Nickels Wealth

09/03/2026

Most business owners think about taxes in April. By then, the year is closed and the choices that mattered are already behind you.

The moves that actually shift your bill happen before December 31.

Our newest blog walks through the strategies you still have time to use this year.

Read more:

If you own a business, most of what you read about taxes was written for W-2 employees. It doesn't quite fit. There's real planning to be done for business owners, but very little of it lives inside our office alone. Your CPA prepares the return. Your attorney handles the entity choice and successio...

09/01/2026

Meet Shilo Goodman, our Director of First Impressions.

If you've ever walked into an office and felt like a task on someone's list, you know how rare the opposite is. Shilo is the opposite. Her job revolves around making sure every client and every visitor feels special from the moment they arrive.

If we had to give her an unofficial second title, it would be Fun Manager. She's always looking for ways to celebrate, bring a little joy, and make people feel good.

She came to that work honestly. Before joining Nickels Wealth, she spent 27 years helping run her family's business, the Fashion Barn, here in Columbus. Nearly three decades of greeting people, remembering them, and making them feel at home.

We're glad she's the first person our clients meet. The plan matters, and so does the welcome. 🙂

08/28/2026

Most people come to us asking how to grow their money. That's rarely the actual problem.

The returns question feels like the right one. If the portfolio just performed a little better, everything else falls into place. But strong returns don't tell you which account to draw from, or when, or what that choice sets in motion.

The real gap is income. More precisely, the absence of a coordinated way to turn what you've saved into a paycheck that lasts.

Look at what most pre-retirees are actually managing:

A 401(k) from the current job
One or two old IRAs from jobs before it
Savings and CDs
A pension or life insurance policy
A mortgage and maybe some other debt

Each piece was set up in isolation, and each one made sense at the time. None of them are talking to each other now.

That's where the misdiagnosis happens. Pull from the wrong account in your 60s and you can push yourself into a higher tax bracket, or trip an IRMAA surcharge (the income threshold that raises your Medicare premiums) in your 70s. A good return year won't fix that. Coordination will.

Growth is the part everyone watches. Distribution is the part that decides how long the money lasts.

The question isn't how do I earn more. It's how do these pieces work together.

08/26/2026

Most people arrive at our office overwhelmed. Too many accounts, too many questions, too many voices telling them retirement has to be complicated.

Tracey Bryan is one of the people who changes that.

Her gift is translation. She takes a tangle of 401(k)s, IRAs, Social Security timing, and healthcare decisions and lays it out in plain language.

Watch her work and you notice the pattern. She listens first. She asks the question behind your question. Then she walks you through the mechanics until the fog lifts and a decision finally feels like yours to make.

Confidence isn't something she hands you. It's what's left once the confusion is gone.

That's the work. Not more sophistication. More clarity.

08/24/2026

Most people who reach out to us for the first time expect to talk about investments. That is almost never where the first conversation goes.

The assumption makes sense. Decades of industry norms have taught people that a first meeting means performance charts, portfolio models, and a polite nudge to move their money. So they arrive braced for a pitch.

What actually happens is different.

We start with your life. Where you are, where you want to go, what keeps you up at night, and which pieces of your financial world exist but have never been coordinated. The old 401(k). The IRA from two jobs ago. The savings, the insurance, the mortgage. We want to see all of it before we build anything.

There is no product to present and no portfolio to pitch. The plan comes first.

We've noticed something too. When people understand the first meeting is a planning conversation, they show up differently. They bring their questions instead of their guard. And that changes what we can build together.

A plan that reflects your life becomes possible once you stop expecting to be sold to.

That's the whole point of the first conversation.

08/20/2026

Ernie has been in this industry since 1974.

Over five decades, he's watched clients worry about the same things, decade after decade, and watched most of those worries quietly fade into history.

