holds there, it holds everywhere else.

Comment "RETIRE" and I'll send you the survivor-year version of your income picture ⤵️

Ninety days from now, one of two things will be true. Either you will know, in actual dollars, what your Social Security...
09/06/2026

Ninety days from now, one of two things will be true. Either you will know, in actual dollars, what your Social Security, your savings, and your other income add up to every month for the rest of your life, or you will be exactly where you are today, still estimating.

Here's how this works.

Ninety days is not enough time to change the market, and it does not need to be. It is enough time to sit down, run your actual numbers instead of a rule of thumb, and walk away with a figure instead of a feeling. Most people who finally do this say the same thing afterward: it took far less time than they had been dreading for years.

The gap between guessing and knowing does not close by itself. It closes the day someone actually does the math with your real numbers instead of an average from an article.

Twenty-three years of watching people carry a guess around for a decade when the actual number was ninety days and one conversation away.

Comment "RETIRE" and I'll send you the ninety-day version of this ⤵️

Most retirement plans I review are arithmetically fine. The savings rate was right, the return assumptions are reasonabl...
09/05/2026

Most retirement plans I review are arithmetically fine. The savings rate was right, the return assumptions are reasonable, the withdrawal percentage is a number someone read in an article. Add it up and it works, on average, over thirty years.

The math being right is not the same as the plan being safe, because you do not get to live your retirement "on average." You get to live it in the specific ten years you actually retire into, with the specific sequence of good years and bad years that shows up, in whatever order they show up.

Here's how this works.

A plan that is correct on average can still fail badly if the first few years happen to be the wrong few years, and nobody controls which years those are. The fix is not a better average. It is making sure the income you actually need does not depend on the average at all.

Twenty-three years of watching "the math works" and "the plan is safe" get treated as the same sentence. They are not the same sentence, and the difference is the whole job.

Comment "RETIRE" and I'll send you the difference between correct and safe ⤵️

Ten years from now, you will not be logging into an account to check a balance the way you do today. You will be looking...
09/03/2026

Ten years from now, you will not be logging into an account to check a balance the way you do today. You will be looking at what shows up in your bank account every month, and asking whether that number still covers the life you built.

Here's how this works.

A portfolio balance is a snapshot. It goes up, it goes down, and none of that matters if you are not selling any stocks that day. Income is different. Income either shows up or it does not, and ten years from now that is the only column that counts.

Most retirement conversations spend all their time on the balance because the balance is easy to look at. Almost none of them spend real time on what that balance turns into every month once you actually need to live on it, under every kind of market your remaining years might bring.

I have spent over two decades building that second number for people, because it is the one they are still relying on a decade from now, long after the balance stopped being the interesting part of the story.

Comment "RETIRE" and I'll send you how to turn a balance into a monthly number ⤵️

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Chicago, IL
60615

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