After decades of saving, giving yourself permission to spend may be the hardest part of retirement. Most of the retirees we talk with have gotten very good at one skill — accumulating — and have had almost no practice at the opposite one: drawing that money back down without a paycheck behind it.
A common first instinct is to pick a single withdrawal rate — say, a fixed percentage of the portfolio each year — and stick with it no matter what markets do. The trouble is that a fixed rule doesn't respond to reality. It can't tell the difference between a strong decade and a rough one, so it either leaves you under-spending during good years or over-spending into a downturn. Our Risk-Based Guardrails approach is designed to respond to that reality instead of ignoring it.
What "guardrails" means in practice
Picture your spending plan as a car on a highway, with guardrails on either side. As long as you're between them, you stay on your planned spending path. The guardrails themselves are set based on how your portfolio is actually performing relative to the plan — not on guesswork or gut feel.
- Upper guardrail: if your portfolio has grown well beyond plan, that's a signal there may be room to spend more — on travel, family, or whatever matters to you.
- Lower guardrail: if performance lags the plan, that's an early signal to ease off temporarily, before a small course correction becomes a large one.
- Between the guardrails: most years, no action is needed at all — you simply continue spending as planned.
"The real risk was never running out of money — it was being too afraid to spend it."
Why this beats "picking a number and hoping"
The value of guardrails isn't just the math — it's the clarity. Instead of wondering every time the market has a bad month whether you need to panic, you have a pre-agreed plan for exactly when a change is warranted, and exactly how big that change should be. That structure is what allows most retirees to actually relax and spend the money they worked so hard to save.
It also means the plan adjusts to your portfolio and your spending — not a generic rule of thumb pulled from a magazine article. The guardrails are revisited regularly as part of an ongoing relationship, not set once and forgotten.
What this means for you
If you're approaching retirement, or already there, and you've never seen your own spending guardrails on paper, that's usually the missing piece — not a better stock pick or a better fund. The Retirement Insight Assessment includes a first look at what your own guardrails could look like, at no cost and with no obligation.
