How to Generate $10K/Month at 60 With $1.5M (Without Selling Shares)

Añadido: 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]You've been watching your balance grow for 30 years and now it says $1.5 million and you're wondering is this enough to actually do it? To retire at 60, to spend $10,000 per month and to stop trading your time for money. That question has a real answer and that's what this video is about. Most retirement planning software and advisors will tell you that this is a near miss. Spending $10,000 a month on a $1.5 million portfolio is an 8% withdrawal rate. That's roughly twice what researchers say is sustainable with a 30-year retirement. So either the math is wrong or the approach is wrong. I'm going to argue that it's the approach and when you reframe it, the numbers stop looking like a problem. Here's the scenario. You're 60 years old and you've got $1.5 million spread across a 401k, an IRA, a Roth and maybe a brokerage account and you want to spend $10,000 a month. Social Security doesn't start for another 2 years, maybe 10 if you want to maximize it. So right now the portfolio is the entire plan. The standard advisor answer here is to run the software, optimize your portfolio allocations, break your money down into buckets and then sell your shares every month in order to cover your lifestyle and of course hope that the stock market cooperates for the next 3 to 7 years until your Social Security kicks in. If it does, you'll be fine. If it doesn't, then you're going to spend the rest of your retirement watching your portfolio balance shrink and wondering if you should go back to work at 68. That's not a plan, it's just a wish with a spreadsheet attached to it. Let me show you a different way. The real problem here isn't that $1.5 million isn't enough, it's the mechanics of turning that money into monthly income. When you sell $10,000 worth of shares each month, you take whatever price that the market gives you and in the good years, it's not so bad, but it's still 8%. In the bad years, you're selling those shares at a deep discount just to pay your groceries and your utilities and every share that you sell at the bottom is one that can't participate in the recovery when it eventually does bounce back. Let's look at a historical example here. A couple retires in January 2008 with $1.5 million in their balance sheet and they want to spend $5,000 a month, which is just half of what this couple is asking for. By December, their portfolio was down to $900,000 and they're still withdrawing that $5,000 a month. It used to be 4%, but now it's 7% of their portfolio. They kept taking that money out each month because they needed the money in order to pay their bills. They sold the shares when they were cheap and when the market eventually recovered, they had less shares to participate in that recovery.

[00:02:39]That portfolio never fully caught back up and that was just at $5,000 a month.

[00:02:44]Imagine what it would be at $10,000 a month with the same $1.5 million balance. With a drop like 2008 where the balance drops all the way to $900,000, at $10,000 a month, you're now spending 13% of your portfolio balance each year and that's just not mathematically sustainable at all. And there's another piece to this that we haven't touched on yet and that's taxes. So if you're taking out $10,000 a month from a 401k or traditional IRA, then the IRS is going to take their cut first. For a married couple in 2026, withdrawing $120,000 a year actually leaves you with closer to $110,000 a year. So if you want to have $10,000 a month spendable, then you need to be withdrawing around $132,000 per year from your accounts. Now you're not at an 8% withdrawal rate, you're closer to a 9% withdrawal rate and you're even more dependent on the stock market to have good years when you retire. Okay, so here's the reframe.

[00:03:41]What if your portfolio paid you $10,000 a month without you having to sell anything? That's not a trick, it's just a different way to build your portfolio.

[00:03:49]Instead of having shares that you sell and whittle down, you've got assets that pay you to hold them. The payments on these types of assets are contractual.

[00:03:58]They pay you the same amount whether the market is up 30% or down 30% and because you're never selling shares, the principal continues to work for you for the entire bridge to Social Security. A $1.5 million portfolio can get you pretty close to that goal of $10,000 per month without having to sell anything.

[00:04:16]I'm going to walk you through three specific income producing assets, how each of them works, how much they pay right now and how they fit together to cover that gap. The first one is bonds.

[00:04:27]Now most people vaguely understand what a bond is without really understanding the mechanics, so we're going to go deeper on this one. When you buy a bond, you're lending money to an entity, the government or a company. They make you coupon payments at a fixed interest rate, usually twice a year and then they return your principal on a date called the maturity date. The most popular version of a bond is a US Treasury.

[00:04:50]You're lending to the federal government who has never defaulted on their debt.

[00:04:54]The current yields on US Treasury bonds, for a 10-year bond, it's 4.3% and for a 30-year bond, it's 4.9%.

[00:05:02]And investment grade corporate bonds pay a little bit more. Think about companies like Apple, Google or Johnson & Johnson.

