Justin Fitzpatrick, PhD, CFA, CFP

Justin Fitzpatrick co-founded Income Lab in 2018 to solve a problem he saw across the financial planning industry: advisors had no good way to give retirees a specific, trustworthy answer to "how much can I spend?"

The prevailing approach, probability of success, gives clients a percentage. Justin Fitzpatrick's research showed that percentages don't translate into actionable guidance. A client told they have an 82% chance of success still doesn't know what to do when markets drop 20%. The guardrails-based methodology Justin developed at Income Lab replaces that abstraction with a concrete spending number, upper and lower guardrails, and specific adjustment rules that update automatically as conditions change.

Before Income Lab, Justin Fitzpatrick spent 10 years in financial services at Jackson, where he served as Head of Private Wealth and Trust. He led teams in advanced financial planning and portfolio strategy, managed development of financial technology tools, and designed strategies to enter new markets. Before that, he spent seven years in academia, teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard University, Queen Mary University of London, and UCLA.

Justin Fitzpatrick holds a PhD in Linguistics from MIT, where his research focused on formal semantics and the structure of meaning. That background in systematic analysis of complex systems carries directly into his work on retirement income modeling. He is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) charterholder and Certified Financial Planner (CFP) professional.

His research on retirement income planning has been published on Kitces.com (the most widely read financial planning publication in the industry), in AdvintroEdge Magazine, and through presentations at industry conferences including the Financial Experts Network. His foundational work on why Guyton-Klinger guardrails fail in practice and how risk-based guardrails solve those failures has shaped how thousands of advisors approach retirement income conversations.

Justin Fitzpatrick leads Income Lab's product and research direction, working with Income Lab's retirement planning tools including Tax Lab and the Social Security Optimizer. Meet the full Income Lab team.