What does a financial advisor do?
A financial advisor helps you build and maintain a plan that covers the parts of your financial life that never show up on a brokerage statement. This can include:
- Income planning, so you know how and when retirement income will flow from each source.
- Protection, including guidance on life insurance, disability coverage, and long-term care insurance
- Tax-aware decisions like Roth conversions or withdrawal sequencing and timing, coordinated with your tax preparer.*
- Estate planning coordinated with your attorney so that your plans are aligned with your legacy plans.
- Ongoing guidance when your job, family, or health situation changes.*
Insurance as the planning foundation
A retirement strategy built only on investments leaves a household exposed where it hurts most: Paychecks can stop, a health event can turn into a financial one, and a bad market right after you stop working can force you to sell assets you meant to hold. Insurance is the layer that keeps any of those things from undoing the rest of the plan.
Protection and growth aren’t competing strategies; they’re two sides of the same plan.
Retirement income planning
The switch from saving to spending is the part most people underestimate. Years of putting money into a 401(k) trains one set of habits. Taking it back out requires thinking strategically:
- When to claim Social Security: Benefits grow about 8% for each full year you delay past your full retirement age, up to 70.1,2 For a married couple, the right claiming sequence can be worth tens of thousands over a lifetime.
- How to sequence withdrawals: Drawing from taxable, tax-deferred, and Roth accounts in the right order can lower lifetime taxes and stretch the portfolio.
- How to build guaranteed income: Social Security, pensions, and income annuities can cover essential expenses without leaning on the market.
- Ways to generate supplemental income: If you have a cash value life insurance policy (such as whole life) and no longer need the full death benefit, you can use the accumulated cash value as an additional source of income, tax-free in most cases.**
- How to diversify the tax treatment of your savings: A mix of pre-tax, post-tax, and tax-free sources gives you room to manage taxable income year by year.
The behavioral advantage
The return that’s hardest to see is often the biggest. Over the decade ending December 2024, investors in U.S. mutual funds and ETFs earned about 7.0% per year while the funds themselves returned 8.2%.2 Most of that 1.2%-point gap came from buying and selling at the wrong moments, and over a decade it cost investors roughly 15% of the return their funds actually generated.
A financial advisor can help close that gap. While past performance is not indicative of future results and investments are inherently subject to risk, a financial advisor is the person who questions when the headlines say sell, who reminds you what the plan was built to handle, prevents you from derailing from your plans and identifies other sources of income to tap.
Budgeting in the context of retirement
Budgeting in retirement is about creating a clear picture of what your life actually costs. This helps determine the guaranteed income you should secure for essential expenses, and how much remains for discretionary use or additional investment.
A financial advisor uses that picture to connect today’s habits to tomorrow’s readiness. If essentials run higher than you assumed, the plan may need more guaranteed income underneath it. If discretionary spending is lighter than projected, there may be room to spend earlier, help family, or take on a goal that wasn’t on the original list.
Estate planning coordination
A financial advisor can help ensure that your retirement strategy lines up with your estate plan. Their services may include:
- Beneficiary designations are current across policies, wills, and trusts.
- Life insurance sits correctly inside or outside your estate.
- Account titling matches what you actually intend.
This coordination, along with your estate attorney, can help you stay on top of your legacy plans.
The long-term relationship
A financial advisor is there through job changes, market cycles, health events, the loss of a spouse, and the transitions from earning money to spending savings.
The best financial advisors should understand your goals, identify the risks that could derail them, design a plan that integrates protection with growth, and regularly revisit and adjust as needed. It’s a relationship that runs as long as your retirement.
What we can offer
A financial advisor from Eagle Strategies LLC, a Registered Investment Adviser and a New York Life Company, can help you build a plan that protects what you have while growing toward what’s next, and is by your side as a resource throughout your retirement.
Your three next steps
- Map where your retirement income will actually come from, and where the gaps are.
- Review your protection (life insurance, disability coverage, long-term care) against what your household would need if something changed tomorrow.
- Talk to a financial advisor about building a plan that connects both.
Frequently asked questions
