Give Every Dollar In The Portfolio A Job.
Buckets is one page that sorts a client's investments into Cash, Income and Growth — plus Annuities when they hold them — with the monthly income it all supports underneath. One look answers the question behind every scary headline: which money is for now, and which money has time.
Built and used every week by Micah Shilanski and Matthew Jarvis, the advisors behind The Perfect RIA.
An Allocation Is Not A Plan.
Ask a client how they are invested and you will hear a ratio someone told them once — sixty-forty, moderate, diversified. It is a fine description of a portfolio and a useless description of a life. When markets drop, a ratio gives the client nothing to hold onto: every dollar looks equally at risk, so every dollar feels like grocery money. The panic is not irrational. It is unlabeled money.
The allocation answer
“60/40”- The portfolio is a pie chart and a risk score.
- “Moderately aggressive” describes a quiz, not a plan.
- No dollar has a stated job.
- A 20 percent drop reads as losing a fifth of everything.
- “Should we get out?” becomes a verdict on the whole portfolio.
- The client nods along, then calls back scared in October.
The buckets answer
Sorted.- “$60,000 sits in cash for right now.”
- “$240,000 sits in income, keeping the checks coming.”
- “$100,000 sits in annuities, paying on contract, not on markets.”
- “$600,000 sits in growth with a decade to work.”
- A drop lands in the bucket that has time, not the grocery money.
- The client leaves able to redraw the chart on a napkin.
Figures shown for a $1,000,000 portfolio drawing $4,500 a month, split six percent cash, twenty-four income, ten annuities and sixty growth — a portfolio an allocation would call roughly 60/40. Every delivered page computes from the household's actual accounts at your firm's rates.
Four Buckets, Drawn To Scale, In Dollars.
A bar chart a client reads without help, and the income it all supports right underneath — drawn from their actual accounts and printed under your logo. Here is the whole page.
A simplified rendering — a $1,000,000 portfolio split 6, 24, 10 and 60 percent. On the delivered page the bars print in your firm's brand color, the dollars keep the sheet's green, and the Annuities bar drops off for households that hold none.
- Total assets up top
- The headline over the chart: the household's investable total, floored to a clean figure a client can hold onto.
- A bar for every bucket
- Cash, Income and Growth — plus Annuities, a fourth bar that appears only when the household actually holds them.
- Dollar amounts, not percentages
- Each bucket prints its dollars in green under its bar. Nobody does allocation math to know what is where.
- Bars scaled to the biggest bucket
- Heights compare the buckets to each other, so the shape of the money reads from across the table.
- The income table underneath
- The same four-column table as Guardrails — current, available, upper and lower — connecting what they own to what it pays monthly.
- Allocation-driven, account by account
- Every account contributes its value times its allocation percentages. Those flow from your custodian feed, your spreadsheet import, or your team's hands.
- Bank accounts stay out
- Checking, savings and CDs are left off entirely, not mislabeled as a bucket. The chart shows invested dollars only.
- Reported as of
- Every figure carries the date the account data was reported, tied to the current column's asterisk.
- Your firm everywhere
- Bars print in your brand color, under your logo, with your report title and your disclaimer at the base.
- Live until you freeze it
- The chart recomputes when account data changes, and every delivered version is saved as a timestamped snapshot with your meeting notes.
A Pie Chart Never Calmed Anyone Down.
Every client already thinks in buckets — the vacation fund, the emergency fund, the money you do not touch. Buckets meets the portfolio where the client's brain already lives, without dumbing down what is underneath.
Purpose reads faster than percentages
“Sixty-forty” describes a portfolio. “This bucket pays for the next stretch, this one grows for the 2040s” describes a plan. Clients repeat the second one to their kids.
Volatility finally has an address
When growth swings, you point at the bucket built to swing — and at the ones that did not move. The scary number gets a context the client can see.
It shrinks the sell-everything call
Nobody liquidates “the portfolio” when they can see which bucket is for now. The call becomes a conversation about one bucket instead of a verdict on all of them.
Your team runs it, not you
Allocations flow in from the custodian feed, the spreadsheet import, or your team's hands, and the chart draws itself. Nothing waits on the advisor.
A Drawdown Only Hurts If You Sell Into It.
Sequence-of-returns risk is the retirement killer with the boring name: being forced to sell growth assets in a down year to pay for groceries, locking the loss in for good. The entire defense is structural — the near years get funded from money that does not swing, so the market money is never sold on its worst day.
A bear market is survivable when the grocery money and the market money are visibly different money. Buckets is the page that keeps them different in the client's head.
Under the chart sits the same income table Guardrails uses, run at your firm's rates — composition on top, sustainability underneath. The rates ship at a 5.4 percent available rate with rails at 4.32 and 6.48, and Buckets carries its own trio in Settings, separate from the Guardrails one.
They Were Drawing Buckets Before The Software.
Walking a nervous client through where the next few years live is how Matt and Micah have run the retirement-income conversation in their own practices for years. SurgeTK just made it a page a team can produce for every household without the advisor touching it.
In their offices it rides in the Surge Packet next to the Homework Sheet and the net-worth statement — and alongside Guardrails, its sibling. Guardrails answers how much. Buckets answers from where.
And it is the same chart, the same buckets, for every household. That consistency is what lets a client compare this year's page to last year's, and what lets the whole packet go out on schedule in the middle of a thirty-meeting week.
SurgeTK is built by The Perfect RIA, the team that popularized Surge and Value-Adds and teaches them to advisors across the country.
Try It On Your Most Nervous Client.
Buckets does not demo well in the abstract. It earns its keep the first time a worried client sees which bucket the next few years come from. The whole test costs one household and one review.
Have your team enter one household by hand.
Account values, systematic withdrawals, and the four allocation percentages per account. Manually, just the one. Importing at scale is a conversation for later.
Open the household. The chart is already drawn.
SurgeTK sorts every account into its buckets and totals the bars. Your rates apply from Settings, and refresh recalculates whenever the data moves.
Deliver it when the market gets loud.
Point at the bucket built for right now, then at the one built to swing. Watch the shoulders come down. That is the page working.