Ed - your post reminds me a lot of how I felt when my wife and I were staring down retirement, particularly the part about having frugalista tendencies and a conservative approach to money management and spending. Longevity in both our families, a large enough portfolio to make the math work, and lots of thoughts about things we wanted to do once we had all of our time to ourselves (‘time millionaire’ I call it). Based on what you wrote, I get the sense that you have more than enough saved and invested to see you through a ripe old age without any need to worry about making it. Of course, that depends a lot on how you’re invested and the decisions you make now and in the next 10 years. I’d recommend sitting down with your wife and talking through what you want the next 30-40 years of your life to be like as if money didn’t matter. Do this without putting any limitations on yourselves financially (or otherwise, assuming you’re both in good health). I mean really allow yourselves to go wild with it. See where that takes you and write it all down in whatever format makes sense to you. Then you can go through it and start evaluating what’s on it. Do you really want this or that thing you put on your vision list, or was that just a fantasy wish? Identify what’s important, what would make the first 10-20 years of being retired meaningful to you. Then go back and through and determine how much it would cost to realize that vision. We are now spending a good 50% more than we were when were both working. At first this was not easy. We needed to run the numbers in such a way that we could feel comfortable with spending the level we’re now spending, and know that if needed we could adjust our spending any time we wanted. On a more tactical level, you may want to look into setting up a bond ladder to stave off SORR risk. This is a way of ensuring you have money ‘coming at you’ each year from a secure, stable source that isn’t subject to the market’s buffeting. Remember, retirement is a journey. You can change your mind about your discretionary spending any time you want. Good luck. Enjoy!
This is another example of conflating bitcoin with cryptocurrencies and blockchain. Bitcoin transactions include mining new bitcoin versus just exchanging them for goods and services. Mining new bitcoin is very energy intensive because bitcoin is built on the principle of Proof of Work. Most stablecoin transactions, on the other hand, are based on Proof of Stake. These are much less energy intensive and highly scalable. More info here: https://datadrivenlab.org/climate/blockchain-energy-consumption-debunking-the-misperceptions-of-bitcoins-and-blockchains-climate-impact/
While I think you’re on the right track with your thoughts about stable coin, I wish you wouldn’t have started with the old bitcoin story about the pizza. Conflating bitcoin and cryptocurrency is already a big issue among the general public - most could not tell you the difference between the two. And yet, they are as different as saying you have a car versus saying you have a Ferrari. Bitcoin and stable coins are both types of cryptocurrency, but they are as different as a 1957 Chevy is from a 2025 Tesla. As such, between these two types of crytocurrency, one has nothing to do with the other. I take a long view toward stablecoin, which, btw, is being trialed by a couple of different countries. When a stable coin is issued by a central government, it’s called a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). While there are several digital dollar coins out there (USDC, for example), as of now none are CBDCs backed by the US government. You can view a complete list of coins and their total market capitalization here. At the top of the list is Tether, with over $164B market cap. One of the keys to making a CBDC stablecoin work in the US is to dispel the fear and uncertainty around it, which is why I think it’s important for people to understand how it’s different from meme coins or bitcoin. When I was working as a startup advisor at a San Francisco fintech accelerator I wrote a future scenario about CBDCs and stablecoins and what they might look like in 2048. It’s a quick read here: https://www.nex3.com/blog/2020/06/10/banking-in-2048-story-from-the-future
Right. Issue-Age rating is the one I was referring to. Compared to the other options, which will likely increase a lot between 65 and death, IA plans will only increase at the rate of inflation so long as one stays in the same place (and doesn’t start smoking). Where in I live in Northern California, there are about a dozen MediGap insurer offerings, only one of which was IA. The rest were all AA.
A lot of this depends on how much of a numbers and software nerd you are.
