The Five-Lock Strategy for a Smarter Retirement
You spent decades building your retirement savings. Now learn how to turn what you’ve accumulated into income you can actually live on.
Discover how to approach the transition from building wealth to living from it while balancing income, growth, protection, taxes, and access to your money.
Watch this first to learn what the masterclass coversWatch this first to learn what the masterclass covers and how it can help you.
EFC Wealth Group Legacy
With more than 30 years of experience in financial services, I understand that preparing for retirement involves more than building wealth. It also means thinking about how your savings may support your income needs, manage risk, account for taxes, and remain accessible throughout retirement.
A Smarter Approach to What Comes Next
Accumulating Wealth Was the First Step.
Distributing It Is the Next Challenge.
Retirement brings a different set of financial questions. The focus shifts from building your savings to understanding how those savings may support your lifestyle, provide income, manage risk, account for taxes, and remain accessible when you need them.
The goal is to understand how the different parts of your financial picture may work together in this next stage of life.
You spent years working, saving, and building your retirement nest egg. But saving for retirement and living in retirement are two different challenges.
Create Reliable Income
Understand how your retirement savings and other financial resources may help support your living expenses when your regular paycheck stops.
Protect What You’ve Built
Explore why retirement planning involves more than investment returns, including the role of safety and managing risk as you begin using your savings.
Be More Tax Efficient
Understand why taxes matter when deciding where retirement income comes from and how different assets may fit into your overall strategy.
Maintain Flexibility for the Future
Consider why accessible cash and flexibility can matter when preparing for retirement expenses, changing needs, and unexpected costs.
THE CODE 2 RETIREMENT FRAMEWORK
What Is Code 2 Retirement?
What Is Code 2 Retirement?
Code 2 Retirement is the framework I use to help organize retirement around what your money needs to do, not just what it has done. Over the years, it's helped many individuals and families better understand how their savings can support retirement income, identify potential gaps and risks, and see how taxes, safety, liquidity, and growth all fit together. Instead of looking at separate accounts and hoping they'll be enough, this framework provides a clearer way to give every dollar a purpose and build a more coordinated retirement strategy.
THE FIVE LOCKS
A Smarter Retirement Starts With These Five Locks
At the heart of this framework is what I call the Five-Lock Strategy. Each lock addresses a different part of retirement planning, from keeping cash accessible and managing taxes to protecting against market risk, creating retirement income, and positioning money for long-term growth.
The real value isn't in any one lock, but in how all five work together. Retirement requires your money to serve different purposes at the same time. Understanding these five areas can help you make more informed decisions, identify potential gaps, and build a more coordinated retirement strategy.
GROWTH
Growth keeps part of your portfolio working for the future and helps address inflation over time.
INCOME
Reliable retirement cash flow helps support the lifestyle you want your money to provide.
SAFETY
Protection matters when market volatility and sequence risk can affect retirement outcomes.
TAXES
A smarter withdrawal strategy can help reduce tax drag and keep more of what you've built.
CASH
Accessible reserves for spending, flexibility, and the unexpected.
Code 2 Retirement is about helping these five locks work together, not as separate ideas, but as one coordinated retirement strategy. This masterclass is designed to help you see how the pieces fit together.
Inside the Code to Retirement Masterclass
A Clearer Way to Think About
Your Retirement Savings
Discover what changes when you move from accumulating wealth to distributing it, why managing investments is different from managing retirement, and how the Code to Retirement Five-Lock Strategy can help organize the questions worth considering.
The Shift From Accumulation to Distribution
Understand why the approach that helped you build your savings may need to change when those savings become a source of retirement income.
The Shift From Accumulation to Distribution
Understand why the approach that helped you build your savings may need to change when those savings become a source of retirement income.
Managing Investments vs. Managing Retirement
Explore why retirement planning involves more than investment performance, including income needs, market risk, taxes, and how the different parts of your financial picture work together.
Managing Investments vs. Managing Retirement
Explore why retirement planning involves more than investment performance, including income needs, market risk, taxes, and how the different parts of your financial picture work together.
