Michael Horaney is a financial professional with more than four decades of experience in wealth preservation, retirement income planning, and investor education. His relationship with finance started before most people open their first bank account. His father sat him down with The Wall Street Journal and taught him how to read the stock tables, and by age 11, Michael had already bought his first stock. That early grounding shaped everything that followed. He began his career in the late 1980s at a penny stock firm, where he learned, by direct exposure, how badly retail investors can be treated. That experience pushed him toward the major Wall Street firms, where he spent more than two decades and ultimately reached the title of Managing Director. Today he serves as Managing Partner of Osiris Capital and works closely with DeBono Financial Insurance Services, focusing on IRA and 401(k) rollovers, estate planning, long-term care strategies, and what he calls "circling the wagons," a structured approach to protecting assets before building growth on top of them.
Michael started this blog because he kept seeing the same pattern repeat itself. Hardworking people in their late 50s and early 60s, people who had saved carefully for 35 or 40 years, were still carrying full market exposure without a clear income plan for retirement. He watched the rise of robo-advisors and social media-driven trading push everyday investors into a herd mentality chasing headlines rather than goals. His voice here is shaped by nearly 40 years of daily research and a Warren Buffett-style conviction that speculation and headline-chasing are not a plan. A question he comes back to regularly: what happens to someone's retirement if markets are down the year they stop working and they have no protected income to fall back on?
Readers of this blog can expect straightforward thinking on retirement income strategy, the emotional side of shifting from accumulating wealth to drawing it down, and the practical risks that come with procrastinating on a retirement plan. Michael draws on community outreach work, including the "Psychology of Retirement" documentary event, to ground his writing in the concerns real people carry into retirement. Posts reflect the same approach he takes with clients: listen first, identify what needs protecting, and build a plan that doesn't depend on a bull market to survive.