Financial plan review for executives: Scotia Wealth Management checks your roadmap before the last paycheck

What does a financial plan review cover once the paychecks stop?

A financial plan review rebuilds the first 24 months of your retirement withdrawals month by month, so you can see which account pays each bill, what tax each withdrawal triggers and which beneficiary form controls each account. It tests the roadmap you already hold against your situation today, not the one you had when it was written.

Retirees often keep using a roadmap built for their working years, and that roadmap assumes a salary, an employer match and someone else doing the withholding. Once the paychecks stop, none of those exist. Generic advice makes it worse when followed to the letter: spend taxable accounts first and retirement accounts last sounds sensible, yet a retiree with cash and a large IRA who reports almost no ordinary income from 63 to 72 leaves the $16,100 single standard deduction unused every year. That is $161,000 over ten years that could have come out of the IRA free of federal income tax, and it waits for larger required withdrawals later.

The executive who usually needs this is within a year or two of separating. Their roadmap is three or more years old, or it predates a spouse's death, a divorce or a moved retirement date. Peggy (hypothetical) fits: she retires this year, and she is still using a roadmap drafted when her husband was alive. Open your own roadmap and look for which account pays for each of the first 24 months. If that page isn't there, you are holding a working-years roadmap.

When your roadmap still assumes a spouse, what breaks?

Peggy's current roadmap was drafted while her husband was alive, and it still runs the numbers as a joint return (hypothetical, round numbers). Put her beside an otherwise identical married couple: same $1.4 million, same $110,000 drawn annually from the IRA at 65, no other income.

Using 2026 figures, the couple's taxable income is $110,000 minus the $32,200 standard deduction, or $77,800. Peggy, filing single, has $110,000 minus $16,100, which is $93,900, so $16,100 more of her income is taxed.

The Medicare effect arrives later. Two years on, Medicare uses that $110,000 to set her Part B premium: above the $109,000 single line, the premium is $284.10 monthly instead of $202.90. That is $81.20 times 12, or $974.40 more annually. Drawing $105,000 from the IRA and $5,000 from cash keeps her under the line.

Social Security is the next place a two-person roadmap goes quiet. A widow can take the survivor benefit as early as 60 and switch to her own retirement benefit later, which keeps growing until 70, or do it in the reverse order. Few roadmaps written for two even raise the choice.

Then the paperwork. Beneficiary forms on a 401(k) and an IRA pass outside the will, so a form still naming her late husband decides where that money goes. The first thing we look at is the beneficiary page of each account statement.

Keeping the pieces in step is mostly a matter of order. Say rebalancing would mean selling a fund held outside your IRA and 401(k). Before Scotia Wealth Management suggests that sale, we put a number on the capital gain it would create and place it beside the withdrawal schedule. Markets fall as well as rise, and any withdrawal schedule can come up short if the portfolio loses value. And if a roadmap item works, we leave it alone and mark it keep.

If your tax preparer or estate attorney should take the next step

The review flags what is wrong, but it does not file your return, draft a will or trust, or pick a Medicare supplement policy. Those jobs belong to a CPA, an estate attorney and a licensed Medicare agent, and the marked-up roadmap lists exactly what to hand each of them. If your roadmap was updated within the past year and nothing has changed in your family, job or accounts, hold off on a full review; the fee buys little until something moves.

How the review runs at Scotia Wealth Management, from statements to a marked-up roadmap

Four steps, two meetings, and the work between them is ours. You don't need to prepare a spreadsheet.

• Step 1: you send the current roadmap, recent statements for every account, the 401(k) summary plan description, the beneficiary forms and your Social Security statement from ssa.gov.
• Step 2: we rebuild cash flow month by month for the first two years after the last paycheck, including any company stock decision that has a cutoff at separation (the NUA choice itself is covered on its own page).
• Step 3: we mark each part of your roadmap as keep, fix or missing, and estimate the tax effect of every proposed change before recommending it.
• Step 4: in the second meeting we walk through the marked-up roadmap, and you decide which fixes to make now and which can wait.

When do the year's cutoffs change what the review recommends?

Withdrawals with no withholding need estimated tax payments in April, June, September and the following January, and a lump-sum distribution for NUA has to be completed within one tax year. That is why we time the review six to twelve months before separation, when each of those cutoffs can still be planned around.

Retirees miss the first estimated payment more than any other, usually because nothing in their working life ever asked for it.

Bringing your current roadmap to the first Scotia Wealth Management conversation

We open by asking what you think already works. Then we cover your retirement date and any separation-day choices still open, such as 401(k) company stock or the timing of a final bonus. Bring the current roadmap even if it is outdated, your latest statements, all beneficiary forms and your Social Security statement. We don't take first contact by phone; send a short note through the form on this website instead. You will read and sign off on every fee in writing before any work begins, and this page quotes no figures.