Understanding the Retirement Income Challenge
Learn why the gap between retirement expenses and dependable income matters, and how market downturns can affect withdrawals from your savings.
Understanding the Retirement Income Challenge
Learn why the gap between retirement expenses and dependable income matters, and how market downturns can affect withdrawals from your savings.
Introducing the Code to Retirement Five-Lock Strategy
Discover the five areas I consider when thinking about retirement: growth, income, safety, taxes, and cash.
Introducing the Code to Retirement Five-Lock Strategy
Discover the five areas I consider when thinking about retirement: growth, income, safety, taxes, and cash.
Bringing the Five Locks Together
See how growth, income, safety, taxes, and cash fit into a broader conversation about preparing your financial resources for retirement.
Bringing the Five Locks Together
See how growth, income, safety, taxes, and cash fit into a broader conversation about preparing your financial resources for retirement.
By the end of this masterclass, you’ll have a clearer picture of the transition from accumulating wealth to distributing it, why retirement requires more than managing investments, and how growth, income, safety, taxes, and cash fit into the Code to Retirement Five-Lock Strategy. You’ll be better equipped to ask informed questions about how your retirement savings may need to work together in the years ahead.
What Happens If the Market Drops After You Retire?
A market downturn can feel very different when you’re retired than when you’re still earning a paycheck.
When you’re withdrawing money from your investments to cover living expenses, the timing of market losses can affect how long your savings may last. Selling investments during a downturn to fund withdrawals can make it harder for your portfolio to recover.
That’s why retirement planning involves more than choosing investments.
You also need to think about where your income will come from, which assets need to keep growing, and how safety and accessible cash fit into your overall strategy.
You can’t control market performance, but you can make more informed decisions about how your retirement income and investments work together.
Is This Where You Are in Your Retirement Journey?
You’ve worked hard to build your retirement savings. Now you may be wondering how to turn those years of saving into a retirement strategy that makes sense for the next stage of your life.
You’re approaching retirement and wondering how your savings will support your lifestyle.
You’re already retired and thinking about where your income should come from.
You’re concerned about how market downturns could affect your retirement withdrawals.
You want to understand how growth, income, safety, taxes, and cash fit together.
You want to make more informed decisions about your retirement savings.
If any of these questions sound familiar, this masterclass will help you understand the key considerations involved in moving from accumulating wealth to distributing it.
I’m Cory Chapman.
For more than 30 years, I’ve worked in financial services helping successful professionals, business owners, and families prepare for one of the biggest transitions of their financial lives:
Moving from accumulation into distribution.
I founded EFC Wealth Management, which grew to more than $100 million in assets under care, and I’ve spent decades helping clients think through retirement income, market risk, taxes, protection, and the decisions that become more important once they begin relying on the assets they’ve accumulated.
Along the way, I’ve been recognized by the Los Angeles Business Journal as a Leader of Influence: Wealth Managers in 2024 and 2026, and I also serve as a Senior Instructor with Los Angeles Adult Financial Education.
But what matters most to me isn’t making retirement more complicated.
It’s helping people understand it.
After thousands of conversations, different market cycles, and decades of helping people prepare for retirement, one lesson keeps coming back:
Accumulating wealth and distributing wealth are two different disciplines.
You may already know how to save. You may already know how to invest. The next challenge is understanding how the assets you’ve accumulated should be positioned and distributed to help provide the income, protection, growth, and flexibility you need throughout retirement.
With more than 30 years of experience in financial services, I’ve seen that preparing for retirement involves more than managing investments. It requires thinking about how income, growth, safety, taxes, and accessible cash may work together. Through the Code to Retirement Framework, I want to help you understand the questions worth considering as you move from building wealth to using it in retirement.
Frequently Asked Questions
The Five-Lock Strategy for a Smarter Retirement
Your retirement savings took decades to build.
Now spend some time learning how to think about turning what you’ve accumulated into income you can live on. Discover how the Code to Retirement Framework approaches the transition from accumulating wealth to distributing it, and why growth, income, safety, taxes, and cash all deserve consideration.