How it works
The five steps we use to answer your biggest retirement questions
Step 1: Understand Where You Stand
First, I review your complete financial picture: income, spending, taxes, investments, insurance, and estate documents. You'll know exactly where you stand.
Step 2: Identify Opportunities
Then I pinpoint the opportunities most likely to improve your retirement: lower costs, smarter allocation, Roth conversions, withdrawal sequencing, and Social Security timing.
Step 3: Build Your Retirement Strategy
Every piece feeds one integrated plan, stress-tested against thousands of market scenarios.
You'll see your probability of success and exactly which decisions move it.
Step 4: Implement the Plan
Plans don't create results. Implementation does — organized into the Four-Pillar Retirement Strategy: your Retirement Paycheck Plan, Retirement Resilience Plan, Lifetime Tax Map, and Estate & Legacy Plan.
Step 5: Continue Adapting
Markets, tax laws, and your life all change. Your plan should too.
We meet 2–3 times per year, with each pillar reviewed on a schedule — your paycheck and cash reserves, your portfolio and protection reserves, and your tax plan before year-end.
The Five Steps, Delivered in Two Phases
The 90-Day Retirement Roadmap
Steps 1–3: Understand, Identify, Build. Over the first 90 days, for a one-time planning fee, we test whether your retirement is sustainable, design your income and tax strategy, set your target portfolio, and agree on the plan I’ll carry out in Phase 2.
You leave the first 90 days with clarity and a prioritized set of decisions, ready to be carried out in Phase 2.
Implementation & Ongoing Wealth Management
Steps 4–5: Implement, Adapt. I take responsibility for carrying the strategy out through four coordinated pillars — a monthly retirement paycheck, a resilient portfolio with a written down-market plan, a lifetime tax map, and an estate plan that’s checked, not assumed — and for keeping it current every year.
When you begin here, the separate planning fee can be waived.
Ready to see if you can retire with confidence?
Schedule a free initial consult, or see this process applied to a real scenario: Walter & Skylar's complete sample plan →
FAQs
Yes! I offer in-person meetings in Hawaii and virtual meetings nationwide. This works very well for those living on the East or West Coast who prefer to meet in the late afternoon or evening.
Yes, I am a fiduciary 100% of the time. To learn why hiring a fiduciary is SO important, check out this Investopedia article.
Nearly every client follows the same path through my five-step process. Phase 1, Build the Plan, is the 90-Day Retirement Roadmap and covers Steps 1–3 (Understand, Identify, Build): in the first 90 days we answer your most important retirement questions and agree on a prioritized set of decisions. Phase 2, Run the Plan, is Implementation & Ongoing Wealth Management and covers Steps 4–5 (Implement, Adapt): I manage your investments, carry out the plan, and keep it current as your life and the tax law change. Clients who begin with ongoing management directly receive the same planning work, and the separate planning fee can be waived. A small number of clients complete the Roadmap only. That’s available, but it isn’t how I’m set up to do my best work for you.
Masuda Lehrman Wealth is a fee-only, commission-free fiduciary financial planning firm. The only compensation I receive is directly from my clients.
You can read more on my pricing page.
I believe in goals-based strategic asset allocation: your retirement plan dictates how your portfolio is built, not a generic risk questionnaire.
Low-cost passive investing should be the default for most people. Research consistently shows that higher-cost active management tends to underperform its benchmarks over the long term.
Client accounts are held at Charles Schwab, where I manage portfolios with institutional rebalancing tools, coordinate withdrawals, and implement tax strategies like asset location and tax-loss harvesting when appropriate.
