I've Helped Hundreds of Savers Retire - Here's Why I've Never Said THIS Until Now

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]Over my career, I've helped hundreds of families plan their retirement, and I want to say something I've never said before over that time. Right now, today, is the single best time I've ever seen to retire, and I'm going to prove it to you with math. Let's start with what's happened to the stock market over the last 10 or 15 years because I think sometimes we get so used to the growth that we forget just how extraordinary this run has actually been. This is a long-term chart of the S&P 500 in particular. Look at what's happened since 2008.

[00:00:33]The chart completely changes. The market has skyrocketed over the last 10 years.

[00:00:37]The market has averaged around 15% per year. Historically, that's almost 50% higher than the long-term market average of 10%. We've had a great run, and that's really helped a lot of people feel more prepared for their retirement.

[00:00:51]Now, I've sat across from a lot of people in the last couple of years who walked into the office and said, "Hey, Antonio, I had $700,000 saved 5 years ago. I I felt a little bit worried. I wasn't sure I'd get there. Now, I've got 1.3 million, and for the first time, I feel like retirement might be real."

[00:01:09]And they're right. The market did a lot of heavy lifting that their savings alone could not have done. Years of smart saving combined with an extraordinary bull market have created a real window, a real opportunity. But, here's the thing most people miss, and it's the most important thing I'm going to say in this whole video. A large portfolio is not a retirement plan. I say that with a lot of respect because building that pile of money was hard. I understand that. It took discipline, it took patience, a lot of grinding. But, here's the thing most people don't fully grasp until they're staring retirement in the face. That million or million five or two million dollars, it has to become a paycheck at some point every single month for the next 20, 25, 30 years. And not only does it need to become a paycheck, but it needs to stay a paycheck. It needs to last. It needs to be resilient through all kinds of markets and circumstances. And converting a pile of money into a sustainable, reliable income stream, that's a completely different problem than building the pile in the first place. Now, in about 2 minutes, I'm going to show you exactly why today is the best time I've seen to solve that paycheck problem and how to do it. But before I do, I need to warn you about something because if you don't understand this risk, none of what comes next matters. Here's the hard truth about the stock market that most financial advisors don't want to say out loud. The last 15 years have been remarkable, but markets don't move in one direction forever. And one of the most important things you can understand as someone sitting close to retirement is this: where stock market returns may go from here. There's a concept in finance, and I'm going to keep this in plain English. Today's market valuations are one of the most reliable predictors of where your returns will be over the next 10 years or so. The more expensive the market is right now, the lower future returns tend to be. Here's a chart that explains this. It's showing something called a Shiller CAPE ratio.

[00:03:05]Without putting you to sleep, what you need to understand is this: the farther to the right these little dots get, that's a measure of stocks being more highly valued, stocks being more expensive. And the lower the dots get, up and down, that's a measure of future stock market returns. The simplest way to say it is this: what goes up must come down. The economic way to say it is called reversion to the mean. Things just don't go up forever. And when the market is highly valued, it's been a predictor more often than not that returns will be lower going forward from that point. It's this concept that has places like Vanguard saying, "If you're close to retirement, you need to reduce your risk." And even a moderate investor should own less stock than they normally would. They literally said that, Vanguard did. I did a video about it.

[00:03:54]Their own capital markets model is predicting stock market returns between 3.9% and 5.9% per year for the next 10 years. Remember, we got almost 15% a year for the last 10 years. Now, why does this matter to you specifically?

[00:04:10]Because if your entire retirement income plan depends on stock market withdrawals, distributions from the portfolio, and those returns come in at half or less than what we've been experiencing for the last 15 years, your money runs out faster than your plan projects, and at that point, there's no do-over. It's this math that's the reason that I say if you're within 5 years of retirement, you need to readjust your portfolio to protect the gains that you've made and secure that retirement because those are the years right before the start of retirement when your portfolio is at its most vulnerable to a bad stretch of market returns, and it's possible that we could be entering a stretch just like that.

