Retirement Planning Beyond the Accumulation Years

Most retirement content is aimed at accumulation: contribute more, start earlier, let compounding do the work. That advice is sound, and it's also incomplete — it says very little about the years immediately before and after retirement, when the questions change.

During accumulation, a market decline is, in a specific sense, good news for a systematic saver — future contributions buy in at a lower price. That relationship reverses once someone is drawing income from the portfolio instead of adding to it.

Sequence matters more than average returns

Two retirees can experience the exact same average return over twenty years and end up in very different positions, depending on whether the poor years happened early or late in retirement. This is sequence-of-returns risk, and it's one of the more counterintuitive aspects of planning for decumulation rather than accumulation.

Planning for it isn't about predicting when poor years will happen — nobody can do that reliably. It's about structuring withdrawals and liquidity so an early downturn doesn't permanently damage a plan built on long-term averages.