Hi Jan,
I hope you had a good Fourth of July. Around here the week brought a bit of everything, heat one day, storms rolling in the next, the kind of forecast where you stop trying to plan too far ahead and just adjust as you go.
That is a decent way to think about retirement spending too. Most retirement income strategies assume you set an amount and stick with it, adjusting only for inflation. But this week's article looks at a different idea: what happens when you let spending rise and fall with the market, interest rates, and your own life expectancy, the way a strategy called the Annually Recalculated Virtual Annuity does. We walk through how it works, why the math often looks appealing, and why the spending pattern it produces does not always match what people actually want in retirement.
| | | | Should Your Retirement Spending Rise and Fall with the Market? Most retirement income strategies assume spending will remain relatively stable over time. You retire, determine a sustainable withdrawal amount, and then spend roughly that amount for the rest of your life, perhaps adjusting for inflation along the way.
By Retirement Researcher | | | | Making Confident Retirement Decisions When There Is No “Right” Answer One of the most unsettling moments in retirement planning is realizing there is no single right answer.
You can run the numbers, follow the rules, and read the research, yet still find yourself facing multiple reasonable paths forward. Different advisors may offer confident but conflicting recommendations. Articles may point in opposite directions. Each approach may be defensible, but none feels definitive. This is not a failure of planning. It is the nature of retirement.
By McLean Asset Management
| | | | Are Annuities Better than Bonds in Retirement?
Alex and I keep working through listener questions from our recent YouTube Live, covering long term care and Medicaid planning, the annually recalculated virtual annuity approach to spending, direct primary care alongside Medicare, and the right way to discount Social Security
| | | | | | | | |
