This is the 500th post of How Much Can I Afford to Spend in Retirement. The primary purposes of this post are to:
- Celebrate our 500th 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
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.
Thanks
We have many people to thank for supporting or otherwise improving this website over the years.
The first level of thanks goes to Kin Chan, my former associate at Towers Watson and now good friend, who talked me into starting this blog when I retired as a pension actuary in 2010. Kin did all the work to design the blog and has done all the work to maintain it. I’m pretty sure that he now rues the day when he casually suggested that I should start this blog. We are hoping that this retirement will reduce his blood pressure somewhat.
The second level of thanks goes to Bobby Kalben and Emily Van Vleet. Bobby took on the job of trying to make the blog more understandable and less “actuarial.” My wife, Emily, who is smarter than I and who handles all of our household finances in retirement, has helped me with the spreadsheets over the years and has been very patient with me during my many periods of “blogging.”
A third level of thanks goes to:
- Lois and David Baker of BenefitsLink.com, who included links to many of our posts and who improved the post titles in an attempt to generate more interest in them,
- Robert Huebscher, founder of Advisor Perspectives, for his support and many fine suggested edits to submitted articles,
- Will Selden of Riverhedge.blogspot.com for his support and for including summaries of our posts in his “My blog list”, and
- Pete Neuwirth for his support and podcast interview.
Lastly, thanks go to the many individuals/organizations who provided feedback to us on the website and/or the spreadsheets over the years. We didn’t always like the feedback we received, but it usually helped us make positive changes.
Conclusion
We encourage you (or your financial advisor) to use and support the proven actuarial principles and processes incorporated in the Actuarial Approach to determine how much you can afford to spend in retirement.
Happy planning!
