Luminary Financial Advisors

Luminary Financial Advisors Luminary Financial Advisors is a fee only firm that strives to light your way forward to achieving your financial best life.

Let us help you understand your family's goals, construct a financial plan, and work with you to implement our suggestions.

09/04/2026

Title: 4 Signs Your Retirement Portfolio Is Set Up to Fail

Description: Most retirees don't see this coming until it's too late 👀

Building wealth and living off wealth require completely different strategies, but most portfolios never make that transition.

According to Morningstar's 2025 research, nearly 70% of retirement plan failures trace back to losses in the very first years of retirement. That's not just bad timing. That's a structural gap.

There are four warning signs that a portfolio is built for the wrong phase of life:

Relying on your brokerage account as your only cash reserve means a bad market year can force you to sell at exactly the wrong time.

Having every dollar in pre-tax accounts removes your ability to manage your tax bracket or sidestep Medicare surcharges down the road.

Carrying a large concentration of your employer's stock means your paycheck and your retirement savings are exposed to the same single risk.

Having no written plan for which account to draw from first means each year's spending decision is essentially a guess.

A solid balance sheet doesn't automatically produce safe retirement income. How the portfolio is structured matters just as much as how much is in it.

Warren Burger is a financial advisor.

09/03/2026

Title: The BEST Legacy Gift You Can Leave Your Family

Description: The asset type matters more than the amount 👀

Most people think the best legacy gift is a big chunk of cash. But which asset you pass on, and when, can have a huge impact on how much your family actually keeps.

Appreciated stock or real estate you've held for years carries embedded gains. Gift it while you're alive and your recipient inherits your original cost basis, meaning they could owe capital gains taxes on all that growth when they eventually sell.

Hold that same asset until death and your heirs may receive a stepped-up basis, resetting to the asset's value on the day they inherit it. That one rule can quietly wipe out decades of taxable gains.

Retirement accounts, on the other hand, don't get that step-up. Most non-spouse heirs must drain an inherited IRA or 401(k) within 10 years, and every dollar counts as ordinary income. A Roth conversion done today could actually be one of the most thoughtful gifts you ever make.

And the annual gift exclusion? It changes which assets make sense to give away now versus which ones are better held.

The right legacy gift isn't the one that feels the most generous. It's the one structured to keep the most in your family's hands.

Hit follow to keep learning about estate planning strategies that actually work.

Warren Burger is a financial advisor.

09/02/2026

Title: The Backdoor Roth IRA Strategy Explained for High Earners

Description: Too much income for a Roth IRA? Not so fast. 👀

Once your household income crosses the IRS threshold, direct Roth contributions are off the table. But there's a perfectly legal two-step strategy that high earners have been using for years, and most people have never heard of it.

It starts with a non-deductible traditional IRA contribution, then moves to a conversion. No income limit applies to that second step, and from that point forward, the money grows completely tax-free.

But here's where it gets tricky.

Your brokerage will issue a tax form that the IRS will treat as a taxable distribution unless you file a specific form to prove otherwise. Skip that form, and you could end up paying taxes on money you already paid taxes on.

There's also a rule that can complicate the whole process if you're already carrying a pre-tax IRA balance. Most people don't know it applies to them until after the fact.

Watch the full video to understand both steps, the forms involved, and the one rule that can derail the entire strategy.

This content is for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute personalized investment, tax, or financial advice. Please consult a qualified tax or financial professional before implementing any strategy.

Warren Burger is a financial advisor.

08/28/2026

The 4% rule is missing a critical piece 👀

Most retirees treat this number like a guaranteed safe zone. But the original research modeled a very specific scenario, and recent Morningstar data suggests the evidence-backed starting rate is now closer to 3.9% for a 30-year retirement.

That small difference compounds in ways that aren't obvious at first glance.

And the percentage itself isn't even the biggest risk.

Two retirees can start with identical portfolios and identical withdrawal rates. If one retires into a down market and the other doesn't, their balances can look dramatically different within a decade. Early losses force you to sell more shares to cover withdrawals, and those shares don't come back when the market recovers.

A fixed withdrawal rate never asks the question that actually matters most: how much of your spending is truly non-negotiable?

The answer to that question, not the percentage, is what gives a retirement income plan real staying power.

Hit follow for more retirement income breakdowns like this one.

08/27/2026

Most owners won't know what their business is worth until it's too late. 👀

The majority of business owners plan to exit within the next decade. But planning to exit someday and actually being prepared are two very different things.

Three factors quietly determine how much you walk away with:

📌 Revenue concentration: When a small number of clients drive a large portion of your revenue, buyers treat that as risk, not value.

📌 Owner dependency: A business that can't operate without you for six months is a business that loses negotiating leverage at the table.

📌 Financial clarity: Organized records and predictable margins signal certainty to buyers. And buyers pay a premium for certainty.

Here's a simple diagnostic: If you had to close or sell in 90 days, what would you actually net? Now compare that to what a deliberate, multi-year exit runway could produce.

That difference is the real cost of not having a plan.

If you're a business owner within ten years of an exit, drop a comment: do you have a written plan, or is it still in your head?

08/26/2026

Most retirees ask the wrong question entirely. 🤔

If you're heading into retirement with around $2M saved, you're probably focused on what return you need to make it last.

But that's not the right question.

The real question is: what structure survives the years when returns don't cooperate?

A portfolio designed for a 30-year retirement has to do three things at once: generate income now, outpace inflation over decades, and hold up through multiple serious market downturns without forcing you to sell at the worst possible time.

That means separating your money by job. Near-term spending needs stay in lower-volatility instruments. The growth portion runs long. That separation gives you runway during a downturn so you're not raiding the growth bucket when it's down 30%.

There's also a question most people skip entirely: how much of your annual spending is truly fixed versus flexible? That flexible portion is your real buffer against sequence-of-returns risk, the danger that poor early returns do permanent damage even if the long-run average looks fine.

Recent research puts a sustainable starting withdrawal at around 3.9% for a 30-year horizon, which works out to roughly $78,000 a year on $2M.

The math isn't the hard part. The structure is.

Follow along for more on how these plans actually get built. 👇

08/21/2026

75% plan to work in retirement. Only 31% do. 👀

There's a version of retirement most people never consider, and it might be the one that actually fits your life.

It's not about stopping completely or grinding until the wheels fall off. It's about asking one honest question: if the financial pressure were off the table entirely, would you still show up to work?

If the answer is yes, that's not a failure to retire. It's a completely different way to think about what comes next.

The real gap between the 75% who plan to keep working and the 31% who actually do? It usually comes down to never clearly deciding what they wanted retirement to look like before making the leap.

A solid plan doesn't just protect your money. It protects your options.

Comment RETIRE below for a free guide on building a retirement income plan that keeps you in control. 👇

Address

1980 N. Atlantic Avenue Suit 411
Cocoa Beach, FL
32931

Telephone

+13213334923

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