Services
Our Solutions
You've got a mandatory retirement date on the calendar and a lot of moving parts that need to land at the same time. When to take Social Security. How to fill the income gap before it starts. Which survivor benefit to choose with your pension? What to do with the 401(k) (or, as I refer to it, "your joint account with the IRS")? This is what we work on together.
Asset Management
Is your portfolio set up for the life you're actually heading into?
Most people do this backwards. They pick investments first and figure out the plan later. Goal. Plan. Invest. In that order.
The goal tells us what the money has to do. The plan tells us how to get there. The portfolio is built to serve the plan — not the other way around.
I invest in broadly diversified, low-cost exchange-traded funds built on decades of academic research. Global diversification, systematic rebalancing, and no guessing about which stock is going to outperform next quarter. The academic evidence on this is not subtle. Every portfolio is different because every plan is different. Yours won’t look like anyone else’s — because it shouldn’t.
Retirement Income Planning
How do you turn decades of saving into income you can actually live on?
For most of your career, the job was simple: save more, invest it well, repeat. Retirement breaks that model entirely.
Now the question is how to turn a 401k, a PBGC check, and a Social Security decision into a paycheck that lasts 30 years — without paying more tax than necessary or drawing down the wrong account in the wrong order.
That sequence matters more than most people realize. Which account you pull from first, and when, can mean the difference between a manageable tax bill and an ugly one. I build a distribution plan around your specific numbers. Not a template. Your numbers.
Estate Planning
Have you thought through what happens to everything you've built once you're no longer managing it?
Your accounts, your assets, your policy benefits, and your personal property all have to go somewhere. Without a clear plan in place, the people you're trying to protect can end up dealing with a process that is more complicated, more costly, and less reflective of your actual wishes than you intended. We're not estate attorneys, but we work with Wealth.com, a service built specifically for estate planning, to help you put the right documents and structures in place so everything passes the way you intend, to whom you intend, and when. Our part is keeping that plan connected to the rest of your financial picture, so it all moves in the same direction.
Healthcare Planning
Do you know what your healthcare coverage actually looks like once you stop working?
Employer-provided coverage tends to handle the healthcare question quietly throughout your career. Retirement removes that floor. Medicare comes with enrollment timelines, plan types, and coverage decisions that carry real financial consequences if you miss the windows or choose the wrong fit. This is specialized enough that we bring in Move Health, a team that focuses entirely on Medicare and retiree coverage, to walk you through your options, explain what each path covers and what it costs over time, and help you land on the right fit. As a fiduciary who doesn't sell insurance, our role is to coordinate that expertise and keep your coverage decisions connected to the rest of your financial plan.
Tax Planning
Are the financial decisions you're making today creating a tax problem you haven't seen yet?
The years immediately before and after retirement are full of financial decisions that carry tax consequences, some of which don't show up until years later. How you sequence withdrawals, whether and when to consider Roth conversions, and how Social Security or pension timing interacts with your taxable income are not isolated decisions. They affect each other in ways that add up significantly over time. We're not a CPA firm, and we don't prepare returns, but we do think carefully about how your financial choices shape your long-term tax picture. Working alongside your tax professional, we help coordinate a planning approach that accounts for the full scope of what you have and what you're doing with it.
A Direct Line
When I call with a question about your money, who actually picks up?
When you call, there's no phone tree and no hold music. You deal directly with Ed Schweitzer, who manages your money personally, not a call center or a junior associate three steps removed from your accounts. Your time is too valuable to spend getting routed around just to reach someone who can give you a real answer.
About Edward
Meet Edward Schweitzer, CFP®.
Freedom Capital Management was founded by Edward Schweitzer, CFP®, a former airline pilot who spent over a decade at one of the country's top independent investment advisory firms before building a practice around the clients and challenges he understood best.