Retirement Income Map Worksheet

How do you replace a paycheck when no one is paying you anymore? That’s the question that keeps new retirees up at night, and a pile of accounts doesn’t answer it. This worksheet does. It maps every income source you have against what you actually spend, so you can see the paycheck instead of hoping it’s there.

The hard shift in retirement isn’t the size of the nest egg. It’s going from one employer depositing money on the 1st and the 15th to you assembling income from five different places, each with its own tax treatment and its own rules. The map is how you turn scattered accounts into a steady, intentional paycheck.

What the worksheet lays out

It runs in two halves. On top, what reliably comes in: Social Security, any pension, annuity payments, rental income. On the bottom, what you pull from the portfolio to cover the rest: taxable accounts, traditional IRA and 401(k) money, and Roth dollars. The gap between your guaranteed income and your spending is the number the portfolio has to fill, and naming that gap is the entire point.

Fill it in this order

• Start with spending, because every other number serves it. Use a real baseline, not a hopeful one.
• Add up the guaranteed income that lands no matter what the market does.
• Subtract. What’s left is the annual withdrawal the portfolio has to produce.
• Assign each withdrawal dollar to a source, in a deliberate sequence, following a tax-efficient withdrawal order.

Which dollar you spend first changes the tax bill

Here’s the part that separates a good map from a list of accounts. The order matters as much as the amount. Spend taxable accounts first and you let tax-deferred money keep compounding, but lean on them too long and you waste the low brackets you could have used for a Roth conversion. Pull too little from the IRA in your 60s and the RMD at 73 or 75 forces it out later in a bigger, higher-taxed lump. The map lets you see that collision years ahead and smooth it.

Build in the buffer

One more line, and it’s the one that saves retirements. Keep a cash buffer so you’re never forced to sell investments into a down market. Selling low to fund spending early on is how sequence-of-returns risk does permanent damage. A year or two of spending in cash is the shock absorber, and it belongs right on the map. Size it with cash buffer sizing for withdrawals.

Fill this out before your first withdrawal, not after. A retirement paycheck doesn’t arrive on its own. You build it, one mapped dollar at a time, and this is the page where it becomes real.