This is a personal blog about retirement planning, investing, and the financial decisions that come with life’s transitions.
I write for pre-retirees and retirees who want to make thoughtful decisions about their money and feel more confident about where they’re headed.
Most of what I share isn’t about predicting markets or chasing returns. It’s about thinking clearly, avoiding common mistakes, and making steady progress over time.
At some point, almost everyone asks the same question:
“How much can I spend in retirement?”
It sounds like it should have a clear answer. In reality, it’s a bit more flexible than that.
It’s Not a Single Number
It’s natural to want a specific number you can rely on each year, but retirement doesn’t work that way.
Spending can change over time. Markets don’t move in straight lines, and your priorities may shift as the years go on. A good plan doesn’t rely on one fixed number. It allows for adjustment.
Income and Spending Work Together
In retirement, your spending is supported by your income sources.
That might include:
Social Security
Investment accounts
Retirement plans like IRAs or 401(k)s
Possibly a pension
The key is understanding how these sources fit together over time.
Instead of trying to find the “perfect” spending number, it’s often more helpful to think in ranges.
Some years, you may spend more, and other years you may spend less. That flexibility can make your plan more resilient, especially during periods of market volatility.
Your Spending Will Likely Change
Spending in retirement is rarely flat.
For example:
Early years may include more travel or activity
Later years may shift toward different priorities
Unexpected expenses can arise
A good plan accounts for these changes rather than assuming everything stays the same.
A Plan Provides Guardrails
A thoughtful retirement plan helps you understand what level of spending is reasonable, how adjustments can be made over time, and how your income supports your lifestyle.
It’s less about finding an exact answer and more about having a framework to make decisions.
“How much can I spend?” is an important question, but the better question is:
“How can I spend in a way that supports the life I want, while staying flexible over time?”
That’s where planning makes a difference.
If You’d Like Help Thinking This Through
If you’re approaching retirement and want help understanding how your spending fits into your overall plan, you can schedule a brief, complimentary call.
No pressure. Just a chance to see if it makes sense to talk further.
One of the most common concerns I hear from people is how to handle market declines, especially as they get closer to retirement or begin drawing from their savings.
It’s a reasonable concern. Market volatility can feel unsettling, even when you know it’s part of investing.
The challenge isn’t just understanding that markets move. It’s knowing how to respond when they do.
Volatility Is Normal, Even When It Doesn’t Feel Like It
Markets don’t move in straight lines. Periods of decline are a natural part of long-term investing.
The difficulty is that when volatility shows up, it rarely feels normal in the moment. It can feel like something has changed or that action needs to be taken.
In most cases, these periods are temporary. Over time, markets have moved through cycles of growth and decline.
The Real Risk Is Often Behavioral
For long-term investors, the biggest risk isn’t volatility itself. It’s how we react to it.
Selling during a downturn or making significant changes based on short-term market movements can disrupt a plan that was designed for much longer time horizons.
That doesn’t mean you ignore what’s happening. It means your response should be grounded in your plan, not in the moment.
Your Time Horizon Still Matters
One of the most important factors during periods of volatility is your time horizon.
If your goals are years or decades away, short-term market movements are often less meaningful than they feel at the time.
Even in retirement, many plans are designed to last for decades. That longer horizon still matters when thinking about how to respond to market changes.
A Plan Provides Context
Market declines can feel very different depending on whether you have a plan in place.
Without a plan, it’s easy to focus on account values and day-to-day movements.
With a plan, you can step back and ask more important questions:
Has anything actually changed about my long-term goals?
Do I need to adjust anything, or stay the course?
How does this fit into the bigger picture?
In many cases, the answer is that nothing meaningful has changed.
Staying invested doesn’t mean ignoring risk or avoiding adjustments altogether.
It means making decisions thoughtfully, based on your overall plan rather than reacting to short-term uncertainty.
Diversification helps manage risk, though it does not eliminate it. Maintaining an appropriate allocation continues to play an important role over time.
Market volatility is part of investing. It always has been, and it likely always will be.
The goal is not to avoid it. It is to be prepared for it.
A thoughtful plan, combined with a long-term perspective, can help you stay focused on what matters and avoid decisions that could set you back.
If You’d Like Help Thinking This Through
If you are approaching retirement or already retired and want help thinking through how your plan holds up during periods of market volatility, you can schedule a brief, complimentary call.
No pressure. Just a chance to see if it makes sense to talk further.
One of the things I’ve noticed over the years is that many people feel confident about their retirement savings, but less clear about their retirement plan.
Their accounts may be in good shape, and they’ve done a good job saving. But when you start talking through how everything fits together—income, spending, investments, and the decisions that come with retirement—it’s often less defined.
When people think about retirement planning, they often picture numbers—account balances, rates of return, withdrawal percentages.
Those things matter. But they’re only part of the picture.
A good retirement plan isn’t just a set of projections. It’s a way of organizing decisions so that everything works together.
It Starts With Your Life, Not Your Portfolio
A plan doesn’t begin with investments.
It begins with how you want to live.
