About
Retirement planning, explained like you’re in the room.
I’m Josh Rendler, a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER® professional and a partner at Define Financial, a retirement planning firm in San Diego. I spend my working days building plans for families who are close to retirement or already in it.
I’ve worked with more than 500 retirees on the decisions that only come up once. The work concentrates in four places: tax planning, Social Security timing, withdrawal strategy, and charitable giving. Those are the areas with the most room in them, and the ones you can still do something about.
Motion Retirement is where that work gets published. Same planning, same numbers, explained in plain English for anyone who wants it.
It started for a simple reason. The genuinely useful part of retirement planning kept getting lost, buried under jargon on one side and sales pitches on the other. That’s the part that changes what you pay and what you get to spend.
So I started showing the work instead.
Today that’s 42 deep dives on YouTube and a weekly newsletter, plus the guides on this site. Every number sourced, and nothing gated behind an email address just to read it.
Josh’s travels
What this is built on
You should see how a decision works before anyone asks you to make it
That’s why the charts on this site move, and why the numbers in them are the real ones. If a strategy only sounds good when it’s described vaguely, it isn’t a strategy.
Most retirement advice is written for someone else
It’s either aimed at people still saving their first hundred thousand, or it’s a product pitch wearing a cardigan. Neither one helps if you’ve already done the hard part.
The tax decisions are the ones you can still control
You can’t control the market. You can control which account you spend from, what your income looks like in a given year, and when you convert. Those choices compound quietly.
Education and advice are different things
Everything here is educational. It isn’t a recommendation for your situation, because your situation isn’t on this page. When it matters, talk to someone who can see all of it.
Where the content lives
- 42deep dives on YouTube
- 17K+subscribers on my channel
- Weeklynewsletter, free, one click to leave
- 1.1M+views on YouTube
Free guide
Get the Ultimate Retirement Guide
Sixteen pages on the three places retirement taxes quietly cost people the most: the 2026 brackets, the Medicare IRMAA cliff, and required withdrawals.
Check any of this yourself. Define Financial, LLC is an SEC-registered investment adviser (CRD 286648, SEC file 801-122024), San Diego, CA. Look it up at adviserinfo.sec.gov, or read the Form ADV Part 2A.
Motion Retirement is an educational media brand. Content is for informational purposes only and does not constitute personalized financial, tax, or legal advice. Define Financial is a separate registered investment adviser. Motion Retirement does not provide advisory services. Read the full disclosures.