[00:05:09]They're currently paying between 5 and 5.5%. The way that most retirees actually use bonds is they build what's called a bond ladder. Instead of buying just one single bond, they buy a stack of bonds that matures at different times. They'll buy one bond that matures next year and another one that matures the year after that and the year after that and so on and so forth. As each one matures, it frees up some capital to reinvest that money at whatever interest rates are prevalent at that time.

[00:05:37]Building a bond ladder this way smooths out your interest rate risk and it gives you cash back on a predictable schedule in case you need it and you're not guessing where the interest rate is going to be in a particular year, you're buying maturity dates. For our example, we'll say that the couple puts $200,000 into a bond ladder that averages a 4.8% yield. That's around $9,600 per year or $800 per month. It's arriving on a predictable schedule and it's backed by some of the best borrowers in the world.

[00:06:08]By the way, I work through the real numbers on retirement strategies like this every week. So if you want to see more of that, be sure to subscribe. The second income producing asset that I want to talk about is called a multi-year guaranteed annuity or MYGA and I want to be clear about exactly what that is because the term annuity actually gets used for a lot of different products. This is not the same as a variable annuity, an indexed annuity or an immediate annuity where you're handing over a lump sum of cash and you lose access to that principal forever. Those are different products with different trade-offs. An MYGA is functionally a CD that's issued by an insurance company. You hand them a lump sum and they agree to pay you at a fixed interest rate for a period of time, usually 3, 5 or 7 years. At the end of that term, you get your principal back plus whatever accumulated interest you've earned or you can roll that into a new MYGA at whatever the prevailing interest rates are at that time. Think of an MYGA kind of like a pressure cooker. You load in the ingredients, which is your principal, you set the timer, which is the term length and then you walk away and you just let it do its thing. The result is guaranteed before you even start, so you don't have to taste the stew and adjust the seasoning mid-cook. You know exactly what it's going to be when it's done. The current yields in 2026 are relatively strong.

[00:07:26]For a 3-year MYGA, you can expect to earn 5 to 5.2%.

[00:07:32]A 5-year is 5.3 to 5.5% and then the 7-year MYGAs are around 5.4 to 5.6% depending on the insurance company. The advantage during the bridge years is that the rate locks in no matter what the market's doing and unlike a bond, the value of an MYGA doesn't fluctuate during those years either. The limitation here is that you can't pull that money out early without surrender charges. MYGAs are designed to stay put, so make sure that you're not committing any capital that you might need to have liquid. For our couple, let's say that they put $400,000 in MYGAs with 3 and 5-year maturities with an average of 5.3%.

[00:08:12]That gets them $21,200 per year or an average of $1,767 per month. Now the major caveat here with MYGAs is that they don't pay you periodic payments. It all comes out at the end and so you do need to have a cash bucket available to smooth out those years. The ideal strategy here is to time that money so that it comes out when you need it in retirement. So if you buy a 3-year maturity 3 years before you need it, then you've got that money available to you to spend during the bridge years. Now the third asset here is one that most retirees don't know is available to them and they're called secured mortgage notes. A mortgage note is a loan backed by a specific piece of property. It's the same document that you get when you buy a property with a bank loan, except in this case, instead of being the borrower, you're the lender on the property like the bank. Let's say that a real estate operator needs capital to purchase a property and instead of going to a bank, they go to a private lender. You sign a mortgage that secures your interest against the property and a promissory note that details the payment structure, how much you're getting paid, what the interest rate is and how long the loan is for.

[00:09:23]And on the mortgage, you always want to make sure that it's first position just like a bank because first position means that if the property has to be sold, then you're the first one that gets paid back before anyone else. The property then becomes your collateral on the loan and this mortgage document is recorded at the county recorder's office.

[00:09:41]Privately originated first position mortgage notes typically yield between 7 to 10% and this varies depending on the property itself, the borrower's track record, the loan-to-value ratio and the terms in general. For our illustration, let's use 9%. Specific deal terms generally aren't disclosed publicly due to securities laws, but the asset class itself, secured mortgage notes as a category, is public information that you can research. And the payments on a secured mortgage note come every month.

[00:10:12]It can be fully amortized where a lot of the interest is front-loaded, or it can be interest only, and the terms range anywhere from 5 years up to 30 years.

[00:10:22]One of the caveats here is you can't just go buy these through your brokerage account. You have to buy them from a real estate operator who originates them, or you can find them on platforms that offer them. To make sure that you're doing this safely, you want to do your research, and you want to make sure that you have a conservative loan-to-value ratio, that your title company or attorney is recording the mortgage for you, and that all of the paperwork is reviewed by your attorney.

