One Millionaire. Three Advisors. Are they up to the challenge of generating lifetime income for our lowly millionaire?

Forget about Joe Millionaire. We've got a better idea for a show. Fox, are you listening? You'll love this one. We're calling it Joe Millionaire Sr. The guy's already got $1 million, so we're saving you a bundle from the start.

The challenge? He and his wife actually have to retire on the money and generate enough income to live on for the rest of their lives.

We put our challenge to three prominent financial advisors, who created real investment portfolios they believe will do the trick-provide Joe Millionaire Sr. with the $65,000 he and his wife will need every year to survive and thrive when he retires next year at age 62.

Joe's situation is as straightforward as can be. He's just walked in the door with $1 million in 401(k) assets, and he needs help planning for next year's retirement. In addition to a monthly Social Security benefit of $1,300 that he'll take at age 62, the $1 million is all the assets he and his wife have in the world. Can the advisors help?

As we quickly learned, there is more than one way to skin a portfolio. All three advisors-Kathy Longo, a principal with Accredited Investors Inc. in Edina, Minn.; Glenn Kautt, president of The Monitor Group in Fairfax, Va.; and Christopher J. Cordaro, a principal with RegentAtlantic in Chatham, N.J.-are CFPs, and two are CFAs. The one who isn't a CFA, Kautt, has his MBA from Harvard University. All three also suggested that Joe Millionaire Sr. roll his 401(k) money into an IRA, to ensure maximum continued tax deferral. All three expressed the opinion that, given the generally accepted and sustainable retirement withdrawal rate of 4%, Joe is tempting fate by taking 5% from his portfolio annually. They all agreed that Joe would increase his odds of success (in Joe's case defined by having sufficient funds left at death) if he shaved back his annual income needs or agreed to take on part-time employment. While Longo and Cordaro developed portfolios containing 80% equities and 20% bonds, Kautt limited Joe's portfolio to just three fixed-income mutual funds. Longo and Cordaro are including corporate junk bond funds in his portfolio in the belief that this battered asset class will rebound in recovery. Last but not least, all would charge Joe Sr. $10,000 in first-year asset-based charges to prepare his investment and financial plan and provide ongoing advice. (Although Kautt maintains that his portfolio would fix Joe's problem, so he wouldn't need ongoing investment management.)

That's all interesting advice as far as it goes, but the advisors may have more differences than similarities. For instance, Longo's firm decided last year to pull out of real estate entirely and invest in health care and utilities instead. Cordaro's firm is holding pat with its real estate fund. "We don't make tactical asset allocation decisions," says Cordaro, who chairs the firm's investment committee. "We don't get together at lunch and decide to drop REITs (real estate investment trusts) down from 10% to 5%. We have an annual investment summit where we make long-term strategic decisions, like moving our international large-cap assets, which we didn't believe were getting the diversification they needed, to a hedge fund." The firm's investment committee made that decision last year, and RegentAtlantic advisors has been using Undiscovered Managers' Multi-Discipline Fund ever since.

In stark contrast, Kautt believes that equities have entirely too much volatility to allow Joe Millionaire Sr. to meet his income needs for the next 30 years and beyond, without taking on undue risk. "For advisors to recommend aggressive equity portfolios for Joe Sr. borders on professional negligence," says Kautt, never one to mince words.

As we said at the outset, there is more than one way to build a portfolio. Each of our advisors used their own set of assumptions regarding returns and inflation. We set no parameters beyond the fairly straightforward case study presented by Joe Sr., a kind of everyman and woman when it comes to retirement planning needs.

Read on to find out how each advisor tailored his or her planning and investment recommendations to help him meet his needs over the next 30 years. The actual portfolios they built are in our sidebar "The Challenge."

Without further fanfare, let's crawl inside the minds of our advisors to find out why they did what they did and whether it will work for Joe Sr.

Kathy Longo, Accredited Investors

Longo has developed an 80% equities, 20% bond portfolio for Joe Sr., and is assuming he'll earn average annual returns of 9% over the next 30 years and have to cope with a 2% inflation rate.

She's using growth, value and blend funds on the equity side to reduce volatility. "We like to balance our positions, say between Babson and Turner. That means we won't hit home runs, but we won't have excess volatility when assets revert back to their means," Longo says.

Her tack overall is total return. "We don't look to generating bond income per se off dividend yield," she says. "We're really working to create a total-return approach. We can't go heavy in bonds. This individual has to take a more aggressive position. He could have 30, 35, or 40 years in front of him."

In addition to tilting heavily toward international, global and emerging market funds, Longo also uses "undervalued," relatively low-cost assets that she believes are poised for a rebound, such as iShares DJ Utilities, Vanguard Health Care and Vanguard High-Yield Corporate Fund.