On one end of the spectrum are those who roll their own retirement model in Excel. On the other end, apart from turning the whole thing over to an AUM advisor, are the plug and play options like Boldin and Fidelity's wealth planning platform. While the latter do a lot of the work in the background, you still may find yourself needing some advice when it comes to things like asset allocation, tax loss harvesting, decumulation strategy and ROTH conversions. If you're willing to take the time to do some learning and experimenting, tools like Pralana Gold and ficalc.app are available. Pralana is particularly powerful because it includes the ability to model ROTH conversions and taxes at state and federal levels. Then there are the pro tools. If you sign up for Plan Vision, they give you access to e-Money, an platform used by CFPs. I really like PV - been with them for a couple years now. For less than $100/yr they give me access to their full staff of CFPs and tax pros for 1:1 consults as well as the eMoney platform. Still the best deal going, I think. Finally, I just signed up with IncomeLab, another pro platform that doesn't have a consumer-facing offering. Except that if you ask them they will sell you an individual, personal use only license for $20/month. Dirt cheap.
This THE best planning platform l've found for retirees who are in decumuatlion mode. ROTH conversion modeling, tax modeling, stress testing, withdrawal strategy - this tool does it all. The best part is that is uses a MC risk-based spending guardrails methodology. Instead of running an MC and giving you a percent chance of success/failure (I mean really - what is the right percentage there?? Impossible to know), this approach shows you what the chance is that you’ll need to adjust your spending - up or down - in order for your plan goals to be met. This is huge. It means I can quit worrying about whether or not my plan is going to work, and focus instead on just living my best retired life and spending right up to whatever IL tells me my limit is. So far, this limit has been way higher than I ever would’ve attempted otherwise.
As @RQuinn points out, all the insurers offering MediGap coverage at a given plan level (ie, letter designation) must offer the same benefits and coverage. At that point, it really shouldn’t matter which one you go with, so why not go with the lowest priced one? The only difference I could find was that there was exactly one insurer whose offering included a fixed price premium that would not change forever. I don’t recall the ins and outs of this, as I ended up going with an Advantage plan, but you should be able to easily find out about this option as you do your research. I recall when I was exploring these options that the tradeoff between guaranteed flat fee at a higher starting cost per month versus a lower-cost starting fee that had no cap was pretty similar to the logic one might apply to buying an annuity. You’re faced with decided whether you should bet on outliving the actuarial assumptions that the insurer used to set the prices.
Who says dying with zero means you need to put your unknown future at risk? To me, dying with zero means planning for a statistically maximum lifespan - in our case that is both of us living to 100, which is statistically majorly improbable. From there, we use a risk-based spending guardrails strategy with a zero legacy goal. This approach to decumulation dynamically adjusts for portfolio value changes to maintain a defined MC percentage chance of success. Statistically it is set for us to die with zero, but in reality it is highly likely we will end up with a pretty good-sized legacy. In other words, this is the “both and” option. It gives us permission to spend far more lavishly than we otherwise would, while giving us peace of mind that we will not run out of money, regardless of unforeseen expenses.
After reading through the comments and arguments discussions contained therein, I find it a bit strange that the subject contained in the title of this post is questioning the need for either a spreadsheet or planning, yet the main thread of the article is about not needing a budget. I agree - you don’t need a budget. However that has nothing to do with whether or not one should do planning or use a spreadsheet. Once again, I find myself in strong agreement with the commenters who are calling you out on the points you’re trying to make because they’re based on outdated personal finance assumptions. Pensions are gone for most people. Spreadsheets are free and easy to use. People don’t retire at 65 and take a dirt nap at 70 or 75. Health and longevity greatly change the math on retirement planning. It must be done now. Give it up, Dick - everyone’s got an opinion (including me). However it seems to me that posting on this blog should be about educating those who are still on their journey to retirement, not a nostalgic look in the rearview mirror about the good old days.
