Here’s our latest interview with a millionaire as we seek to learn from those who have grown their wealth to high heights.
If you’d like to be considered for an interview, drop me a note and we can chat about specifics.
This interview took place in September.
My questions are in bold italics and their responses follow in black.
Let’s get started…
OVERVIEW
How old are you (and spouse if applicable, plus how long you’ve been married)?
My spouse is 51 and I am 55.
We have been married for 11 years.
Do you have kids/family (if so, how old are they)?
Yes, we have two children, ages 10 and 8.
What area of the country do you live in (and urban or rural)?
Due to our lines of work, this answer is multifaceted. We are temporarily living in urban Oahu in private military housing.
Our primary residence is in rural northwestern Washington. We tend to move around often for temporary military duty on the mainland, and occasionally at overseas duty stations.
I am domiciled (registered to vote, licensed to drive, vehicle registered) in eastern South Dakota, where we also maintain a permanent mail forwarding address.
My spouse keeps her domicile aligned to our primary residence in northwestern Washington.
What is your current net worth?
Estimated $3.3 million (Jul 2025).
I rounded the constituent figures below to the nearest $50k or $100k to account for market fluctuation between the estimate and the date of publication of this post.
What are the main assets that make up your net worth (stocks, real estate, business, home, retirement accounts, etc.) and any debt that offsets part of these?
Joint brokerage account: $1,200,000 to $1,400,000. 97-99% in stock/ETFs, 1-3% in the sweep account.
Roth IRA / Roth TSP accounts: $1,100,000. 55% in fixed rate deferred annuities, 35% in stock/ETFs, 10% in money market funds.
The deferred annuity contracts will complete their guaranteed rate periods by the time I am 60/61, when I will direct roll over the amounts back into my Roth brokerage account for our distribution plan.
Primary residence in Washington: $750,000 to $850,000. We hold no mortgage or home equity line of credit balance on our property, although we are evaluating home equity conversion mortgage options for when I am age 62.
Traditional IRA account: $100,000. 100% fixed rate deferred annuity, expecting to incrementally convert this contract to Roth between now and (my) age 60, and then direct roll over back into a Roth brokerage account on the programmatic distribution plan.
In addition to the above intangible assets, we also estimate net present valuations of $2M on our future protected income streams:
- U. S. military pension (starting age 57, and to be reduced 6.5% as premium paid for a 55% survivor benefit pension, spouse): est. $1.3M.
- Social Security OASI (to be claimed on my work record at age 70 for delayed credits, plus a spousal benefit): est. $500k.
- Department of VA compensation (starting age 57, not taxable): est. $250k.
We have no offsetting debt.
EARN
What is your job?
U. S. Navy, active component mid-1990s for 4 yrs, inactive reserve 13 yr break in service, active reserve component 15 yrs. I serve at the Senior Officer level.
During a break in military service, and since then, when not on active duty orders as a reservist, I am a software engineer. I am effective at the intermediate level as an individual contributor or as a technical lead of a small team.
I am retooling my skills for an encore career as a part-time pro bono or fee only personal financial planner for active, reserve, and retired military.
My spouse is a former management consultant who is now a photography educator. She develops virtual training courses, occasional in-person travel seminars, and sells a few photos.
What is your annual income?
Our annual earned income can vary from $50,000 to $300,000.
The wide range is due to how many months of active duty I serve in a given year, my place of duty, and my spouse’s photography engagements.
Tell us about your income performance over time. What was the starting salary of your first job, how did it grow from there (and what you did to make it grow), and where are you now?
My first full-time (military) annual salary (base pay) was around $22,000.
You may/not realize that my net earned income was higher than base pay alone, due to the receipt of tax-free entitlements for housing and subsistence, and any geographical COLA adjustments. Five years later, and after I transitioned out of the active component, my first full-time private sector annual salary was $42,000.
Over the 9 years that I worked in that first private sector job in eastern Massachusetts, my annual pay grew to around $85,000. In 2009-2011, I held a software consulting job in the National Capital Region with salary between $85,000 and $92,000, at that time I had just returned to military service part-time.
Between long-term active military orders 2012 and 2017, I held another private sector software job, this time in the SF Bay Area, and my salary reflected that move, $215,000 in 2015-2016. That was my salary high-water mark in wage-indexed terms.
What tips do you have for others who want to grow their career-related income?
