Retirement expertise.
Personal advice.
Stockbridge specializes in helping individuals and families navigate the years just before and after retirement, when decisions about income, taxes, investments, and lifestyle become increasingly connected.
Stockbridge specializes in serving households with approximately $3 million to $12 million in investable assets who are approaching retirement or have recently retired.
The financial problem changes at retirement.
During your working years, financial progress is largely about earning, saving, investing, and accumulating.
As retirement approaches, a different set of decisions moves to the center of the plan. When can work become optional? How much can you comfortably spend? Which accounts should fund that spending? When should you claim Social Security? How much investment risk do you actually need? Which tax opportunities are worth acting on now?
For many successful families, the challenge is no longer simply accumulating more. It is making better decisions with what they have already built.
Stockbridge was built around those decisions. We coordinate retirement income, taxes, Social Security, investments, and the choices that affect your lifestyle so they support the same retirement plan.
Explore our retirement process →The people who know your plan are the people you work with.
Retirement decisions often involve years of history, family priorities, tax considerations, and tradeoffs that do not fit neatly into a template. We keep the firm intentionally focused so clients work directly with the people responsible for their advice.
Direct access
You know who is building your plan, managing your portfolio, and helping you make decisions.
Continuity
Your financial history and priorities do not have to be re-explained every time something changes.
Time for the decisions that matter
We keep the firm small so there is time for the planning, conversations, and decisions that matter.
Retirement experience from two different perspectives.
One of us studies and teaches retirement for a living. The other has already made the transition. Both remain directly involved with clients.
Eric T. Ludwig, PhD, CFP®, RICP®
Eric started his career as a commercial airline pilot. When September 11 upended the industry, he moved into financial planning, and at a large national firm he was nominated for Financial Advisor of the Year and earned the firm’s top advisor awards.
Then 2008 happened. He watched clients with sound financial plans make expensive decisions during the market collapse because those plans did little to prepare them for what a major loss would actually feel like. That question, why people do what they do with money under pressure, became his doctorate at Kansas State University.
Today he directs the Center for Retirement Income and the RICP® program at The American College of Financial Services, is the author of The Retirement Specialist, and is quoted regularly in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Barron’s. He continues to work directly with Stockbridge clients, bringing the questions that arise in real retirement decisions back into his teaching and research.
Thomas R. Ludwig, CPA
Tom retired from his corporate career in 2014, so he has already made the transition most Stockbridge clients are preparing for. He brings the perspective of a longtime financial executive to every relationship.
Before co-founding Stockbridge, he spent 27 years as Treasurer and Chief Financial Officer of Brakebush Brothers, where he also served on the board, following earlier work in public accounting, financial analysis, and international finance. A Marine Corps veteran with an MBA in finance, he brings a CFO’s eye to the complex pieces of a retirement, including the sale of a business when that is part of the plan.
Tom and Kathy, his high school sweetheart, split time between Wisconsin and Florida. His favorite title is grandfather.
Retirement is what we study, teach, and practice.
Eric’s work directing the RICP® program and the Center for Retirement Income keeps Stockbridge closely connected to the research and professional education shaping retirement planning. That work informs how we evaluate withdrawal strategies, Social Security decisions, taxes, investment risk, and the behavioral side of retirement.
Working directly with clients keeps those ideas grounded in the decisions real families face, particularly when significant accumulated wealth creates more choices, not fewer.
Selection Checklist
Are you getting retirement-specialist advice?
Choosing an advisor for retirement involves a different set of questions than choosing someone to help you accumulate wealth.
Our free Retirement Specialist Selection Checklist provides an 8-step framework for evaluating an advisor. It includes specific questions to ask, credentials to verify, warning signs to watch for, and what to look for in the answers you receive.
Get the free checklistWondering how your retirement is shaping up?
See how your projected resources compare with the lifestyle you want to maintain, then test how changes to retirement age, spending, savings, and other assumptions affect the result. It takes about two minutes.
Think Stockbridge may be a fit?
If you are approaching retirement or have recently retired and want a more coordinated approach to your wealth, tell us a little about your situation and what prompted you to reach out.
See if you’re a fitPrefer to choose a time? Schedule a conversation →
Or text Eric at (920) 550-6550
Stockbridge is built for households with approximately $3 million to $12 million in investable assets.