It's really hard to kind of think, oh, I'm going to exactly hit my savings goal at age 65. People tend to retire early. A lot of things happen. But if you look at the range of recommendations out there, you see withdrawal rate recommendations between like 2% and 8%. I think 2% is way too conservative. If you do 2%, there's a really, really good chance you're going to have a massive pot of money when you die. I guess that's okay. if that's your goal. If you use 8%,

there's a really good chance good chance you're going to have a massive pot of money when you die. I guess that's okay. If that's your goal, if you use 8%, there's a really good chance you have to cut back significantly during retirement. To me, 5% is this kind of better balance. And again, like, what's the deal between 4 or 5%? Well, like, I think what's really important is where we start when we first retire kind of begins this trajectory that we go down.

Those initial spending amounts become kind of sticky over time, so people kind of get used to a certain lifestyle.

What I want to do is kind of balance this need to possibly cut back if they need to and enjoy as much as they can today. The economic environment the retirees find themselves in today is dramatically different than it was just six years ago, even just two or three years ago.

And how do we view the future of interest rates?

How do we view the future of inflation? And what impact will that make on retirement spending patterns and ultimately your retirement income strategy? Hey, this is Casey Weed and welcome to the show. Where does my mission to deliver clarity and purpose and elevate meaning in your life? And if you're new to the show, I want you to know what to expect.

We do this in a variety of different ways. We bring you both financial and non-financial conversations on a variety of different topics. Week in and week out, we're bringing you

a variety of these conversations with world-class guests like we're going to have today.

This is one of those long-form interview-based podcasts, and I'm excited

about this one because we're bringing someone back that was originally on the podcast back in

2019. We have David Blanchett here with us today. He is currently the managing director and

portfolio manager, head of retirement research at PGMDC Solutions. He was previously,

when we interviewed him back in 2019, he was the head of retirement research at Morningstar. He is still

the professor of wealth management and was my professor of wealth management at one point at

the American College of Financial Services. And if you've been a weekend reading subscriber for

some time, then you've read some of his work.

We regularly include his writings and our emails that we send out to the families that rely on us for their retirement advice,

and we also bring a lot of that research into the conversations that we're having with you weekend and week out.

He has won many awards for that

research. He has received awards from the Academy of Financial Services, the CFP Board, the Financial

Analyst Journal, the Financial Planning Association, and many more. What I'm really excited about

today is we're going to be revisiting some of the discussion that we had six years ago. That was episode number 55. If you want to go back and listen to that episode, we're going to be bringing some of that research forward and taking a look at how it's evolved over the last six years. With that, David, welcome back to the show.

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