We believe you deserve to dream with confidence.
Empowering families to live their best life with confidence, freedom, and purpose is the idea behind everything Confidence Financial Partners does — and it's the idea behind Retire with Confidence. The book follows a fictional couple through the same Confidence Retirement Pathway™ our advisors use every day.
About the Book
One couple. Every decision you're about to face.
Retire with Confidence follows Mark and Denise, a fictional couple standing at the edge of retirement with a familiar mix of excitement and unease. On paper, they've done everything right. In practice, they're carrying risks they can't see: a portfolio with little downside protection, assets that were never built to produce stable lifetime income, a surviving-spouse gap that would cut Denise's pension and Social Security if Mark passed first, and a tax bill quietly compounding in the background.
Chapter by chapter, Mark and Denise work through the same process Confidence Financial Partners uses with real families every day — addressed one world at a time, below — so readers can walk it with their own numbers.
The Confidence Retirement Pathway™
The five worlds Mark and Denise had to get right
Confidence Financial Partners built this framework around the idea that true retirement confidence comes from addressing every dimension of your financial life, not just investments.1
Income
Turning savings into income that lasts, without relying on an unstable portfolio to behave like a paycheck.
Investments
Building in downside protection so a market downturn early in retirement doesn't derail the whole plan.
Taxes
Sorting accounts by how — and whether — they'll be taxed later, before the bill comes due.
Health Care
Planning around Medicare, IRMAA, and the cost of long-term care — including options like asset-based long-term care coverage — before it becomes an urgent decision.
Legacy
Protecting a surviving spouse's income and passing on assets with intention, not by default.
Resource Library
Tax Triangle Worksheet
The fillable worksheet from the book — sort your accounts into Always Taxed, Sometimes Taxed, and Never Taxed Again.
Download Worksheet (PDF) →
IRMAA Sliding Scale Tables
The Social Security Administration's official income brackets showing exactly how MAGI determines your Medicare Part B and Part D surcharge (IRMAA) — straight from the source.
View Tables on SSA.gov →Because You Are Loved: Family Legacy Organizer
A comprehensive organizer by Dr. Brian Kluth for recording the household, financial, medical, and estate details your loved ones would otherwise have to piece together on their own.
Download the Organizer (PDF) →Meet the Team
Confidence Team
Retire with Confidence draws on the combined experience of the whole team behind Confidence Financial Partners, not just its author.
Chris Abeyta founded Confidence Financial Partners around a simple mission: helping families move into the second half of life with clarity, confidence, and care. As part of a team of CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER® professionals and fiduciaries, Chris and his team built the Confidence Retirement Pathway™ to address every dimension of retirement — not just investments — and wrote Retire with Confidence so more families could walk through that same process. We don't want others to walk through it on their own — we want to understand the process and help them.
Dustin West co-founded Confidence Financial Partners alongside Chris and was a major contributor behind the ideas in Retire with Confidence. Dustin's own passion for helping people build a clear financial plan for the future shaped much of the thinking behind the book's approach to retirement planning.
The Rest of the Confidence Team
Susan Auer
CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER®, NSSA® & Wealth Advisor
Ray Hart
CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER®, RICP®, MBA, AAMS® & Wealth Advisor
Mike Hartman
CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER®, CRPC® & Wealth Advisor
Tyler Tingstrom
Wealth Advisor
Stacy Hollingsworth
Client Service Specialist
Brandy Bartlett
Office Manager
Taryn Hardman
Front Office Coordinator
Rashelle Harbour
Client Experience & Marketing Coordinator
Kathy Van Doorn
Business Processor
Judy Marquez
Business Processor
Featured video resources
Confidence Retirement Pathway
An overview of the framework behind the book — and behind every plan Confidence Financial Partners builds.
Annuities Explained
A plain-language look at how annuities work and where they can fit into a retirement income plan.
Life Stage Planning & The Retirement Danger Zone
Why the years right around retirement carry outsized risk — and how life-stage planning helps protect them.
Do You Have a Tax Timebomb?
A closer look at how to tell whether your own accounts are carrying the same risk Mark and Denise faced.
3 Basket Allocation Strategy
A simple way to think about dividing retirement assets by when and how you'll need to use them.
Asset Based Long-Term Care
How asset-based long-term care solutions work as an alternative to traditional long-term care insurance.
The Time, Health & Wealth Balance
Why the right retirement age is about more than your account balance.
Understanding the Tax Triangle
The three ways your money gets taxed — and why it matters where yours sits.
📉 Markets are volatile—but your strategy doesn't have to be.
In this quick breakdown, Chris Abeyta explains how we help clients think about their money across three key areas: Safety, Income, and Growth.
Learn about the Time, Health, Wealth Triangle with Chris Abeyta
In this video, we explore the "Time-Health-Wealth Triangle" and why it's crucial to make the most of these elements when they align.
Retirement Danger Zone with Chris Abeyta
Welcome to the "Retirement Danger Zone"—the critical period when your hard-earned nest egg is at its peak, but also most vulnerable.
Listen In
The Confidence Podcast
Go deeper on the ideas from the book with these episodes from the Confidence Financial Partners podcast.
The Tax Time Bomb
How deferred accounts can turn into a bigger tax bill than expected — and how to defuse it.
Financial Life Stages and the Retirement Danger Zone
A conversation about how risk changes across each stage of life — and why retirement is the highest-stakes stage of all.
Confidence Retirement Pathway
The team talks through how the Pathway framework came together and how it's used with real clients.
3 Basket Strategy
A conversational take on the 3 Basket approach to allocating retirement assets.
Asset Based Long-Term Care
A closer discussion of how asset-based long-term care solutions work and who they tend to fit best.
Access the first five chapters
Read the first five chapters of Retire with Confidence and get access to the audiobook, on us.
Access the First Five ChaptersLet's Talk
Learn more about Confidence Financial Partners today!
Learn more about Confidence Financial Partners from one of our Advisors. Call us at (719) 960-4307 or email us at info@confidencefps.com.
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