Show Every Client Exactly How Much They Can Spend.
Retirement Guardrails is one page that turns a portfolio into a spending plan: the monthly income it supports today, and the two portfolio values where that income gets a raise or a trim. Your team enters the data. SurgeTK draws the lane. The client finally has a number.
Built and used every week by Micah Shilanski and Matthew Jarvis, the advisors behind The Perfect RIA.
Clients Do Not Ask For A Probability Of Success.
Somewhere in the second half of every review, the real question surfaces. It rarely sounds like a question about markets. It sounds like a trip they are not sure they should book, a kitchen they have put off for years, a grandchild's tuition. Underneath it is always the same thing: are we going to be okay? The industry's standard answer is a probability of success — defensible math that lands like a weather forecast.
The probability answer
“87%”- The planning software produces a score, not a spending number.
- “Can we take the trip?” gets a probably.
- Nobody can say what has to happen before the answer changes.
- A market drop means a scared phone call and an improvised answer.
- Re-run the projection, massage the assumptions, hope it cooperates.
- The client cannot repeat any of it to their spouse or their kids.
The guardrails answer
$4,500/mo- “Your portfolio supports $4,500 a month today.”
- “Take the trip. You are inside the lane.”
- “Above $1,250,000, your income goes up ten percent.”
- “Below $840,000, we trim ten percent — as agreed.”
- A drop triggers the plan you both already signed off on.
- The client keeps the page and can repeat every number on it.
Thresholds shown for a household drawing $4,500 a month on a $1,000,000 portfolio at SurgeTK's shipped defaults — a 5.4 percent available rate with rails at 4.32 and 6.48. Your firm sets its own rates, and every report computes from the household's actual accounts.
A Lane, A Marker, And The Numbers That Move It.
A client should be able to read their retirement from across the table. One bar, one marker, four columns — drawn from their actual accounts and printed under your logo. Here is the whole page.
Simplified rendering at SurgeTK's default rates, for a household drawing $4,500 a month on a $1,000,000 portfolio. The delivered page carries your logo, your brand color and your disclaimer.
- The spending lane
- Five zones, red to green to red. Too much savings on the left, not enough on the right, and a green center where the plan is working.
- The current-distribution marker
- A needle in your firm's brand color showing where the client's withdrawal rate sits today. Most meetings end up pointing at it.
- Max distribution available
- The headline above the lane: the rate your firm set and the monthly dollars it supports for this household.
- Four columns of proof
- Current, Available, Upper Guardrail and Lower Guardrail — portfolio value, monthly income and distribution rate, with the client's actual position tinted green.
- The raise and the trim
- Cross the upper guardrail and income rises ten percent. Cross the lower and it trims ten percent. Printed in monthly dollars, not advisor math.
- Dollar thresholds, not percentages
- The exact portfolio values where each adjustment triggers, rounded to clean figures a client can keep an eye on.
- Reported as of
- Every figure carries the date the account data was reported, so a Tuesday snapshot is never mistaken for live pricing.
- Household names and ages
- The household line reads the way you would say it out loud, ages in superscript beside each name.
- Your firm everywhere
- Your logo at the top, your brand color on the marker and footer, your report title, your disclaimer at the base.
- Live until you freeze it
- The report recomputes when account data changes, and every delivered version is saved as a timestamped snapshot with your meeting notes.
It Speaks Client, Not Spreadsheet.
There is a rule at The Perfect RIA: if it is not in crayon, a client is not going to get it. Guardrails is decades of withdrawal-rate research in crayon — a lane, a marker and two thresholds — without dumbing down the math that draws them.
A lane reads in one look
No client has ever repeated a Monte Carlo output to their spouse. Any client can point at a marker in a green zone and say we are okay. That sentence is the deliverable.
The bad-market call is pre-answered
The trim threshold has been printed on the client's page since the good years. When markets fall, you are executing an agreement, not improvising a defense of your fee.
It gives permission to spend
Plenty of retirees underspend out of fear and leave their best years unlived. The left side of the lane exists for exactly them: too much savings, spend more.
Your team runs it, not you
The page builds itself from account values and systematic withdrawals your team already keyed in. No spreadsheet handoff, no formatting pass, nothing parked on your desk.
It Earns Its Keep In A Down Market.
Anyone can look brilliant in a bull market, and the client credits the market anyway. The fee gets tested the year everything falls. That is when a household finds out whether they bought a plan or a performance report.
A guardrails client watching a 20 percent drop does not ask whether the plan failed. They check which side of the lane they are on. You built that reflex in the good years, one page per Surge.
The math underneath is the withdrawal-rate guardrails approach the industry has debated for two decades, implemented from the spreadsheet Matthew Jarvis uses with his own clients. It runs at your firm's rates, set once in Settings, so every client is measured by the same standard.
The Same Page They Hand Their Own Clients.
Guardrails did not come off a product whiteboard. It is the retirement-income one-pager Matt and Micah deliver in their own practices — the private spreadsheet version, moved into software a team can run without the advisor in the loop.
In their offices it ships inside the Surge Packet, on top of the Homework Sheet, next to the net-worth statement — the same packet, in the same order, for every household on the calendar.
The uniformity is the point. A hand-built deliverable per client feels bespoke and breaks the first busy week. One lane, one marker, two thresholds for everyone — that is what a team can produce at scale, and what a client can trust for twenty years.
SurgeTK is built by The Perfect RIA, the team that popularized Surge and Value-Adds and teaches them to advisors across the country.
Put It In Front Of One Client.
Guardrails will not convince you in a feature list. It convinces you the first time a client leans in and points at the marker. The whole test costs one household and one review.
Have your team enter one household by hand.
Account values plus systematic withdrawals, amount and frequency. Manually, just the one. Importing at scale is a conversation for later.
Open the household. The page is already built.
SurgeTK generates Guardrails on its own from what your team entered. Set your three rates once in Settings, and refresh whenever the data moves.
Deliver it at the next review.
Watch where the client's eyes go. When they ask what has to happen to move the marker, the page is doing its job.