HumbleDollar has hosted a lot of interesting and useful discussion recently about the benefits of buying an annuity to provide guaranteed income to a retiree. Once you have decided to purchase an annuity, you are faced with the complicated choice of what annuity to buy. In 2012, Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research published a paper that posited that delaying your Social Security benefits and using other resources to fund your lifestyle was akin to purchasing an annuity from the Social Security Administration (SSA).

Like many HD contributors, I don’t own a Single Premium Immediate Annuity (SPIA). Social Security and pensions cover most all of our spending, I don’t need no stinkin’ SPIA.
Or do I? I’ve done the math. The calculators tell me I’m in good shape. But I know this sense of security I feel is precarious. There are any number of things that could blow up my plan. Lengthy care in a nursing home, victim of fraud,

On April 25 Morningstar published an article “Retirees: Here’s How to Tweak the 4% Rule to Protect Your Nest Egg”.  It includes a link to their Report “State of Retirement Income 2024”.  The report requires an email address.
With recent stock gyrations I thought that their most recent look at withdrawals and retirement accounts might be helpful.
Here are a few points made in the article:

“Morningstar researchers have investigated and identified their latest starting safe withdrawal rate.

One thing (?) really bothers me and that is the idea that Social Security is a bad deal. That view is based on the theory that a person would be far better off if the FICA taxes instead of going toward Social Security, were invested by the worker.
There are two major flaws in that view. First, Social Security is far more that a individual retirement income – disability benefits, survivor income, dependent income, ex-spouse income are included. 

I’M TRYING MY HAND at retirement. It isn’t going so well.
As a teenager and when I was in my early 20s, I would take to the couch and happily spend the day consuming a novel. Could I do that at age 62? It seems not.
At some point over the past four decades, I lost the ability to do things solely for my own enjoyment. It seems the endless demands of work, family and household chores have crushed my inner self-absorbed teenager.

This doesn’t mean you put all your eggs in the annuity basket. You still take advantage of other retirement vehicles and accumulate assets, but adding to the guaranteed Social Security income stream with an annuity seems like a good idea for many, perhaps most retirees.
Certainly do it yourself investing, even withdrawing when retired, offer no guarantees – and a lot of planning and projecting that are challenges for many people – especially those who don’t read HD. 

I cannot think of a better cure for my occasional insomnia than to stare at my electronic 2024 checkbook and analyze our spending for the prior year.
I’m looking for how much money came in, and how much came out to pay bills and buy stuff, and how much went back into savings and investments.
Social Security and two dinky pensions are what I refer to as our spending benchmark. In an ideal world our spending will never exceed the benchmark.

The first Social Security retirement check was issued to Ida M. Fuller on January 31, 1940, for an amount of $22.54. She had paid SS taxes a little less than three years. She died Jan 27, 1975 at 100 years old. It’s a pretty good bet she didn’t pay for her own benefit.
But that is not the point. The point is Social Security has worked quite well paying benefits for 85 years. The is no justification to attack it.

I feel like I am in ranter’s heaven. There is so much to rant about, the choices are confusing. I’ll skip the political scene. 
Still there are dangerous drivers who ignore the rules -and common sense- of the road. There are those who insist on parking next to your car – sometimes making it nearly impossible to open your door- when there are 100 empty spaces a few feet away. Then there are the shopping cart inconsiderates 

I’m withdrawing a bit from IRAs, ahead of RMDs in a few years, which will decide for me how much I’ll be taking out each year. For those of you who make voluntary withdrawals, do you go with a fixed percentage, like 4% every year, plus an inflation boost, calculated on Jan. 1 and taken at the beginning of the year? Or do you recalculate to reflect market change, and withdraw gradually throughout the year? Or wait till Dec.

In January, I outlined a host of money moves I’d made in the first 16 months after retiring from full-time work. Financially, things did not slow down in the first three months of 2025. Here are some of my first quarter financial actions and experiences:
Distributed gifts to charity. We cluster charitable contributions so that we can itemize on our Federal tax return every other year. During the year that we take the standard deduction,

There have been a number of articles and forum questions on best strategies for managing finances during retirement.

The choice, of course, depends on the individual situation. I came across this “three bucket” strategy that is intriguing.
First bucket is cash that meets near term needs ( one to two years of living expenses other than guaranteed income like social security.  This avoids withdrawal of investment funds during market downturns, particularly in early retirement years, which could cause “sequence of return risk”

The status of the Social Security and Medicare trusts is well known. I’m not going to rehash it here. Unfortunately, the amount of misinformation and false information about SS on social media is incredible and scary.
No serious effort at necessary reform has occurred since 1983 and certainly not now which is sad given fixing SS is not that hard or necessarily that painful.
One key question is how, if at all, should changes be allocated between current workers and current retirees.

I recently viewed an interview by Christine Benz on YouTube with the finance writer for the Washington Post.
The topic was the difficulty transitioning from saving to using money for retirement income, a topic frequently discussed on HD. The writer said she was getting ready to retire and her husband was already retired. She went on about her own thinking regarding the difficulty of transitioning from saving to spending. 
After a few minutes of the discussion about withdrawal strategies,

It’s now been 18 months since I retired from my primary career as an electrical engineer. In a previous post, I talked about financial moves I’ve made since retiring. What other changes in my life have occurred since retiring from full-time work? Here are a few:
Parks and Recreation.  For over three decades, my opportunity to enjoy the beautiful Pennsylvania autumn season was limited. As an engineer at a nuclear power plant, I was required to support refueling outages every two years for each reactor.