Retire on your terms — not the system's defaults
Step-by-step strategies built around your actual work history, marital status, and life stage — so you claim every dollar you've earned and never leave lifetime income on the table.
The rules are the same for everyone — but the strategy has to be built around your life, not a hypothetical couple from a textbook.— Leigh Baumann
What you'll learn
What you'll be able to do
- Determine the optimal age to claim Social Security based on your personal health, work history, and financial situation — avoiding permanent income reductions.
- Identify exactly which spousal, divorced-spouse, or survivor benefits you qualify for and how to claim them strategically to maximize lifetime income.
- Audit your earnings record for gaps or errors caused by career breaks, part-time work, or caregiving years — and understand how to address them before filing.
- Build a tax-efficient withdrawal sequence across pensions, retirement accounts, and Social Security to minimize your tax bill and avoid healthcare premium surcharges.
- Navigate Medicare enrollment deadlines and rules with confidence, avoiding costly permanent premium penalties.
- Create a connected, whole-picture retirement income plan that accounts for your unique marital status, work history, and life stage — not a one-size-fits-all template.
How it works
A school that adapts to you
This isn't a set of static videos. Every lesson is generated live and tuned to where you actually are.
We learn your level
A quick placement check tailors your starting point so you're never bored or lost.
Lessons adapt as you go
Each lesson is written for your pace and your goal, adjusting as your skills grow.
Your AI coach keeps you moving
Checkpoints, feedback, and gentle nudges turn progress into a real result.
The curriculum
What's inside your school
6 modules · 16 lessons
Your Retirement Starting Point: Age, Life Stage, and Personal Circumstances
Establishes the foundational principle that retirement planning is personal — shaped by your age, work history, life stage, and individual circumstances. Students build self-awareness of their own retirement profile before any claiming or strategy decisions are made. This module is deliberately placed first because every subsequent decision depends on understanding your personal starting position.
- 1.1Why Generic Retirement Advice Wasn't Written for Your LifeIncluded
- 1.2How Your Work History Builds — or Limits — Your Retirement BenefitIncluded
- 1.3Auditing Your Earnings Record Before You FileIncluded
Claiming Age and Employment Status: The Timing Decisions That Lock In Your Income
Addresses the two most consequential and irreversible decisions women face at the point of filing: when to claim, and whether they are still working. Students learn exactly how early claiming permanently reduces monthly income, how delayed claiming builds it, and how continuing to work while collecting can trigger the earnings test. Placed after the foundation module because students must understand their personal profile before evaluating timing options.
- 2.1Early, Full, or Delayed: What Claiming Age Really Costs YouIncluded
- 2.2Working While Collecting: The Earnings Test and What It Means for YouIncluded
Marital Status and Benefit Entitlement: Spousal, Divorced-Spouse, and Survivor Strategies
The most structurally complex module in the course — and deliberately so, because marital history creates the widest variation in women's benefit entitlements. Covers the four distinct benefit situations women occupy: married, divorced, widowed, and never married. Each has its own eligibility rules, claiming strategies, and lifetime income implications. Placed after the claiming-age module because spousal and survivor strategies only make full sense once the mechanics of claiming age are understood.
- 3.1Spousal Benefits: What Married Women Are Often Leaving on the TableIncluded
- 3.2Divorced-Spouse Benefits: The Rules, the Eligibility Tests, and the StrategyIncluded
- 3.3Survivor Benefits: Maximizing Lifetime Income After Losing a SpouseIncluded
- 3.4If You Are Single: Building Maximum Income Without a Spousal Safety NetIncluded
Medicare: Enrollment Deadlines, Rules, and Decisions You Cannot Afford to Miss
Treats Medicare as what it is: a separate, deadline-driven decision system with its own rules, windows, and permanent financial penalties for mistakes — not simply an automatic add-on to Social Security. Placed after the Social Security modules because students now understand their income picture, which directly affects Medicare premium calculations (IRMAA). This sequencing allows IRMAA to be taught with full context rather than in isolation.
