Income Smoothing

In our little context, we're thinking about income as in "income you want to have for your retirement while you fish until you get a grim health diagnosis and then you eat donuts and smoke until The End."

For those 10-30 years of retirement, you want your income...smooth. It comes in predictably, steadily, reliably. So what would you likely invest in? Eh, for most people, they are fully invested in index or mutual funds for many years before they retire. Those funds sit in their IRAs and have a required minimum distribution that must be taken out of the IRA (and taxed) before they can really think about much else.

The goal then is to have enough coming out of that IRA, along with supplemental income from, say, a personal portfolio of dividend-paying stocks, along with bonds, along with maybe a small commercial property partnership or two...so that, in total, there is almost no fish hook or worm you can't afford, as you sit on your boat, coaxing bass to open wide and say, "Ahhhh."