500th Post—We’re Retiring

This is the 500^th post of How Much Can I Afford to Spend in Retirement. The primary purposes of this post are to:

• Celebrate our 500^th post,
• Announce our retirement from active blogging, and
• Thank those who have helped us with the website in one way or another over the past 14 years

Retirement 

What does retirement mean in this context? It means that we are planning to cut way down on the quantity of our posts to pursue other goals in retirement. It does not mean that we won’t infrequently update the Actuarial Financial Planner spreadsheets, or that we won’t respond to reader comments or questions about the spreadsheets or maybe even add a new post infrequently.

We still believe that the Actuarial Approach (with its deterministic Actuarial Financial Planner model, general actuarial process and suggested spending adjustment guard-rails) is a superior approach for determining household spending in retirement. We also still believe that you should be using the Actuarial Approach in lieu of, or in addition to, the approach you are currently using for this purpose.

We simply no longer plan to respond to each financial planning opinion we read in the press that suggests otherwise. 

What Percentage Drop in Your Assets Might Trigger a Reduction in Your Discretionary Spending?

Nice to see two more recent articles in the retirement income press discussing the advantages of dynamic retirement approaches like ours that use guardrails to adjust spending in retirement. These two articles are:

• “Why Guyton-Klinger Guardrails Are Too Risky For Most Retirees (And How Risk-Based Guardrails Can Help)” and
• ‘Probability of Success’ Doesn’t Mean What Your Clients Think It Means
  

In the first article, the authors say:

“We think including spending adjustments in retirement planning is a major step forward.”

In the second article, the author says”:

“Retirement planning that rejects success/failure framing can help clients understand that a realistic retirement journey involves not failure, but adjustments.

Advisors can help clients plan for those adjustments by establishing a “spend more” guardrail that tells clients when their risk of underspending and regret is too high, and so they can afford to live a little and spend more. It also means setting a “spend less” guardrail that tells clients when their risk of overspending is too high, so they should find a way to tighten the belt or adjust their goals to bring that risk down.”

We agree.