There's a name for the pattern behind it: recency bias. It's the mind's tendency to treat the most recent event as the most likely future. A rough quarter feels permanent. A scary headline feels like a turning point. Meanwhile, the ten-year trend keeps doing what ten-year trends tend to do.

Ernie has lived through more "worst years ever" than many investors will ever see. Many of them felt urgent in the moment. Very few of them mattered a decade later.

The longer your view, the smaller any single event becomes. That's the gift of a long career, and the reason we keep coming back to the whole picture instead of the latest headline.

08/18/2026

A Roth conversion in 2026 can raise your Medicare premium in 2028.

Most pre-retirees treat these as two separate decisions. Convert some of that IRA to a Roth this year. Enroll in Medicare when the time comes. Two boxes, two different years.

IRMAA rules connect them directly.

IRMAA is the surcharge Medicare adds to your Part B premium when your income crosses certain thresholds. Here's the part that catches people: it looks back two years. The income you report in 2026 sets your premium in 2028.

So a single year of elevated income, from a Roth conversion, a capital gain, a big withdrawal, can add anywhere from $1,148.40 to $6,936 per person to your Medicare cost. Per year. For a decision you may have forgotten you made.

The two-year lag is what makes income timing in the years before Medicare enrollment more consequential than most people realize. The bill doesn't arrive when you make the choice. It arrives two years later, and by then the window to adjust has closed.

Don't get us wrong. We love Roth conversions, but it has to be the right amount at the right time.

This is why we look at more than a Roth conversion on its own. We look at what your income does two years out, and the year after that.

The math isn't complicated. The timing is everything.

08/13/2026

Suzette Bates has spent more than 30 years in financial planning, and one thing has stayed with her: people usually arrive at a vulnerable moment. A death, a diagnosis, a retirement date that suddenly feels real.

In those moments, two very different kinds of help matter.

One is the listening ear. Acknowledging the fear and the uncertainty. Creating space before any decision gets made. Trust doesn't get built when someone rushes you.

The other is knowledgeable advice. Translating a complicated situation into plain language. Pointing to a specific next step. Grounding the decision in facts.

Lead with only the advice and you can feel like a stranger handing out instructions. Lead with only the listening and nothing actually moves forward.

In Suzette's words, "We all have times in our lives where the most help comes from a listening ear, an encouraging word, and knowledgeable advice."

The best planning holds both at once.

08/11/2026

What is your withdrawal rate?

Most people meet the term as a percentage on a spreadsheet. Pick 4%, run the math, feel finished. That framing treats a retirement decision like an arithmetic problem.

The number is real. It also isn't the whole thing.

A withdrawal rate is closer to a contract you make with your future self. It sets how much your savings pay you each year, and it has to hold up across markets you can't predict and years you can't count in advance.

Set it too high, and a couple of bad market years early can shrink the savings that were supposed to carry you into your 80s. Set it too low, and you underspend the years you were working toward the whole time.

And the rate never sits alone. What you pull, and from which account, moves your tax bracket this year and shapes your Medicare premiums down the road.

Our Retirement Readiness Workbook lists "make informed withdrawal decisions" as a core outcome, because turning savings into a steady paycheck is one of the harder parts of retirement.

A withdrawal rate is more than a number you set once. It's the pace of the paycheck you're writing to yourself for the next thirty years.

08/11/2026

Your financial plan reflects your numbers. Does it reflect your values too?

For a lot of the families we work with, faith and money decisions go together. Faith shapes them. How you save, how you give, how you think about what you've been entrusted with.

The CKA® (Certified Kingdom Advisor®) designation is built for exactly that. It means an advisor has been trained to integrate biblical financial principles with sound, technical planning. Stewardship, generosity, and wise decision-making, applied to the real work of retirement income, taxes, and giving strategies.

Both Bain Nickels and Tracey Bryan hold the CKA® alongside their CFP® credentials.

So if you want your plan to reflect what you have and what you believe, you have two advisors here who are specifically trained to help with that.

Money is a tool. Stewardship gives it direction.