- 4.1Medicare Enrollment: Windows, Penalties, and the Rules That Catch Women Off GuardIncluded
- 4.2Medicare Coverage Choices and IRMAA: How Your Retirement Income Affects Your PremiumsIncluded
Tax-Efficient Withdrawal Strategy: Keeping More of What You've Saved
Addresses the sequencing and taxation of retirement income withdrawals — a topic that directly affects how much of their saved money women actually keep. Covers the withdrawal order across account types, the Social Security taxation trap, and the strategic use of Roth conversions in the early retirement window. Placed after Medicare because students now understand that their taxable income in retirement drives both their tax bill and their healthcare premiums — giving the tax efficiency lessons their full weight.
- 5.1The Withdrawal Sequence: Why the Order You Draw Down Accounts MattersIncluded
- 5.2Social Security Taxability and the Combined Income TrapIncluded
- 5.3Roth Conversions: Using the Early Retirement Window to Reduce Future TaxesIncluded
Your Connected Retirement Income Plan: Putting It All Together
The integrating capstone module — where students stop studying individual decisions in isolation and build a single, coherent retirement income plan that reflects their personal age, marital status, work history, and life stage. Explicitly maps the connections between every system covered in the course and guides students through assembling their own retirement income blueprint. Placed last because it depends on mastery of all prior modules — students cannot build a connected plan until they understand each of the components it connects.
- 6.1Mapping the Connections: How Social Security, Medicare, Taxes, and Investments InteractIncluded
- 6.2Building Your Personal Retirement Income BlueprintIncluded
Who it's for
Is this you?
The career-break returner
She stepped away from work for caregiving and wants to understand exactly how those zero-income years affect her benefit — and what she can still do about it.
The recently divorced woman
She's rebuilding her financial future solo and needs to know whether divorced-spouse benefits apply to her and how to claim them strategically.
The surviving spouse
She lost her husband and wants a clear, compassionate guide to survivor benefits and how to maximize her income as a widow going forward.
The lifelong single woman
She's always been her own safety net and needs a strategy that builds maximum income without any spousal benefit to fall back on.
The early retirement planner
She's 50 and wants to get ahead of the decisions now — especially Roth conversions, Medicare windows, and the claiming-age math — before options close.
The part-time worker
She spent years working reduced hours and worries her uneven earnings record won't deliver the retirement income she needs — and wants to know the real numbers.
Questions
Frequently asked
Your teacher
A note from your teacher
Leigh Baumann
If you've ever sat across from a financial advisor, nodded along politely, and thought quietly to yourself, "But none of this applies to my situation" — I want you to know that feeling is completely justified. Because for the most part, it didn't.
The retirement planning world was built around a specific model: a man with a continuous, full-time career, a wife who was covered under his benefits, and a couple who retired together at the same time. The rules, the calculators, the advice columns, the Social Security guides — most of them still start from that assumption. And if your life looked different from that picture at any point — a career break, a divorce, years of part-time work, the loss of a spouse, or simply building everything on your own — you've probably felt the gap between the advice you could find and the answer you actually needed.
That gap is exactly what this school exists to close. Not with a watered-down overview that treats you like you can't handle the details, but with a clear, structured walk through the decisions that will determine your income for the rest of your life — decisions about when to claim, which benefits you actually qualify for, how to sequence your withdrawals, and how to navigate Medicare without triggering the penalties that quietly add up for years. Every concept is anchored to real circumstances: your earnings record, your marital history, your work timeline, your life stage right now.
I built this curriculum because I kept seeing the same painful patterns. Women discovering divorced-spouse benefits they'd been eligible for all along. Women who claimed Social Security at 62 because they didn't realize how permanent that reduction was. Women hit with Medicare late-enrollment penalties because no one explained the windows clearly. Women with a pension, an IRA, and Social Security income drawing them down in exactly the wrong order and handing unnecessary money to the IRS every year. These aren't obscure edge cases — they're the normal experience for millions of women navigating a system that wasn't designed with them in mind.
What I want for you is a retirement income plan you actually understand — one where you've looked at your specific numbers, made intentional choices, and know exactly why you made them. Not a plan someone handed you, but one you built. That's what this school is for, and I am genuinely glad you're here.
Come in, start with your earnings record, and let's build your blueprint together.
— Leigh Baumann
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- 6 modules, 16 lessons
- AI-adaptive lessons tuned to your level
- Quizzes & checkpoints to lock in progress
- Your own AI learning coach
- Learn on any device, at your pace
- Full access for as long as you're subscribed