I am the wrong guy to ask about tips to grow earned income. I learned to plan financial freedom in the absence of any high-growth career track.
Sidebar on military service: about half the people I meet (my spouse included in that cohort) express wide-eyed astonishment upon learning that half of my working years have been penetrated by service to a government agency. My spouse was clear with me that she has never and would never work for any government, foreign or US, federal, state or local.
Apart from making the most of it (see below paragraph), my connection to my tribe — the United States Navy — is not something that I can easily craft into words for consumption by those who have not served in uniform, military or other public sector.
My 13-year break in service and ultimate return duty should be evidence enough that it’s a lifestyle and professional choice that I have made for deeply personal reasons unrelated to the exceptional non-salaried benefits afforded those of us who serve in uniform. I don’t ever forget that I serve the People of the Nation, so I don’t inject this non-topical note here to distance myself from the People.
On the contrary, I’m trying to proactively answer the questions that I expect to receive here about my decision to serve. I know there are a few former Sailors in the ESI tribe, having read their interviews and comments.
I will share in more detail here that if you are (military) service inclined or even just interested, my experience in and out of the military as a part-time (Reservist) has afforded me the advantage of having both benefits for government service (tax efficient albeit lower income, entitlement eventually to a COLA-hinged government backed pension, cost effective health, disability, life and longevity insurance coverage, and disability compensation for conditions incurred or aggravated while in service) and higher salaries and equity option plans for private sector tech employment.
I have truly enjoyed broad flexibility in both my public and private sector work, I took a temporary early retirement for a few years as a single veteran, and each break in service between periods of active service has felt like a mini retirement where I could reintegrate with family and prioritize a long family trip, or two.
What’s your work-life balance look like?
Right now, it’s reasonably balanced for me.
My spouse has endured periods of acute work-life imbalance due to resuming her photography career after our children entered their school years.
Do you have any sources of income besides your career? If so, can you list them, give us a feel for how much you earn with each, and offer some insight into how you developed them?
We have no source of earned income outside of our current lines of work.
My spouse has expressed interest in managing vacation rental properties, while I aim to dissuade her of that tack on the basis that it will detract from her travel-centric photography practice.
SAVE
What is your annual spending?
Estimated mid 2024 – mid-2025: $75,000, after withholding income taxes paid through my paycheck.
I won’t start tracking income taxes paid as spending until my earned income stops flowing to me.
What are the main categories (expenses) this spending breaks into?
- Travel (includes food/dining & energy, when away from home area): $30k
- Maintenance (vehicle & home, includes small projects/purchases): $14k
- Food (includes dining out in home area): $12k+
- Energy (at home, and fuel for local trips/camping/hiking): $6k
- Books, games, toys, miscellaneous gifts: $4k
- Property tax: $4k
- Insurance (health) and medical expenditures: $3k
- Insurance (other): $2k
Excluded/irregular spending categories that vary widely depending on my duty status and our location abroad or at home, and often funded directly by my spouse:
- Entertainment: $4k
- Non-food essentials (hygiene, cosmetics): $2-4k
- Charity: $1k
Do you have a budget? If so, how do you implement it?
We don’t have an explicit spending budget beyond rough statistics divined from reviewing credit card account statements.
If we were to have a budget, I would have to create it and invest a non-trivial amount of energy enforcing it, ha.
What percentage of your gross income do you save and how has that changed over time?
We are currently saving at least 22% of our gross income. This is significantly lower than the rate at which I was saving (over 50% of my single W2 earner gross income) two decades ago.
I estimate that 22% is higher than my spouse’s single earner former savings rate. My expenses historically tended to significantly fall short of my modest earnings.
My spouse’s earnings historically tended to significantly overrun her ample expenses. One of our ongoing challenges in marriage has been what I’ll characterize here as “reconciling household balance sheet dissonance”, heh.
We do somehow manage to keep trained on the downrange targets, and our future income distributions remain on-plan. With pay raises coming in Oct 2025 (promotion) and then Jan 2026 (annual military pay raise), we expect to increase our savings rate above 25% of our gross income.
I also must note that not all of the 22% saving is siloed downrange (retirement, education, long term care, legacy bequests). Some slice of our monthly saving is earmarked for a tactical account that funds our next major travel trip.
What’s your best tip for saving (accumulating) money?
My color on this tip: programmatically increase one’s savings rate to the point of marginal discomfort. This is the household savings equivalent of resistance training in the gym.
