It’s not too early to start planning your spending for 2026 even though you haven’t yet determined your January 1, 2026 Funded Status. You or your spouse may be considering spending in 2026 on items that weren’t in your 2025 spending budget, such as an extra vacation, purchase of a new car or remodeling your kitchen, but you don’t know whether you can afford the “extra” spending involved.
Fortunately, you are using the Actuarial Approach, its Funding Status metric and our suggested guardrails to manage your spending in retirement rather than a Strategic Withdrawal Plan (SWP) or Retirement Income Strategy (RIS) that is designed to slowly release your own money to you over time via something called a “retirement paycheck.” Therefore, if your Funded Status is sufficient and you are comfortable with a potentially lower Funded Status as of January 1, 2027, you may be able to increase your spending for 2026.
In this post, we will show you how easy the process is for determining how much more than your 2026 budget you may be able to spend. We will also show several examples illustrating the process for retired households with different Funded Statuses and tolerances for risk.
