Wealth Path Financial Wealth Path Financial
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Retirement income planning · Licensed in all 50 states

Turn your savings into a paycheck you can count on.

Three questions decide whether your money lasts: how you replace your paycheck, what happens if the market drops early in retirement, and who pays if you need long-term care. I help you answer all three — in writing, before you retire.

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Derrick Loflin

Derrick Loflin Retirement Planning Specialist · Host, Safe Money Radio

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What’s your monthly income gap?

Everything — housing, food, insurance, travel, grandkids. $6,500
Social Security plus any pension, for both spouses. $3,400
$3,100 a month your savings must produce

That’s $37,200 a year — about $930,000 over a 25-year retirement, in today’s dollars before inflation.

Get the Income Gap Worksheet

Simple arithmetic, not a projection. It ignores inflation, taxes and investment returns — which is exactly what we work through on a call.

50States licensed — wherever you live, we can work together
18+Years focused on retirement income, principal protection and care planning
2Weekly radio shows across the Florida panhandle and Tallahassee
$0Cost for the first call, the review, and the written plan

What I actually do

Most retirement worries come down to three problems.

Each one has a tool built for it. Each tool has trade-offs, and I’ll show you both sides before you decide anything.

Problem 01 — The retirement income gap · Income annuities

Bridging the gap between what you get and what you spend

“Social Security and my pension cover about half our bills. Where does the rest come from?”

For most of your working life the answer was simple: a paycheck arrived. In retirement you have to build one. The usual approach is to withdraw a percentage from a portfolio and hope the math holds for thirty years.

There’s another way to handle the part you can’t afford to get wrong. An income annuity converts a portion of your savings into a payment that arrives every month for as long as you live, no matter what the market does. Used well, it isn’t a replacement for your portfolio — it’s a floor underneath it.

Building the retirement paycheck

A stacked bar showing Social Security and pension at the base, an income annuity filling the gap up to the essential-bills line, and portfolio withdrawals for discretionary spending above it. Portfolio withdrawals Travel, gifts, the fun money — flexible by design ESSENTIAL BILLS LINE Income annuity Fills the gap — paid monthly, for life Pension, if you have one Social Security $0
Illustrative structure only; proportions vary by household and are not a recommendation. Cover the non-negotiables with guaranteed income, and the rest of your money is free to stay invested — because it’s no longer the thing keeping the lights on.
Download the Income Gap Worksheet

Problem 02 — Sequence-of-returns risk · Fixed indexed annuities

A buffer so a bad market doesn’t become a smaller lifestyle

“What happens if the market drops the year after I retire?”

While you’re working, a down market is an inconvenience — you keep contributing and you recover. Once you’re withdrawing, it’s a different animal. Selling shares to pay bills in a down year locks in the loss and removes the shares that would have recovered. Advisors call it sequence-of-returns risk. It means two retirees can earn the exact same average return and end up in completely different places.

Same returns. Different order. 20 years later.

Two portfolio balance lines over twenty years. Good years first ends at $584,128; the same returns in reverse order ends at $144,222. $584,128 GOOD YEARS FIRST $144,222 BAD YEARS FIRST YEAR 0 YEAR 20

Good years first Bad years first — same returns, reversed

Hypothetical illustration, not a projection and not indicative of any product. Both retirees start with $500,000, withdraw $30,000 a year for 20 years, and experience the identical set of twenty annual returns averaging 5.8%. Only the order differs. The ending balances are $439,906 apart.

A fixed indexed annuity is one way to build a shock absorber. Your principal isn’t exposed to market losses; growth is credited based on an index, subject to a cap or participation rate. In a bad year, that’s the bucket you draw from — so your invested accounts get left alone to recover instead of being sold at the bottom.

Download the Market Buffer guide

Problem 03 — Long-term care · Asset-based LTC planning

Protecting the estate if care is needed

“We saved our whole lives. I don’t want a nursing home to be what our kids inherit.”

This is the risk that undoes otherwise good plans — and the numbers move faster than most people expect.

National median cost of care, 2025

Bar chart of 2025 national median annual costs: adult day health care $24,700; assisted living $74,400; in-home caregiver $80,080; nursing home private room $129,575. Adult day health care $24,700 Assisted living $74,400 In-home caregiver $80,080 Nursing home, private room $129,575
National median annual costs, 2025 CareScout (Genworth) Cost of Care Survey, released March 2026. In-home figure assumes 44 hours a week; adult day care assumes five days a week. Costs vary considerably by state and metro area.

Traditional long-term care insurance solves this, but it’s use-it-or-lose-it and premiums have been raised on policyholders repeatedly. So most people quietly choose the third option: self-fund, and hope. That plan works right up until it doesn’t, and the bill lands on the surviving spouse.

Asset-based long-term care is the middle path. You reposition a portion of savings — often money already sitting in a CD or an old annuity — into a life insurance or annuity contract with a long-term care benefit. The money then does one of three jobs, and none of them is “disappear.”

Three ways to handle the risk
Self-fund Traditional LTC insurance Asset-based LTC
If you need care Your savings pay the bill, dollar for dollar Policy pays up to its benefit limits Pays a multiple of what you repositioned
If you never need care Money stays yours Premiums are gone Passes to heirs as a death benefit, or returns under the contract’s terms
Can the cost go up? The cost of care certainly can Yes — carriers have raised premiums on in-force policies Typically funded once, with the cost fixed at issue
Main drawback Unlimited exposure; hits the surviving spouse hardest Use-it-or-lose-it, and rate-increase risk Ties up a lump sum, and requires health underwriting
Download the Asset-Based LTC guide

Free, no phone call required

Read first. Decide later.

