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 198th episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast. My guest on today's podcast is

Bill Benin. Bill is the former owner of Bengin Financial Services,

an independent RIA based in Southern California that oversaw nearly 50 million of assets under management

for 80 affluent retirees. What's unique about Bill, though, is that he's also known as the

father of the 4% rule and the progenitor of the research that we now know is safe withdrawal rates,

research that he not only published in a series of studies in the journal of financial

planning in a subsequent book, but also research that he put into practice with his clients

as a financial planning practitioner. In this episode, we talk in depth about how Bill first

developed his safe withdrawal rate research,

the retirement problem in the early 1990s that he was trying to solve for, the irony that Bill

first did his safe withdrawal rate studies to delve deeper than rules of thumb that were popular

at the time and then ended out having his 4% rule become a rule of thumb instead.

How Bill integrated his 4% rule become a rule of thumb instead. How Bill integrated his 4% rule alongside

his financial planning business and why Bill didn't actually use the 4% safe withdrawal rate with

his clients. He used 4.5% instead. We also talk about Bill's own path as a financial planner,

how he career changed into financial

planning after first studying aerospace engineering and then spending his first career running

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