No need for a budget? Agreed. Sure. Why bother? If you’re disciplined in your spending. IF. Then you’ll probably be ok and will ‘feel’ when you’re spending too much. We did it that way for most of our earning years and still managed to take some nice vacations and splurge on some purchases. OTOH, we were both seriously frugalista. As we got to within 5 years of retiring, though, we did start tracking two things: spending and total portfolio value. With no pension, you really can’t know when it’s time to quit working without these two things. You can’t just ‘feel’ when you have the right amount to last you the next 30-40 years (as in our case). No one can - at least not unless you have $8-10m stashed. We had nine investment accounts strewn across a couple of brokerages: his/her IRAs, his/her ROTHs, his/her 401k’s, his/her ESPPs (actually, we had 3-4 of those) and a taxable account. Oh, and bank savings and checking accounts. Oh, and two small (<$100k cash value) pension accounts from previous employers. I never really added it all up for most of the time I was working. A part of me didn’t want to know, because I wanted to be surprised - wake up one day and be ‘rich.’ So we just kept our heads down and worked. Sometime into my early 50s I started really tracking our total pile and teaching myself about personal finance. I played with lots of different retirement calculators and read bunches of stuff about how to figure out when you have enough and how to make it last. I couldn’t have retired with any confidence at all unless I knew how much we had, how much we would need to spend, and some estimate of how long it would all last. But then again, we had no pension. If you don’t have big mailbox money or expect a big inheritance, you must figurethese things out. There is no other way.
We use a variable percentage withdrawal rate that is based on Monte Carlo risk-based guard rails. Every six months or so we run a Monte Carlo analysis and look for a withdrawal amount that results in a 70% rate of success. We have a five-year bond ladder in place which provides an income floor for us to use to cover fixed expenses and a small amount of discretionary spending. When the market is performing well, we effectively roll maturing rungs into our checking account and withdraw from our portfolio up to the guard rail limit the amount indicated and use it to replenish rungs on the bond ladder.
Comments
Ed - your post reminds me a lot of how I felt when my wife and I were staring down retirement, particularly the part about having frugalista tendencies and a conservative approach to money management and spending. Longevity in both our families, a large enough portfolio to make the math work, and lots of thoughts about things we wanted to do once we had all of our time to ourselves (‘time millionaire’ I call it). Based on what you wrote, I get the sense that you have more than enough saved and invested to see you through a ripe old age without any need to worry about making it. Of course, that depends a lot on how you’re invested and the decisions you make now and in the next 10 years. I’d recommend sitting down with your wife and talking through what you want the next 30-40 years of your life to be like as if money didn’t matter. Do this without putting any limitations on yourselves financially (or otherwise, assuming you’re both in good health). I mean really allow yourselves to go wild with it. See where that takes you and write it all down in whatever format makes sense to you. Then you can go through it and start evaluating what’s on it. Do you really want this or that thing you put on your vision list, or was that just a fantasy wish? Identify what’s important, what would make the first 10-20 years of being retired meaningful to you. Then go back and through and determine how much it would cost to realize that vision. We are now spending a good 50% more than we were when were both working. At first this was not easy. We needed to run the numbers in such a way that we could feel comfortable with spending the level we’re now spending, and know that if needed we could adjust our spending any time we wanted. On a more tactical level, you may want to look into setting up a bond ladder to stave off SORR risk. This is a way of ensuring you have money ‘coming at you’ each year from a secure, stable source that isn’t subject to the market’s buffeting. Remember, retirement is a journey. You can change your mind about your discretionary spending any time you want. Good luck. Enjoy!
Post: Keeping Calm
Link to comment from August 16, 2025
This is another example of conflating bitcoin with cryptocurrencies and blockchain. Bitcoin transactions include mining new bitcoin versus just exchanging them for goods and services. Mining new bitcoin is very energy intensive because bitcoin is built on the principle of Proof of Work. Most stablecoin transactions, on the other hand, are based on Proof of Stake. These are much less energy intensive and highly scalable. More info here: https://datadrivenlab.org/climate/blockchain-energy-consumption-debunking-the-misperceptions-of-bitcoins-and-blockchains-climate-impact/
Post: Smart Move?