Each guide is short, plain-English, and written to be useful even if you never call me. Pick the one that matches what’s keeping you up.

GAP GUARANTEED

Worksheet

The Retirement Income Gap Worksheet

Fill in what you’ll spend and what’s already guaranteed. You’ll finish with one number: the monthly income your savings have to create — and three ways to create it.

Get the worksheet

PDF · 8 pages · fillable worksheet

Guide

Protecting Cash Flow From a Bad Market

Why the order of your returns matters more than the average, how much a poorly-timed downturn actually costs, and how a buffer bucket keeps you from selling at the bottom.

Get the guide

PDF · 9 pages

Guide

Paying for Care Without Draining the Estate

What care actually costs today, an honest comparison of traditional LTC, self-funding and asset-based coverage, and the questions to ask before you buy any of them.

Get the guide

PDF · 11 pages

Instant download

Where should I send it?

You’ll get the guide by email in about a minute. I’ll follow up once to ask if it raised any questions. If it didn’t, tell me so and you won’t hear from me again — that’s a promise I keep.

No cost. No obligation. I don’t sell or share your information.

What happens if you call

Three steps, and you can stop after any of them.

Step 01

A 15-minute call

You tell me when you want to retire and what you’re worried about. I tell you whether I’m the right person to help. No cost, and no one calls you afterward if you say no.

Step 02

A retirement income review

We map your guaranteed income, your gap, your tax picture and your long-term care exposure. If you already own an annuity, we read the contract together and I tell you plainly what it does.

Step 03

A written plan you keep

You get the plan in writing, including what each recommendation costs and what its downside is. Implement it with me, implement it elsewhere, or put it in a drawer. It’s yours either way.

Derrick Loflin, Retirement Planning Specialist

Who you’d be working with

Derrick Loflin

Eighteen years in this business taught me something most people find out too late: retirement isn’t one problem, it’s three. How you replace the paycheck. What happens if the market turns while you’re withdrawing. Who pays if you or your spouse needs care. Miss any one of them and solving the other two stops mattering.

So that’s the work I do, and it’s all I do. I build a floor under your essential bills with guaranteed lifetime income, so the mortgage and the groceries stop depending on a good year. I put a buffer between your spending and the market, so a downturn early in retirement costs you a vacation instead of a decade. And I reposition a portion of what you’ve already saved so a long-term care event doesn’t become your children’s inheritance.

Here’s what that looks like if you call. Fifteen minutes on the phone to hear what’s actually keeping you up. Then a review where we put your guaranteed income, your gap, your tax exposure and your care risk on one page — and if you already own an annuity, we read the contract together and I tell you plainly what it does and what it costs. Then a written plan, with every recommendation’s downside written next to it. The plan is yours whether or not you ever work with me.

Most of the people I sit with are five years either side of retiring. They did the hard part already — they saved. What nobody has given them is a straight answer to “what does this actually pay me, and what breaks it?” That’s the conversation I’m good at, and I say the same things across a kitchen table that I say on the radio. If something has a catch, I’d rather you hear it from me first.

Book a 15-minute call Call 504.356.4900
Focus
Retirement income, principal protection, asset-based long-term care
Licensed in
All 50 states
On the radio
101 FM Panama CitySaturday & Sunday, 12–1pm
 
100.7 FM WFLA TallahasseeSaturday, 9–10am
Podcast
Safe Money RadioAvailable on Spotify
Experience
18+ years in retirement planning

Straight answers

The questions people are too polite to ask.

Do I have to move all my money?

No, and you shouldn’t. The whole idea is to guarantee the part of your income you can’t afford to lose and leave the rest working. For most people that means committing a portion of savings — sized to your essential monthly bills — and nothing more. If someone proposes moving everything you have into one product, get a second opinion.

Aren’t annuities expensive?

Some are. Variable annuities with multiple riders can carry several percent a year in combined costs. Fixed and fixed indexed annuities usually have no explicit annual fee — the cost is embedded, showing up as a cap on your growth, and as a surrender schedule if you need the money early.

Either way, “no fee” never means free. I’ll show you where the cost is, in dollars and in limits, before you sign anything.

How do you get paid?

[Derrick — confirm this wording. Draft: I’m paid a commission by the insurance company when a contract is placed. You don’t pay me a separate planning fee, and the commission doesn’t come out of your deposit. If you’d like to know what a specific recommendation pays me, ask and I’ll tell you.]

I already own an annuity. Is it any good?

Sometimes yes. Bring the contract and I’ll read it with you: what it credits, what it costs, what the surrender schedule looks like and whether the income rider you’re paying for is actually worth keeping. Plenty of times the right answer is to keep what you have, and I’ll tell you that.

Is a guaranteed annuity actually guaranteed?

It’s guaranteed by the insurance company that issues it — backed by that carrier’s claims-paying ability and its statutory reserves. It is not FDIC insured and not guaranteed by any government agency. State guaranty associations provide a backstop, but with limits that vary by state.

That’s why carrier selection isn’t an afterthought. We look at financial strength ratings before we look at rates.

I’m 58 and not retiring for a while. Too early?

It’s the best time. The decisions with the biggest effect — when to claim Social Security, how much to convert to Roth, whether to qualify for long-term care coverage while you’re healthy — all have to be made before you retire, not after.

Do you work with people outside the Gulf South?

Yes. I’m licensed in all 50 states, and most of my planning work happens by phone and video regardless of where a client lives. The radio shows are local to the Florida panhandle and Tallahassee; the practice isn’t.

Book a call Free guides