The 6 Money Moves to Make Before You Retire

Tyler Gardner (0:00)

Because if you do the work in advance, the day itself is anticlimactic. You wake up on that Monday, the portfolio is structured, the cash is sitting there, the beneficiaries are right, your spouse knows where everything is, your healthcare is covered. And then, you make a coffee, you walk to the window, and you realize that the calendar in front of you is genuinely, completely, fully yours.

Hello friends, this is Tyler Gardner, welcoming you to another episode of Your Money Guide on the Side, where it is my job to simplify what seems complex, add nuance to what seems simple, and learn from and alongside some of the brightest minds in money, finance, and investing. So let's get started and get you one step closer to where you need to be.

Quick note before we dive in, July's pre-order incentive for my book Real Wealth is live, and this one is for the investors who are ready to go beyond the basics. Pre-order this month, tell me you did at tylergardner.com/book, and I'll send you Investing 2 Beyond the Foundation, a full-hour video presentation on the five things every investor needs to know after they've mastered the fundamentals, yours to keep, delivered to your inbox digitally in early August. And if you pre-order now, you're locked in for every monthly incentive through December 1st, tylergardner.com/book. Now let's get into it.

Back in May, I asked all of you what you wanted me to write about in the weekly newsletter, and over 1200 of you took the survey, with 600 of you writing long, thoughtful, generous notes that I truly enjoyed sifting through for about two weeks. I'm embarrassed at how much better your suggestions were than anything I had planned. But one thing came through louder than anything else.

You don't need more accumulation content. You don't need another video about how to invest in your 20s, or how compound interest works, or why the index fund beats the active manager. You've heard that part. You've internalized that part. Most of you, frankly, are done with that part. You've already accumulated. And what you actually want help with is the next chapter, the one so few people seem to be talking about.

You want to know how to spend the money you just spent 40 years saving. So, starting today, I'm dedicating the next five episodes of this podcast to exactly that. Five episodes, one topic each week, and we're calling it the Art of Decumulation Series because the technical word for drawing down your savings in retirement is decumulation. And frankly, I think it deserves more airtime than it gets. And yes, it is an art.

Now, the word decumulation is kind of ugly. The English language has a thousand words for accumulating and almost none for the careful, deliberate spending of what you accumulated, which is, I suspect, part of the problem we're going to spend the next month trying to solve together. We don't even have a vocabulary for the thing, so we mostly don't think about it.

Here's the roadmap for the next few weeks.

This week, in part one, we're going to talk about what happens the day you stop working. The logistical set up, the accounts, the rollovers, the cash buffer, the Social Security decision, the spousal piece nobody talks about. This is your orientation episode. Next week, in part two, we'll go over the withdrawal order. Which accounts to draw from first, second, third, and why the order matters more than almost anything else you'll do in retirement.

Week three, for part three, we'll cover Roth Conversions, RMDs, and Irma Cliffs, the single most technically dense episode in the series, so I would bring a pen to that one. Week four, part four, we'll cover market downturns in the drawdown years. The guardrails we'll need in place, when to draw from cash, when to draw from equities, and what counts as an actual downturn versus normal market noise.

And finally, week five, part five, we'll go a little more philosophical and talk about what happens when we transition from saver to spender. The behavioral and psychological episode. How to actually give yourself permission to enjoy what you spent your life building. That's the series. Five episodes, roughly one month. Save this one and share it with someone who's facing the same set of decisions. And before we get into it, one familiar ask, if you've enjoyed anything about this podcast, if it's proved helpful to you in any way through the art of accumulating or de-cumulating, please consider leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, as it helps more people find the show, it helps the show grow, and it helps me know that I'm speaking and connecting with more than just my sleeping bloodhounds on the couch, which is, again, just fine with me because that is and always will be my enough.