My spouse’s color on this tip: focus on the high-dollar projects and top-line concerns. Let spending, saving and other bottom-line concerns resolve themselves on an improvisational basis relative to income.
What’s your best tip for spending less money?
I may have to attribute this tip to Mr. David Ramsey. Although I have not more than scanned his work or his stepwise personal financial advice, many of his teaching points resonate with how I have historically executed personal financial tasks.
Bucketing routine spending into cash management categories has reliably regulated my spending at the times when I needed that “envelope discipline”.
I won’t attempt to reverse engineer my spouse’s best tip. The question is nearly anathema to her relationship with money.
What is your favorite thing to spend money on/your secret splurge?
High-grade, loose-leaf pu-erh cha (Chinese “red” tea); and historical wargames of the paper map and cardboard chit variety.
Spouse: High-end designer-branded ladies’ handbags.
INVEST
What is your investment philosophy/plan?
Learned through my experience as a Navy/Joint operational planner, I curate from the joint principles of war the following principles of household investment management. In defense (war) planning, ten or twelve principles prevail, but these are the four that I have internalized for our financial planning purposes…
OBJECTIVE “selection and maintenance of the aim”
- Know yourself and know what you want. This is the prerequisite to any viable investment/financial plan.
- Thereafter, keep yourself on-plan through diligent, periodic reviews. The armed forces refer to this as after-action reporting and plan assessment.
SECURITY “maintenance of an operating environment with freedom of action”
- Enumerate your risks. Prioritize and build management of those risks into your investment/financial plan.
- Execute your plan from a base of (relative) security under the risks you have accepted.
UNITY OF COMMAND “cooperation/incorporation of teamwork”
- Get on the same planning page as your spouse and other family members. Clarify what you will execute yourself and what you will delegate to financial services and legal professionals.
- Succession of command is a key point, i.e. a comprehensive estate plan with beneficiary designations and executor assignments.
SIMPLICITY “clear/understandable plans beget successful execution”
- As with military affairs, everything in personal finance can be very simple but the simplest thing is still difficult to sustain. (Clausewitz for portfolio management.)
- Arrange your plan and other financial affairs to maximize understanding and minimize confusion. Write standard operating manuals for specific accounts and related areas of your plan.
- On financial product evaluation, remember that complexity is roughly proportional to expense (to you).
With the above personal financial planning philosophy presented, I move on with implementation and execution.
Our retirement income planning objective was gross $10k/month [2013 US dollars]. I use a 3.2% annual price inflation planning factor.
My spouse was comfortable with that objective as a point of departure, with my concurrence that we would aspire to at least gross $20k/month [2013 USD].
In the intervening years, I have routinely reverse engineered our projected retirement income streams into a retirement income blueprint.
As an overview of how this plan has (ideally will have) unfolded for us, here are two snapshots at my ages 60 and 70. I chose those two points because that is when our Roth and OASI streams first flow, respectively.
Age 60 (spouse 56), objective baseline $17k/month, aspirational lifestyle $34k/month [2030 US dollars]:
Est. $18,800/mo.
- US military pension payment: $7,600
- Brokerage (qualified) dividend withdrawal: $5,800
- Roth IRA distribution: $2,900
- VA compensation payment: $2,500
Age 70 (spouse 66), objective baseline $23.5k/month, aspirational lifestyle $47k/month [2040 US dollars]:
Est. $28,700/mo.
- US military pension payment: $10,500
- Brokerage (qual.) dividend withdrawal: $7,900
- Roth IRA distribution: $3,900
- VA compensation payment: $3,400
- Social Security OASI benefits: $3,000*
Notes and assumptions around the above figures:
* both the brokerage and Roth portfolio withdrawal rates start around 3% and decline from there (because the allocation has an expected mean return that exceeds the inflation planning factor) — I overtly plan for such a conservative withdrawal rate to give us contingency space for surge or spike withdrawals to satisfy my spouse’s aspirational lifestyle income goal, i.e. we could cover episodically anything that her encore photography practice does not sustain organically.
* The VA compensation could notch higher faster if my rated partial disability increases in the next 5-15 years.
* I don’t have a solid calculation on my work record with the SSA yet because these last 1 or 2 years of full time Navy employment will fall among the top 5 earning years of my AWI-adjusted earnings over 35 years. The figure includes an estimate of my spouse’s claim on my age-67 normal retirement PIA.