Link to comment from August 10, 2025
While I think you’re on the right track with your thoughts about stable coin, I wish you wouldn’t have started with the old bitcoin story about the pizza. Conflating bitcoin and cryptocurrency is already a big issue among the general public - most could not tell you the difference between the two. And yet, they are as different as saying you have a car versus saying you have a Ferrari. Bitcoin and stable coins are both types of cryptocurrency, but they are as different as a 1957 Chevy is from a 2025 Tesla. As such, between these two types of crytocurrency, one has nothing to do with the other. I take a long view toward stablecoin, which, btw, is being trialed by a couple of different countries. When a stable coin is issued by a central government, it’s called a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). While there are several digital dollar coins out there (USDC, for example), as of now none are CBDCs backed by the US government. You can view a complete list of coins and their total market capitalization here. At the top of the list is Tether, with over $164B market cap. One of the keys to making a CBDC stablecoin work in the US is to dispel the fear and uncertainty around it, which is why I think it’s important for people to understand how it’s different from meme coins or bitcoin. When I was working as a startup advisor at a San Francisco fintech accelerator I wrote a future scenario about CBDCs and stablecoins and what they might look like in 2048. It’s a quick read here: https://www.nex3.com/blog/2020/06/10/banking-in-2048-story-from-the-future
Post: Smart Move?
Link to comment from August 10, 2025
Right. Issue-Age rating is the one I was referring to. Compared to the other options, which will likely increase a lot between 65 and death, IA plans will only increase at the rate of inflation so long as one stays in the same place (and doesn’t start smoking). Where in I live in Northern California, there are about a dozen MediGap insurer offerings, only one of which was IA. The rest were all AA.
Post: Seeking Input on Medicare Supplement Carriers
Link to comment from August 3, 2025
A lot of this depends on how much of a numbers and software nerd you are. On one end of the spectrum are those who roll their own retirement model in Excel. On the other end, apart from turning the whole thing over to an AUM advisor, are the plug and play options like Boldin and Fidelity's wealth planning platform. While the latter do a lot of the work in the background, you still may find yourself needing some advice when it comes to things like asset allocation, tax loss harvesting, decumulation strategy and ROTH conversions. If you're willing to take the time to do some learning and experimenting, tools like Pralana Gold and ficalc.app are available. Pralana is particularly powerful because it includes the ability to model ROTH conversions and taxes at state and federal levels. Then there are the pro tools. If you sign up for Plan Vision, they give you access to e-Money, an platform used by CFPs. I really like PV - been with them for a couple years now. For less than $100/yr they give me access to their full staff of CFPs and tax pros for 1:1 consults as well as the eMoney platform. Still the best deal going, I think. Finally, I just signed up with IncomeLab, another pro platform that doesn't have a consumer-facing offering. Except that if you ask them they will sell you an individual, personal use only license for $20/month. Dirt cheap. This THE best planning platform l've found for retirees who are in decumuatlion mode. ROTH conversion modeling, tax modeling, stress testing, withdrawal strategy - this tool does it all. The best part is that is uses a MC risk-based spending guardrails methodology. Instead of running an MC and giving you a percent chance of success/failure (I mean really - what is the right percentage there?? Impossible to know), this approach shows you what the chance is that you’ll need to adjust your spending - up or down - in order for your plan goals to be met. This is huge. It means I can quit worrying about whether or not my plan is going to work, and focus instead on just living my best retired life and spending right up to whatever IL tells me my limit is. So far, this limit has been way higher than I ever would’ve attempted otherwise.
Post: Recommendations for Retirement Planning Tools
Link to comment from August 2, 2025
As @RQuinn points out, all the insurers offering MediGap coverage at a given plan level (ie, letter designation) must offer the same benefits and coverage. At that point, it really shouldn’t matter which one you go with, so why not go with the lowest priced one? The only difference I could find was that there was exactly one insurer whose offering included a fixed price premium that would not change forever. I don’t recall the ins and outs of this, as I ended up going with an Advantage plan, but you should be able to easily find out about this option as you do your research. I recall when I was exploring these options that the tradeoff between guaranteed flat fee at a higher starting cost per month versus a lower-cost starting fee that had no cap was pretty similar to the logic one might apply to buying an annuity. You’re faced with decided whether you should bet on outliving the actuarial assumptions that the insurer used to set the prices.
