Most retirement plans cover one or two pieces of the puzzle. We cover all four — Income, Tax, Insurance, and Estate — and we connect them to each other and to what matters most to you.
Most people walk into retirement with a 401(k), a Social Security estimate, maybe an old life insurance policy, and a vague sense that they should "talk to someone about Medicare soon." That's not a plan. That's a pile of pieces.
The trouble is, those pieces affect each other. When you take Social Security changes how much tax you pay. The kind of insurance you carry changes how much income you actually need. Your estate documents determine whether all the planning you did even reaches the people you want it to.
The Four Branches is how we put the pieces together. We walk through each one in order, in plain English, rooted in your specific goals — not a generic plan template.
Each branch addresses a different part of retirement. Together, they form a complete picture — and we walk through them in order, because each one builds on the last.
Where your paycheck comes from after work stops.
How to keep more of what you've saved.
How to protect what you've built.
How to pass it on the way you intended.
Before anything else, you need a paycheck. When you stop working, that paycheck has to come from somewhere — usually a mix of Social Security, pensions if you're lucky enough to have one, and withdrawals from the accounts you've spent decades filling up.
The first branch is figuring out exactly where every dollar of your retirement income is going to come from, in what order, and at what age. Get this right, and the rest of the plan has a foundation. Get it wrong, and everything else gets harder.
Once we know where your income is coming from, the next question is how much of it the IRS gets to keep. Most retirees pay more in lifetime taxes than they need to — not because they did anything wrong, but because nobody ever showed them the levers they could pull.
The second branch is the tax planning layer. We look at what's coming out of which account, in what order, and whether moves like Roth conversions or charitable strategies can shift the math in your favor over the long run — not just this year.
Income and tax planning tell us what you're going to have. Insurance is what protects it. A health event, a long-term care need, or the loss of a spouse can undo decades of saving in a matter of months — and most people are underprepared for at least one of those scenarios.
The third branch covers everything that protects what you've built. That includes Medicare and supplemental coverage, long-term care planning, life insurance reviews, and where annuities can play a role for guaranteed income that doesn't depend on the market.
The last branch is about what happens to everything else. A retirement plan that produces income, manages taxes, and protects against the unexpected is only as good as what it leaves behind — and far too many estate plans are out of date, incomplete, or never written down at all.
This branch covers the documents and decisions that determine where your assets go, who makes decisions if you can't, and how your wishes actually get carried out. We work with established estate planning platforms to deliver real legal documents, not generic templates pulled off the internet.
Before we ever sit down together, we want to know a little about where you are and what matters most to you. The Snapshot is a short, online intake — about 5 to 8 minutes — that helps us show up to our first conversation already prepared.
No. Most people come to us focused on one or two — usually Medicare or income planning — and the other branches come up naturally as we work together. The framework is how we make sure nothing important gets missed, not a checklist you have to complete on day one.
The planning conversation is always free. We get paid by the carriers and platforms when we help you place insurance, manage investments, or set up an estate plan — never by charging you up front for the planning itself. We'll explain exactly how we get paid the first time we meet, so you always know how the math works.
Yes — we're a Wisconsin practice, based in Mauston, serving central and southwest Wisconsin. We're not licensed to work outside the state, and we'd rather be excellent in one geography than spread thin across many. If you're outside Wisconsin, we can still point you toward good resources, but we won't be the right fit to work with directly.
That's fine — and pretty common. A lot of the people we meet with already have someone managing their investments but want a second opinion, or want help with the parts their current advisor doesn't cover (Medicare, long-term care, estate documents). We're happy to work alongside what you already have rather than ask you to start over.
We review your responses, and depending on what you're looking for, you'll either see our calendar to book a meeting, get an invitation to an upcoming seminar, or receive some educational resources by email. There's no automatic phone call and no high-pressure follow-up. You're in control of how the conversation goes from there.