Finally, I have been conservative (rounded down to nearest $1k/month) with this estimate to account for recent OASDI Annual Trustees Reports indicating that the program will be able to self-fund only 77-78% of benefits in the coming years, c. 2033.
What has been your best investment?
Vanguard Total U. S. Stock Index ETF purchased c. 2020. Roughly, my spouse and I each purchased new shares of VTI in March/April 2020 at between 110 and 130/sh, with an internal rate of return of at least 20% annually over the past 5+ years.
This is unlikely our best single investment over a comparable holding period, but I highlight it here as it’s the gain that I’m most comfortable with as an index ETF.
What has been your worst investment?
Washington Mutual (WaMu) common stock purchased c. 2007.
I recall this was a $10,000 investment from which I salvaged around $30-40. I let my loser ride almost all the way down.
What’s been your overall return?
6.5% to 7% (nominal), 3.5% to 4% (real). As we approach full family retirement and I angle to mitigate sequence risk (especially in our Roth accounts), our overall portfolio return has faced a mild headwind in the form of fixed income yields (those fixed rate deferred annuities), in the 2.5% to 3% (real) range in recent years.
At steady state (accounting for post-sequence risk allocation and mean reversion from high equity multiples), I am roughly planning to see 7-8% nominal (4-5% real) across our portfolio. In a protracted adverse global equity climate, as noted in an earlier answer we have enough play in our portfolio withdrawal rate that we can accommodate lower-growing equity dividend payouts for several years, perhaps even a decade.
How often do you monitor/review your portfolio?
I spot check our portfolio weekly if I have a limit order pending.
Otherwise, I will conduct quarterly or annual reviews of allocation slices, with minor rebalancing as required.
NET WORTH
How did you accumulate your net worth?
Due to our marriage relatively later in our years (ESI-wise), this answer has 3 parts and I can only hold forth reliably on 2 of those 3 parts.
#1. My accumulation journey is summarized as family, education, gamification and luck. I earned bachelor’s and (later) master’s degrees from highly rated universities.
My bachelor’s degree was funded by a Navy ROTC scholarship (tuition, books, stipend), working for an hourly wage at my university’s interlibrary loan department (spending money) and my paternal grandfather (room and board). I had a 0% Federal Stafford loan of $2,000 when I graduated and commissioned as an Ensign in the U. S. Navy. I paid off that loan within 2 or 3 monthly pay periods at my first Navy training station.
I have since learned that I could have deferred 0% repayment of that loan throughout my period of duty in the active component. I carry no regret on this decision, but it would be the first in my battery of tactical financial errors.
#2. My spouse’s accumulation journey is lost to the mysteries of an overseas upbringing and early career.
She earned an MBA at a highly rated program in the U. S. She held high-income management consultant positions for a few years, developed her passion for global travel, and encountered a few health problems that compelled her to transition into photography, first as a family portrait photographer and now as a travel photography seminar leader and travel and landscape photography educator.
#3. Our accumulation journey over the past decade+ together. We have been routinely saving (when I am on active duty orders), we managed to have a few overseas family trips in between my periods of duty, and are now just generally refining and simplifying our retirement income plan.
Yet to accomplish: living and testamentary documents for my spouse, and our special needs plan documents for our younger son. I should also note here that none of our accumulation factors in expected future (modest) inheritance.
(I did receive $10,000 / year, over three years in the late 1990s as my paternal grandfather made some early distributions to his beneficiaries prior to his death in 2008. Those amounts went directly into my long-term retirement accumulation program, Traditional and Roth IRAs first, then the non-qualified index/mutual fund accounts.)
What would you say is your greatest strength in the ESI wealth-building model (Earn, Save or Invest) and why would you say it’s tops?
For my spouse, Earn, Save, Invest in that order.
For me, Save, Invest, Earn. And I will include in the Save element an acute sense of optimizing Federal income tax planning.
What road bumps did you face along the way to becoming a millionaire and how did you handle them?
Market bumps:
- 1997-98 Asian financial crisis: I rode it out.
- 2000-01 Dot com stock market bubble and crash: I rode it out, no change in investment contribution plan or security/sector allocation.
- 2008 global financial crisis (GFC): I purchased some securities on the way down, then I rode it out (one of my positions in the financial sector fell to nearly zero).
- 2020 pandemic stock market crash: we purchased some securities on the way down, then I rode it out.
