E.P. Wayne Financial Group · Columbia, SC
Retirement Income Planning in Columbia, SC
We help people in Columbia who are at or near retirement seeking to turn what they have saved into income — addressing how much to take and from where, when to claim Social Security, how to keep taxes down, and how to manage it all.
Retirement Reverses the Flow of Money
For many, most of your working life, money flowed in one direction: part of every paycheck went into your accounts. Retirement reverses that. Now your accounts have to produce the paycheck — every month, for as long as you need it, whether the market cooperates that year or not.
That is a completely different job than growing savings, and it takes a completely different plan. Growth asks how much your money can earn. Income asks how much you can take, from where, and in what order — without running out or paying more tax than you have to.
The Decisions We Work Through Together
Retirement income is not one decision. It is a handful of connected ones, and the order you make them in matters.
How Much to Withdraw
Your spending sets the number, not a rule of thumb. We map what you need each year — the bills, the travel, the surprises — and set withdrawals aiming to cover real life, with room to adjust when life changes.
Social Security and Pension Timing
Claiming early means smaller checks for life; waiting means bigger ones. If there is a pension, the lump-sum-or-monthly choice may be permanent. We run your numbers before you decide anything you cannot undo.
Which Accounts to Tap First
Taxable, tax-deferred, Roth — each is taxed differently, so the order you draw from them changes what you keep. We sequence withdrawals striving to keep more of your money working and less of it going to taxes.
Required Minimum Distributions
At 73 — or 75, depending on when you were born — the IRS starts telling you how much to withdraw, and taxing it. We plan years ahead managing required distributions in an effort to not shove you into a higher bracket or raise your Medicare premiums.
Inflation and Healthcare
A dollar that covers your bills today will not cover them in fifteen years. And healthcare is the wildcard — Medicare helps, but it does not cover everything. Your income plan has to evolve and flex, not just start.
Investment Risk in Retirement
A market drop early in retirement hurts far more than one later, because you are selling to live on while prices are down. We structure your investments so near-term income does not depend on what the market does this year.
How We Would Work Together
You work directly with me — Ed Peagler, the founder. No call center, no handoffs.
You choose the structure that fits: an actively managed advisory account with an asset-based fee (accounts start at $10,000), a self-directed commission-based account with no minimum, or a combination of the two. Every commission is disclosed before you decide anything.
In an advisory account, I act as your fiduciary. Planning is part of the relationship: there is no separate planning fee, and the advisory fee is debited from the account — never billed to you.
We are independent, so recommendations is not limited to any company’s products. LPL Financial serves as custodian — they hold client assets, but they do not make investment decisions. Every recommendation is ours, made together with you.
Questions People Ask
Straight answers to the questions I hear most about turning savings into income.
There is no single safe number — it depends on your spending, your other income, and how long the money needs to last. We build your withdrawal plan around your actual life, then adjust it as life changes, rather than handing you a rule of thumb and hoping.
The order matters because each account is taxed differently. Usually it makes sense to spend taxable accounts first and let tax-advantaged accounts keep growing — but the right sequence changes year to year based on your tax picture, so we revisit it annually.
It depends on your health, your other income, and whether you are married — there is no universally right age. We run the numbers for your situation, because claiming early means smaller checks for life and waiting means bigger ones.
This is the biggest risk in early retirement: selling investments for income during a downturn locks in the losses. We plan for this in advance by keeping near-term spending money where a market drop cannot touch it.
No. We can build your income plan around accounts wherever they are, and you decide which accounts — if any — you would like us to manage.
Start With a Conversation
If you are within a few years of retirement — or already there and wondering whether your income will hold up — let’s talk it through.
Related: Retirement Planning in Columbia, SC
E.P. Wayne Financial Group is an independent financial services firm with an office in Forest Acres, serving Columbia, SC. LPL Financial serves as broker-dealer and custodian; LPL does not make investment decisions for clients.