Advanced Time Segmentation™

Match short-term liabilities with short-term investment strategies, and long-term liabilities with long-term investment strategies. That's it. Read it again and notice there's nothing clever in it. Any advisor would agree with that sentence. Most would say they already do it. But look at how a typical retirement portfolio is actually built — one allocation, one risk score, one withdrawal rate — and ask which liability it's matched to. The answer is all of them at once. The money paying for groceries in March and the money that won't be touched until 2045 sit in the same pool, exposed to the same quarter, subject to the same decision. When that pool drops 18%, the client isn't looking at a long-term allocation. They're looking at the account their income comes from. And they call. Advanced Time Segmentation™ just refuses to let those two liabilities share a container. Near-term income gets matched to assets that can fund it. Long-term growth gets matched to time. Every segment answers a different question about when. None of this is a new idea. It's the oldest idea in liability matching, applied to a household instead of a pension. The reason it's rare is that until recently there was no practical way to build it, show it, and update it for every client without starting from scratch each time.

Within three months of adopting Cetera’s Advanced Time Segmentation™ (ATS) tool, Sean McQueen at Kinnect Advisors was well on his way to increasing his production exponentially. 📈

“I’ve always believed in a time-segmented approach, but ATS gives me something I didn’t have before: a fully compliant, patented software platform that turns that philosophy into a living, flexible document I can actually deliver to clients.” There's a version of this business where you already know the right answer and still can't deliver it. Plenty of advisors have believed in time segmentation for years. The logic isn't obscure — match near-term income to stable assets, give growth assets time, stop forcing clients to sell into weakness. Most experienced advisors arrive at some version of it on their own and try to put it in front of a client. It turns into a whiteboard sketch. Or a spreadsheet they built themselves. Or a conversation that goes well and leaves nothing behind. The philosophy is sound, there's just no artifact — nothing the client can take home, nothing compliance has cleared, nothing that updates when the client's life does. That's the gap Brian Zardavets described when he explained why he moved. Note the word he used - deliver. A philosophy you can explain is worth something. A philosophy the client can hold is worth considerably more.

The question I get most from advisors with annuity-heavy practices: where does the annuity go? Wherever it fits. That's not a dodge... ATS doesn't take a position on products. It takes a position on timing. Each segment answers a question about when the client needs money and what that money has to do while it waits. What you put inside the segment to accomplish that is your call. A lifetime income annuity is a natural fit for the Lifetime Income segment, because that's exactly the job that segment exists to do. Fixed income products fit the near-term paycheck segment. Managed accounts, mutual funds, and alternatives fit wherever their time horizon and behavior make sense. The strategy doesn't change based on what's inside. The structure holds either way. Which matters more than it sounds. It means you don't have to rebuild your practice to use this. You don't have to abandon products you believe in, or adopt ones you don't. Advisors who are 80% advisory and advisors who are 80% brokerage can run the same strategy and produce the same clarity for the client. And it means the client conversation stops being about the products at all. They're no longer evaluating the ins and outs of the annuity, but seeing a segment of their strategy that will provide income for the first 15 years.

Ask an advisor with 200 clients how they explain retirement income, and you'll get 1 answer. Sit in on 10 of their meetings and you'll see 10 versions of it. I wouldn’t call this carelessness, but improvisation. After 25 years you have a good version in your head — and that's the only place it is. What that costs: 👎 Prep time. Every plan built from scratch. 👎 Consistency. Your Thursday afternoon explanation isn't your Tuesday morning one, and the Thursday client doesn't know. 👎 Delegation. You can't hand it to an associate. There's nothing to hand them. 👎 Valuation. A practice that lives in one person's head sells for less. Every buyer knows it. Advisors usually brush this off as “being busy”. What ATS changed for a lot of them wasn't the client conversation but the fact that there was finally one conversation. Same structure, same sequence, whether the client has $400,000 or $4 million. An associate can learn it, meetings get shorter, and what you built stops depending on you being in the room.

Rich finds ATS to be particularly impactful for clients approaching retirement, especially those with disorganized assets or incomplete planning. 💡