Career/personal bumps:
- I retired (first time) as a single, took 2-3 years to visit friends, road trip, bike, hike, study sustainable living, and ruminated on the idea of turning a hobby software coding project into a business. I then worked for a few years as a paid consultant as part of the hobby project (neither angle panned out).
- I returned to the Navy as a selected Reservist (part-time military), when I met my future wife (who was/is not in the Navy).
- Shortly thereafter, I returned to the full-time work force for another career pump, as our combined expenses had outstripped the spending plan that was the basis for my single retirement 8 years prior.
What are you currently doing to maintain/grow your net worth?
Other than a year or two of Navy career remaining, with high savings rate contributions to Roth TSP and to our Roth IRAs, we are mostly in net worth maintenance mode.
We may be selling the primary residence on the Olympic Peninsula to move somewhere after I retire from the Navy in Hawaii (unlikely to stay in HI).
Do you have a target net worth you are trying to attain?
We don’t have a hard target net worth.
Instead, our family financial planning has focused on 1) maintaining a steady annual increase in planned retirement income (both the protected income and portfolio withdrawal streams) using a 3.2% inflation planning factor, 2) preparing a funding plan for two special needs trusts and an ABLE account for our younger son, 3) streamlining end of life / long term care planning and squaring away our living and testamentary estate documents and beneficiary designations, and 4) calibrating our legacy charitable goals around the above three focus points.
How old were you when you made your first million and have you had any significant behavior shifts since then?
Our est. $1M net worth milestone was marked in the latter half of 2014, I was age 45, spouse was 41. In terms of the source, this was a fairly even three way split between cash savings/brokerage account, my Traditional IRA (rollover 401(k)), and my Roth IRA.
I have not noticed step changes in behavior since the $1M mark, though I’m sure my behavior has naturally migrated through my age 45-55 window. We did buy a home with cash-only at ages 50/51, which was a pattern departure for both of us.
What personal habits and/or traits have you developed that have made you successful at growing your net worth?
My patience and resilience are strong partners with my long-term outlook. Including my optimism of living a long life, these are key success factors in our savings and investment plan.
I readily recall using spreadsheet forecasting to calibrate my investment trajectory with my long term plan goals. At every opportunity, I looked to decrease my spending, increase my savings rate, and make annual income tax optimizations, such as Traditional to Roth IRA partial conversions starting in 1998.
What money mistakes have you made along the way that others can learn from?
The mixed downside of my patience and resilience is that with my securities, I tend to let both winners >and
With the exception of WaMu (near total loss), I held on and did not lose principal in those holdings, but I most certainly underperformed relative to our now broad market index holdings had I not allowed the income taxation tail to wag my asset allocation dog at that time.
What advice do you have for ESI Money readers on how to become wealthy?
Starting in late teens and early twenties, a wealth aspirant should visualize her/his financial life course as a steady and reliable transfer of human capital to financial capital. The unspoken expectation is that one must be clear with oneself on one’s personal wealth objective.
When one starts early enough, the rate of human capital transfer matters materially less than one’s prudent and deliberate handling of financial capital in a plan calibrated first to one’s risk capacity and thereafter to one’s risk tolerance. Retain a reserve of human capital (don’t retire too late) in order to properly enjoy income streams from your financial capital.
FUTURE
What are your plans for the future regarding lifestyle?
The single retirement (for me) was early, age 36. The family retirement will be near the median: I will be age 58, my spouse age 55.
My spouse has already commenced her encore career, and my encore career may end up better characterized as a durable volunteer engagement with fellow Servicemembers and Veterans.
What are your retirement plans?
We intend to right-size our primary residence.
We plan significant travel for 10-20 years into retirement, health permitting.
Are there any issues in retirement that concern you? If so, how are you planning to address them?
Our long-term care plan remains unsettled, beyond funding it by default from our general income streams. I am researching insurance products to cover some of my — and most of my spouse’s — expected long-term care liability.
Our special needs plan (for our younger son) is roughly laid down, but it remains unexecuted. We have not interviewed attorneys or set up trusts and accounts.
MISCELLANEOUS
How did you learn about finances and at what age did it “click”?
For me, it started with “paper trading” stocks and commodities in middle school, followed by closely observing how my high school Advanced Placement chemistry teacher handled the 1987 stock market crash. My personal savings were entirely in time deposits throughout my secondary education.