That includes questions like:
When do you want to retire?
What does a typical year look like?
How do you want to spend your time and money?
Without that context, the numbers don’t mean much.
If you’re thinking through the timing of retirement itself, you can read more here:When Should You Retire?
Income Is the Foundation
In retirement, your plan revolves around income.
Not just how much you have, but how that translates into something you can live on.
A good plan answers:
Where will your income come from?
How will that change over time?
How do different sources (Social Security, investments, etc.) fit together?
It’s less about maximizing returns and more about creating a reliable, sustainable flow of income. If you’d like a deeper look at how that works in practice, you can read more here: Turning Savings Into Retirement Income.
It Accounts for Uncertainty
No retirement unfolds exactly as planned.
Markets move. Expenses change. Life happens.
A good plan doesn’t try to predict everything. It builds in flexibility.
That might mean:
Adjusting spending during market declines
Revisiting assumptions over time
Leaving room for the unexpected
The goal isn’t precision. It’s resilience.
Investments Support the Plan—They Don’t Drive It
Investments are important, but they’re a tool, not the plan itself.
Their role is to:
Support your income needs
Manage risk appropriately
Help your plan stay on track over time
Diversification helps manage risk, though it doesn’t eliminate it.
And maintaining an appropriate time horizon remains important, even in retirement.
It Connects the Pieces
A good retirement plan brings multiple areas together:
Income and spending
Investment strategy
Taxes
Estate considerations
Life changes
These decisions don’t exist in isolation. What you do in one area affects the others.
The value of a plan is in how those pieces are coordinated.
It Evolves Over Time
A retirement plan isn’t something you create once and set aside.
It should change as your life changes.
That might include:
Entering retirement
Health changes
Family events
Shifts in priorities
Even without major changes, it’s worth revisiting periodically to make sure everything still fits.
What It Comes Down To
At its core, a good retirement plan helps you answer a simple question:
“Can I live the life I want, with the resources I have?”
Not just today, but over time.
It provides clarity, reduces uncertainty, and gives you a framework for making decisions as things change.
If You’d Like Help Thinking This Through
If you’d like help building or reviewing your retirement plan, you can schedule a brief, complimentary call.
No pressure. Just a chance to see if it makes sense to talk further.
For most of your working life, the goal is straightforward: save and invest as much as you reasonably can. Over time, those savings grow and progress is easy to measure.
At some point, though, the question changes. It’s no longer just about how much you’ve saved. It becomes about how to turn that savings into something you can actually live on.
That shift—from saving to spending—is where retirement planning becomes more nuanced.
The Shift Most People Underestimate
Saving for retirement and living off your savings are fundamentally different.
When you’re working, you’re adding to your portfolio and have time to recover from market declines. In retirement, you’re drawing from those assets, and the timing of returns starts to matter more.
That doesn’t mean investing becomes more complicated. But it does mean your plan needs to adjust.
It’s Not Just About “The Number”
Many people focus on reaching a certain number and assume that means they’re ready.
In reality, that number is only part of the picture.
What matters just as much is how that money translates into spending—how much you plan to use, how flexible that spending can be, and how your income sources fit together. Two people with similar savings can have very different retirements depending on how those pieces line up.
Where Income Comes From
For most retirees, income is a combination of:
Social Security
Investment accounts
Retirement plans like IRAs or 401(k)s
Sometimes a pension
A good plan focuses on how these pieces work together over time, not just investment returns.
Flexibility Matters
It’s natural to want a clear answer to how much you can withdraw each year.
In practice, it’s less about a fixed number and more about flexibility. Spending can adjust over time, markets won’t move in straight lines, and plans need to adapt.
What a Good Plan Does
A good retirement income plan helps you think through:
How much you can reasonably spend
Where income should come from
How to adjust during market declines
What changes over time
It’s not about getting everything exactly right upfront. It’s about making better decisions over time.
Bringing It Together
Turning savings into income isn’t a one-time decision. It’s an ongoing process.
The goal isn’t just to have saved enough. It’s to use those savings in a way that supports the life you want to live.
If You’d Like Help Thinking This Through
If you’re approaching retirement and want help thinking through how your savings translate into income, you can schedule a brief, complimentary call.
No pressure. Just a chance to see if it makes sense to talk further.
Not long ago, I sat down with someone who hadn’t looked at their retirement plan in years. Nothing was “wrong,” exactly—their accounts were fine, and markets had done what markets do. But life had changed. They had moved, one spouse had scaled back work, and a grandchild was now part of the picture. Their priorities were simply different.
That’s the part that often gets missed. A retirement plan isn’t just about numbers—it’s about your life. And life doesn’t stay still.
Over the years, I’ve found that most plan updates aren’t triggered by the market. They usually come from real-life moments, like:
A job change or decision to retire
A move (across the country or just across town)
Changes in family—marriage, grandchildren, or caregiving
Health changes
Receiving an inheritance or paying off a mortgage
Sometimes those changes are positive, sometimes they’re not—but either way, they’re worth revisiting your plan.