Post: Seeking Input on Medicare Supplement Carriers
Link to comment from August 2, 2025
Who says dying with zero means you need to put your unknown future at risk? To me, dying with zero means planning for a statistically maximum lifespan - in our case that is both of us living to 100, which is statistically majorly improbable. From there, we use a risk-based spending guardrails strategy with a zero legacy goal. This approach to decumulation dynamically adjusts for portfolio value changes to maintain a defined MC percentage chance of success. Statistically it is set for us to die with zero, but in reality it is highly likely we will end up with a pretty good-sized legacy. In other words, this is the “both and” option. It gives us permission to spend far more lavishly than we otherwise would, while giving us peace of mind that we will not run out of money, regardless of unforeseen expenses.
Post: Die With Zero? Hell No
Link to comment from July 19, 2025
After reading through the comments and
argumentsdiscussions contained therein, I find it a bit strange that the subject contained in the title of this post is questioning the need for either a spreadsheet or planning, yet the main thread of the article is about not needing a budget. I agree - you don’t need a budget. However that has nothing to do with whether or not one should do planning or use a spreadsheet. Once again, I find myself in strong agreement with the commenters who are calling you out on the points you’re trying to make because they’re based on outdated personal finance assumptions. Pensions are gone for most people. Spreadsheets are free and easy to use. People don’t retire at 65 and take a dirt nap at 70 or 75. Health and longevity greatly change the math on retirement planning. It must be done now. Give it up, Dick - everyone’s got an opinion (including me). However it seems to me that posting on this blog should be about educating those who are still on their journey to retirement, not a nostalgic look in the rearview mirror about the good old days.Post: Is it possible to achieve financial well being without a plan or even a spreadsheet?
Link to comment from May 31, 2025
No need for a budget? Agreed. Sure. Why bother? If you’re disciplined in your spending. IF. Then you’ll probably be ok and will ‘feel’ when you’re spending too much. We did it that way for most of our earning years and still managed to take some nice vacations and splurge on some purchases. OTOH, we were both seriously frugalista. As we got to within 5 years of retiring, though, we did start tracking two things: spending and total portfolio value. With no pension, you really can’t know when it’s time to quit working without these two things. You can’t just ‘feel’ when you have the right amount to last you the next 30-40 years (as in our case). No one can - at least not unless you have $8-10m stashed. We had nine investment accounts strewn across a couple of brokerages: his/her IRAs, his/her ROTHs, his/her 401k’s, his/her ESPPs (actually, we had 3-4 of those) and a taxable account. Oh, and bank savings and checking accounts. Oh, and two small (<$100k cash value) pension accounts from previous employers. I never really added it all up for most of the time I was working. A part of me didn’t want to know, because I wanted to be surprised - wake up one day and be ‘rich.’ So we just kept our heads down and worked. Sometime into my early 50s I started really tracking our total pile and teaching myself about personal finance. I played with lots of different retirement calculators and read bunches of stuff about how to figure out when you have enough and how to make it last. I couldn’t have retired with any confidence at all unless I knew how much we had, how much we would need to spend, and some estimate of how long it would all last. But then again, we had no pension. If you don’t have big mailbox money or expect a big inheritance, you must figure these things out. There is no other way.
Post: Is it possible to achieve financial well being without a plan or even a spreadsheet?
Link to comment from May 31, 2025
We use a variable percentage withdrawal rate that is based on Monte Carlo risk-based guard rails. Every six months or so we run a Monte Carlo analysis and look for a withdrawal amount that results in a 70% rate of success. We have a five-year bond ladder in place which provides an income floor for us to use to cover fixed expenses and a small amount of discretionary spending. When the market is performing well, we effectively roll maturing rungs into our checking account and withdraw from our portfolio up to the guard rail limit the amount indicated and use it to replenish rungs on the bond ladder.
Post: Spending It
Link to comment from January 11, 2025