In college, I had a Navy ROTC senior instructor who directed us midshipmen to follow a simple regimen to track every single penny — including cash transactions — every month for the semester. I haven’t faithfully followed his system throughout my life, but the clarity and routine have stuck with me to this day.
For me, that’s when It Clicked(tm), and I was empowered to always track and optimize my personal finances, the challenges of my family expenses notwithstanding. My drive to optimize income tax also stemmed from that NROTC instructor’s training module on personal financial accountability.
(I prepare my tax returns to the nearest dollar; I gave up the cent-wise tracking in the 20th century.)
Who inspired you to excel in life? Who are your heroes?
For real: my family, and notably my paternal grandfather.
For fun: Col Steve Austin of the Office of Strategic Intelligence (mid-1970s TV serial The Six Million Dollar Man).
Do you have any favorite money books you like/recommend? If so, can you share with us your top three and why you like them?
I am sharing these three books primarily for their residual value, having read all of them several times each. Presented in the order in which I first read them:
Your Money Or Your Life, Dominguez/Robin; 1992. I borrowed this book from my mom in the mid-1990s, around the time I was transitioning from active duty to “CIVLANT” (as we Sailors called it back then).
I was hyper-focused on managing my IRA and brokerage accounts at that time, mainly due to the uncertainty around when I would land my first post-Navy job (my last Navy paycheck on terminal leave was October 1997, and I started a software job in February 1998).
The Dominguez/Robin book centered me in the prospect of calibrating my expenses to both my income and my accumulated savings and investments.
Fooled By Randomness, Taleb; 2004. I read this book twice in the year or so before I resigned from that first post-Navy job.
In concert with some of the lessons I was self-learning from managing my retirement account holdings at the time, I really internalized Taleb’s points on how much luck gets a vote in the short and intermediate term returns that one enjoys/endures in one’s portfolio.
I continued to be challenged by my own hubris in dividend-paying stock selection (mediocre), but reading Taleb helped me to eventually and fully embrace the inner index investor I had attempted to dismiss for a few years.
Value Averaging, Edleson; 1993. In my several intense periods of spreadsheet personal financial planning over the past several decades, Edleson’s book resonates with the contrarian streak in me.
Having been conventionally instructed in cost-averaging programmatic contributions to an investment program, Edleson’s value-averaging approach was in perfect pitch with the larger tranches of savings that I had as an early-retired single guy in the late 2000s. Value averaging very much feeds my drive to plan smooth retirement account balance trajectories.
I continue to use these concepts today as I plan smoothed distributions from 5 or 6 diverse income streams for our family’s retirement.
Do you give to charity? Why or why not? If you do, what percent of time/money do you give?
We episodically make anonymous cash contributions to local causes (shelters or veteran facilities), but currently, we don’t have a programmatic charitable giving plan installed. In general, I hesitate to contribute to large charitable causes that have significant organizational overhead.
My hesitation in this regard is from much the same internal driver that compels me to seek low expense ratio broad market index securities. With a charitable program to be ultimately executed by whichever of us is the surviving spouse, I do intend to arrange significant (but still anonymous) contributions to the Navy Marine Corps Relief Society and to the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program at my undergraduate alma mater.
My spouse intends to arrange contributions to her MBA alma mater and a few other causes important to her.
Do you plan to leave an inheritance for your heirs (how do you plan to distribute your wealth at your death)? What are your reasons behind this plan?
The particulars are not finalized due to the special needs factors yet to be arranged. Roughly, our two sons will receive an appropriate share of our joint brokerage account and enjoy the step-up basis through a shares in-kind beneficiary designation.
They will also receive a similar share of our remaining Roth account. In both cases, our special needs son’s third-party special needs trust will receive the inherited fund shares.
On the reasonable planning assumption that I may predecease my spouse, she will receive 55% of my COLA-adjusted U. S. military pension through a deferred income annuity called the Survivor Benefit Plan. I will also include my two sons as contingent beneficiaries of the Survivor Benefit Plan, though my older son will most likely not be eligible to receive the benefit upon my spouse’s death.
However, my younger son (special needs) at whatever age may still be a legal dependent of my spouse before her death, in which case he will remain eligible to receive the Survivor Benefit Plan annuity.
In order to preserve his eligibility for any government benefits he may still be receiving at that time, the annuity payments will pass directly to our son’s first-party special needs trust.
