I've been thinking about the topic of retirement spending
lately…but not about the obvious stuff. For
the obvious stuff, I feel like I have successfully worked through enough of what I believe
to be a decent percentage of the "cannon" on retirement finance over
the last five years. That cannon ranges from research by the academics over the
last 20 years to advice, papers, and marketing materials by practitioners to
various flavors of opinion -- and sometimes some pretty solid research -- by retirees
that write or blog on the subject. There
is, it seems, no shortage of research and opinions on this topic (often, but
not always, about "safe withdrawal rates"). There is also, unfortunately, no real crisp
"answer" yet to the problem because it was, is, and will continue to
be a fairly open ended non-solvable problem (whether the spending is fixed or
dynamic, "safe" or otherwise) because it depends on way too many
other things.
But that "mainstream obvious stuff" is neither
here nor there. What I have noticed, and
what I want to post about, is that I feel like there seems to be a little bit
of a divergence between what I see in the literature of retirement finance on
spending and withdrawal rates and the real experience of it in real life by
real retirees.