Welcome to the Financial Advisor Success Podcast, where you go behind the scenes with

financial planner, speaker, and consultant Michael Kitsis to hear stories of how leading

financial advisors navigated the inevitable challenges that arise on the path to success

and get insight from leading industry consultants about how to break through to the

next level in your advisory business. And now here's your host, Michael Kitsis. Welcome, everyone.

Welcome to the 109th episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast. My guest on today's

podcast is John Geithen. John is the founder of Cornerstone Wealth Advisors,

an independent R.A. in the Minneapolis area that oversees $240 million in assets and management

for about 240 mostly retiree clients. What's unique about John, though, is that he doesn't

only run a financial planning firm that serves retirees. He's also contributed to the retirement

research himself, with several seminal articles in the mid-2000s on creating retirement

withdrawal rate guardrails and decision rules. And now has spent the past decade actually

implementing those strategies with clients and finding out what really works in practice.

In this episode, we talk in depth about John's retirement

planning approach with his clients, how he separates out of clients' prospective retirement expenses

into core and discretionary categories, the way he applies decision rules to adjust that

retirement spending in subsequent years, and the way he then creates multiple portfolio buckets,

each with its own investment policy statement,

to handle each of those retirement spending categories, but notably does not create a cash

bucket for short-term expenses because of the consequences that cash strike can have on actually

reducing a client's sustainable retirement income in the long run.

We also talk about the unique resident program that

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