There are also quieter shifts that don’t show up on a statement, but still matter. People start asking:
Do I really want to wait this long to retire?
Should we be enjoying this money more now?
What do we want this to do for our family?
Those aren’t spreadsheet questions—they’re life questions. And a good plan should evolve with them.
In many cases, nothing dramatic needs to change. But reviewing your plan—after a life event or even just every year or two—can help keep everything aligned and intentional.
Because the goal isn’t just to have a plan. It’s to have one that still fits the life you’re actually living.
Look beyond this moment and stay focused on your long-term objectives.
Volatility will always be around on Wall Street, and as you invest for the long term, you must learn to tolerate it. Rocky moments, fortunately, are not the norm.
Since the end of World War II, there have been dozens of Wall Street shocks.
Wall Street has seen 56 pullbacks (retreats of 5-9.99%) in the past 73 years; the S&P index dipped 6.9% in this last one. On average, the benchmark fully rebounded from these pullbacks within two months. The S&P has also seen 22 corrections (descents of 10-19.99%) and 12 bear markets (falls of 20% or more) in the post-WWII era. (1)
Even with all those setbacks, the S&P has grown exponentially larger. During the month World War II ended (September 1945), its closing price hovered around 16. At this writing, it is above 2,750. Those two numbers communicate the value of staying invested for the long run. (2)
This current bull market has witnessed five corrections, and nearly a sixth (a 9.8% pullback in 2011, a year that also saw a 19.4% correction). It has risen roughly 335% since its beginning even with those stumbles. Investors who stayed in equities through those downturns watched the major indices soar to all-time highs. (1)
As all this history shows, waiting out the shocks may be highly worthwhile.
The alternative is trying to time the market. That can be a fool’s errand. To succeed at market timing, investors have to be right twice, which is a tall order. Instead of selling in response to paper losses, perhaps they should respond to the fear of missing out on great gains during a recovery and hang on through the choppiness.
After all, volatility creates buying opportunities. Shares of quality companies are suddenly available at a discount. Investors effectively pay a lower average cost per share to obtain them.
Bad market days shock us because they are uncommon.
If pullbacks or corrections occurred regularly, they would discourage many of us from investing in equities; we would look elsewhere to try and build wealth. A decade ago, in the middle of the terrible 2007-09 bear market, some investors convinced themselves that bad days were becoming the new normal. History proved them wrong.
As you ride out this current outbreak of volatility, keep two things in mind.
One, your time horizon. You are investing for goals that may be five, ten, twenty, or thirty years in the future. One bad market week, month, or year is but a blip on that timeline and is unlikely to have a severe impact on your long-run asset accumulation strategy. Two, remember that there have been more good days on Wall Street than bad ones. The S&P 500 rose in 53.7% of its trading sessions during the years 1950-2017, and it advanced in 68 of the 92 years ending in 2017. (3,4)
Sudden volatility should not lead you to exit the market.
If you react anxiously and move out of equities in response to short-term downturns, you may impede your progress toward your long-term goals.
▲ Time, diversification and the volatility of returns
This chart shows historical returns by holding period for stocks, bonds and a 50/50 portfolio, rebalanced annually, over different time horizons. The bars show the highest and lowest return that you could have gotten during each of the time periods (1-year, 5-year rolling, 10-year rolling and 20-year rolling). This page advocates for simple balanced portfolio, as well as for having an appropriate time horizon.
This material was prepared by MarketingPro, Inc., and does not necessarily represent the views of the presenting party, nor their affiliates. This information has been derived from sources believed to be accurate. Please note – investing involves risk, and past performance is no guarantee of future results. The publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting or other professional services. If assistance is needed, the reader is advised to engage the services of a competent professional. This information should not be construed as investment, tax or legal advice and may not be relied on for avoiding any Federal tax penalty. This is neither a solicitation nor recommendation to purchase or sell any investment or insurance product or service, and should not be relied upon as such. All indices are unmanaged and are not illustrative of any particular investment.
This guide walks through a simple framework to help you think clearly about retirement, from defining what matters most to understanding how the financial pieces fit together.
If you’re looking for help with retirement planning or investment management, you can learn more about how I work with clients at Weiss Financial Group.
Weiss Financial Group is a registered investment advisor. Information presented is for educational purposes only and does not intend to make an offer or solicitation for the sale or purchase of any specific securities product, service, or investment strategy. Investments involve risk and unless otherwise stated, are not guaranteed. Be sure to first consult with a qualified financial adviser, tax professional, or attorney before implementing any strategy or recommendation discussed herein. Insurance products and services are offered through individually licensed and appointed agents in all applicable jurisdictions. The advisers at Weiss Financial Group are not attorneys of a law firm but can provide guidance to the client’s other professionals.
Scott Weiss, CFP®
RICP®, CRPC®, AAMS®, AWMA®, APMA®, CMFC®
ADDRESS:
704 Route 6
Mahopac, NY 10541
PHONE:
845-621-4700
EMAIL:
sweiss@weiss-financial.com
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