Your Personalized Retirement Next Steps
Why generic rules of thumb stop working the day you stop earning
For decades, retirees have been handed rules of thumb. Save 10x your salary. Withdraw 4% a year. Rebalance annually. The trouble is that none of those rules know you.
Your goals, your risk tolerance, your tax situation, and how you actually feel during a market drop are all yours. A plan that resonates with someone else may not resonate with you. Here is how I would suggest starting.
Step 1: Find your RISA® profile
The Retirement Income Style Awareness (RISA®) framework is built on the observation that retirement income is not just math — it is psychology. The assessment maps you onto two axes: probability-based comfort (relying on market growth) versus safety-first comfort (relying on contractual guarantees), and a preference for optionality (flexibility) versus commitment (locking in a long-term solution).
That places you in one of four broad styles: Total Return, Income Protection, Time Segmentation, or Risk Wrap. None is “best.” The point is that the strategy that matches your style is the one you'll actually stick with in year eight when markets are down and the headlines are loud.
Step 2: Build a behavioral guardrail
Once you know your style, the next move is protecting yourself from your own decisions in a hard month. Most retirees I sit with do not lose money on the spreadsheet — they lose it during a panic.
A simple Investment Policy Statement, written when nothing is on fire, can hardwire that protection. Common provisions include a 72-hour cooling-off period before any unplanned trade, a required advisor conversation before deviating from the plan, and a written rule for what triggers a rebalance. The job is to make the plan boring on hard days.
Step 3: Adjustment-based planning, not pass/fail
Traditional plans focus on a “probability of success” — the percentage chance the plan won't run out. That framing is anxiety-producing and usually wrong, because no actual retiree spends blindly until they are bankrupt. They adjust.
Risk-based guardrails make those adjustments explicit. If your plan's risk metrics worsen, spending eases slightly. If they improve, you give yourself a modest raise. This reframes market volatility as something you can manage rather than something you can only fear.
Step 4: Match the right tools to the right risks
A personalized plan rarely uses a single tool. It often combines a diversified portfolio for growth, contractually guaranteed income to cover essentials and pool longevity risk where appropriate, and buffer assets to soften sequence-of-returns risk. Whether any specific tool fits your plan is its own conversation — but the principle is that different risks deserve different solutions.
The combination is the point. Generic rules can't do that work for you.
If you'd like to start with the RISA profile and build from there, schedule a conversation.
Click here to schedule your 15-minute Retirement Fit Call.
Let's make sure your retirement journey is as secure and fulfilling as you envision.