[00:10:48]And while you can't buy these from a brokerage, you can invest in them inside of your retirement accounts using what's called a self-directed IRA, and they can be either traditional or Roth, so that you can invest tax-advantaged or tax-free. For our couple, we're going to say that they invest $700,000 into a portfolio of secured mortgage notes that averages 9% per year, which is $63,000 or $5,250 a month, and that does come in every month. And the remainder of that $1.5 million portfolio is about $200,000, and they're just going to keep that liquid in cash for emergencies, and they're going to keep it inside of a high-yield savings account, which yields right now around 4%. Now, let's put this all together for the couple. They've constructed a portfolio of four different income-producing assets where they don't have to sell a single stock or share in order to cover their bills.

[00:11:42]First of all, they've got $200,000 in US Treasuries and corporate bonds built in a bond ladder that averages 4.8% and produces $800 per month. Next, they have $400,000 in an MYG GA ladder that averages 5.3% and produces $1,767 a month on average. Then they've got $700,000 in secured first-position mortgage notes that averages 9% and produces $5,250 per month. And finally, they've got $200,000 in a high-yield savings account for liquidity and emergencies that yields them 4% or on average $667 a month. When we add that up, this couple is making $8,484 per month from their $1.5 million portfolio, and that is regardless of what the S&P 500 is doing. Now, there's nothing sold at a loss, and sequence of returns risk does not show up anywhere in this plan. We didn't make it to our $10,000 a month goal. We're only 85% of the way there. We're $1,500 a month shy of our goal, at least until Social Security kicks in. There are a couple ways that we can bridge this gap to getting to the years where we can claim Social Security.

[00:12:56]We could take a part-time job.

[00:12:58]Consulting one day a week might get us to $1,500 a month. We could simply spend $1,500 a month or less for those two to three years. With the $10,000 budget, that's probably not that difficult. And then, we could also take it from our cash account. We've got $200,000 sitting there. For 2 years, you're looking at a $36,000 hit on your cash account. Once the Social Security kicks in, then we don't have to worry about it anymore.

[00:13:23]Here's where your strategy for when you claim Social Security as a couple really comes into play, and it runs counter to a lot of the generic advice out there.

[00:13:31]In this example, we want to have the lower earner claim first. So, let's say that the lower earner in this case is Jennifer, and if she claims at age 62, her reduced benefit amount is $1,500 to month. Her check alone closes the gap, and now they're at their $10,000 a month goal. This enables Michael, the high earner, to delay claiming his Social Security benefits because they've already reached their monthly income target, and they're doing okay, so they can wait it out until Michael's able to start claiming his Social Security. So, he's able to wait all the way until age 70, in which case he gets to take 124% of his full retirement age benefit. And when he does that, that also increases Jennifer's monthly Social Security amount as well. And the main reason to do this is the surviving spouse rule, because when one spouse dies, the surviving spouse can't keep both Social Security checks. They only get to keep one, and they're going to keep the larger one. If one spouse greatly outlives the other, then every dollar that you are able to increase Michael's benefit is able to benefit Jennifer for another 10 or 20 years after he passes, if that's the case. If you're getting value out of this, please consider giving this video a thumbs up. It helps YouTube share it with other people who need to hear this information. Again, the optimal strategy here is for the lower earner to claim early while the higher earner waits to maximize their benefit. If Michael's able to wait until age 67, his benefit amount might be around $3,230 a month. And if he waits all the way till 70, it's closer to $4,000 per month. Now, at the age of 70, the total household Social Security income is $4,800 to $5,600 per month. And when we add on the $8,500 a month that's still coming in from their investments, we're at month. Now, they're well above their $10,000 a month target. They've got an extra $3,000 a month in cushion, so they can handle any unexpected emergencies that come up. They can reinvest that money, or they can stop thinking about money altogether and just enjoy their retirement. And this couple still has the $1.5 million that's working for them. They've maxed out their Social Security floor, and they've still got income coming in that didn't rely on the stock market cooperating.

[00:15:55]The market can have whatever kind of year it wants to have, this couple's still going to go out for tacos anyway.

[00:16:00]If you want to pressure test whether or not you're ready to retire, then watch this video next. It's the three-step retirement test. It walks through three checks that separate a plan that only holds up on paper from one that actually works in a bad market. Most people fail on step number three. Thanks for watching. I'll see you guys in the next one.