So how does Joe Sr. fare with Longo's portfolio? He has about a 60% chance of having money left at age 90. "We'd much rather see at least 70%," says Longo. "Right now he needs about $49,500 from the portfolio (he'll be getting about $15,500 in Social Security benefits for annual income of $65,000). That means he's taking 5% of his portfolio, and I'd much rather see him at 4%," she says. "I'd be very cautious on the spending side and watch cash needs. Even if he could delay retirement one year, or do part-time work or consulting, it would improve his odds greatly."

To her credit, Kathy did something no other planner here did. She reserved $100,000 in cash from the portfolio upfront to shore up Joe Sr.'s income for the next two years. "It's a bad time to have to generate a cash position," says Kathy, who usually shoots for three years of reserves for clients.

Glenn Kautt, The Monitor Group

Kautt's approach to Joe Sr.'s challenge is risk management. In Joe's case, Kautt hates the inherent risks he believes the stock market presents. So instead of tilting toward stocks or stock mutual funds, he believes Joe Sr. must go whole-hog into bond funds.

While the other advisors didn't mentioned standard deviation, Kautt believes that it is the key to Joe's future success or failure. "A portfolio of equities with standard deviation even well below that of the S&P (which the other two portfolios have) would almost guarantee the Joe will go bankrupt," Kautt admonishes.

"Will there be volatility in a stock portfolio?" he asks. "The answer is yes. And almost any volatility may ensure that Joe Sr. will run out of money."

Instead of using a portfolio that mirrors the S&P's standard deviation measure of 18%, or even The Monitor Group's stock portfolio's standard deviation of 17.9%, Kautt believes it essential that Joe Sr. reduce his standard deviation to 4.5%.

The way to do this? Kautt believes his three-fund portfolio, which allocates 50% to Pimco's Low Duration Bond Fund and splits the remaining 50% evenly between DFA 5-Year Government Bond Fund and DFA Global Fixed Income Fund, will give Joe Sr. a 9% average annual return while negating a large portion of his investment risk and trying to offset a 2% inflation rate.

Last year, this actual portfolio returned 9.3%, says Kautt, who maintains that a number of clients have similar portfolios, though they usually contain more funds.

Kautt's other big push: Getting Joe to reduce his annual income needs by 10%. "When we reduce his income by 10%, his probability of success to age 90 (measured by Joe's still having money left) goes up to 79%," Kautt says. "No other combination will result in a higher probability of success," says Kautt of his bond fund portfolio and Joe's trimmed income.

Kautt, however, like the other planners, does believe Joe Sr. could truly benefit from continuing to work in some capacity. "Many of our clients have part-time jobs for two reasons: It supplements their income, but it also stimulates them mentally, which puts their minds on productive things rather than worry and stress."

Christopher J. Cordaro, RegentAtlantic

Cordaro's portfolio for Joe Sr., with its 80% equity, 20% bond allocation and 2% inflation rate, relies on the firm's in-house investment expertise to create a stock and bond portfolio Cordaro believes will go the distance for our millionaire. At the same time, Cordaro is innately more conservative than the other two planners, believing Joe will earn just a 6.7% average annual return over the next 30 years, even with an eye trained sharply on costs.

"We're always trying to get the lowest-cost funds, but of course we want to make sure we're capturing the asset class that we're investing in, so we can add value above the index," Cordaro says.

The firm is pretty innovative in its approach to adding value and managing costs. When principals became disenchanted with the diversification available in large-cap stock funds, they created their own portfolio (the RegentAtlantic Disciplined Equity Portfolio), which uses a quantitative approach to rank and select 50 stocks from the universe of the largest 1,000 U.S. stocks. The approach has beaten the S&P 500 over time, in addition to eliminating the management fee clients would pay in mutual funds.

With similar sentiment, RegentAtlantic decided to begin investing in Undiscovered Managers Multi Strategy Hedge Fund late last year. In search of high spreads on the fixed-income side of Joe Sr.'s portfolio, Cordaro selected the Vanguard High-Yield Corporate Fund, a portfolio recommendation he has in common with Longo. On the small-cap side, Cordaro's belief that there is a strong value premium is reflected in his 8% allocation in Royce Micro-Cap. "This is an aggressive portfolio, and we'd really underscore that with the client," he says.

So how will Joe Sr. fare with Cordaro's portfolio? "He's got about a 60% chance of having money left at age 90. In my experience, that's not a lot of comfort. If he would cut his income just 5%, the comfort level would go up to 81% at age 90," says Cordaro, who adds that he would strongly counsel Joe Sr. that small changes like part-time work would have big consequences in terms of his success.

Note to Fox: Find Joe Sr. a part-time job, will you?