[00:04:50]Now, the good news is that thing I was telling you about a minute ago, the exact reason why it's so important to do this right now, interest rates. That's it. That's the second force working in your favor right now, and when you combine it with what the market's already done to your account balance, I think you're going to understand why I feel so strongly about this moment. When you build what I refer to as a private pension, when you take a portion of your portfolio and convert it into a guaranteed monthly paycheck for life, the amount of income you receive is directly tied to the interest rate environment at the time that you make that move. Higher returns means you can buy more paycheck per dollar, and lower returns mean that you get less. Now, let me show you what that difference looks like in real dollar terms. If you were looking to buy an income annuity in December of 2021, that's just about 5 years ago, for a 65-year-old male, $100,000 would have bought you a monthly income of about 464 bucks a month. That was effectively a 5.68% distribution on that original investment. That's how much pension you could get per dollar invested. Right now, looking at these same numbers, the average insurer is paying out $625 per month for the same $100,000.

[00:06:05]Annually, that equals a 7.5% distribution rate. That's a 32% increase in income per dollar. And it's simply because with higher rates, the insurance company can take your investment and earn a higher return on how they invest that money than they could if you gave them the same amount of money 5 years ago. Now, that's not a rounding error.

[00:06:25]That's a material difference in what your money can actually do for you. That means that you can use less of your money to buy more monthly income, and you're doing it at a time when you've likely got more dollars to begin with than you've ever had because of what the market has done over the last 10 or 15 years. It's these two variables. That's the exact reason why I'm telling you that I haven't seen a time this good to retire in my career because it's not just a high market. It's markets that helped create a large portfolio and higher interest rates that we've seen in years working together. Here's how everything I've told you connects into a plan. I talk a lot here about an income gap. That's the difference between what you'll have coming in when you retire, typically Social Security, and how much you'll need every month to come in to live and pay your bills. The difference between those two numbers, this way, is your income gap. And when that gap is too wide, something I call portfolio reliance rate, when you need your portfolio to provide too much of the money that you need for monthly income every month, your retirement becomes susceptible to market risk. You're playing Wall Street roulette. See how all of this connects together? Now, you've got the ability to close that income gap, the difference between what Social Security's going to give you and what your life actually taught costs by building your own private pension at rates that haven't been this favorable in a long time and while you have more money to do it than ever before. Let me show you how it works in action. Take a portion of your portfolio, use it to buy that guaranteed monthly income and two things will happen at the same time.

[00:07:59]First, you have a paycheck that will show up every month regardless of what happens in the stock market from this point going forward. It doesn't matter if the market drops 20 or 30%. Your income doesn't change. Second, you've reduced your exposure to exactly the risk that I warned you about earlier because if the market does deliver those lower projected returns over the coming decade, it matters a lot less when you've already secured that baseline income and closed up the income gap. The stock market doesn't get to rob you of the retirement that you've spent years earning. You don't have to bet everything on the market to continue to do what it's done for the last 15 years.

[00:08:36]You've earned the portfolio. You don't have to risk all of it at this point with hope as your retirement strategy.

[00:08:43]We've got this magic window where we've got high portfolio values and solid interest rates and they're both working for you. That window won't stay open forever, but here's the thing, just knowing that it exists doesn't make a bit of difference. Watching this video and learning this changes nothing in your life unless you take action. If you're within 5 years of retirement, you got to take advantage of the situation.

[00:09:04]Understand your income gap. Structure your portfolio for the future markets that we may have not for the markets that we have had over the last 15 years and stop playing Wall Street roulette.

[00:09:14]Now, you can do this on your own. You can do it with your existing advisor.

[00:09:19]Show him the video and ask him how it could work or if you want to talk about how I can help you do it, check the link in the description and I'll meet with you and I'll talk to you about the Clear Vision retirement plan and how we can use it to take advantage of everything that I just talked about in this video.

[00:09:34]And if you want a deeper dive on exactly how to put all of this together. I put together a full case study that walks you through exactly how to build out your retirement plan. I'll put it right over here and I'll see you over there on the other side.