Why Recency Bias Is Dangerous for Today's Retirees
Big Picture Retirement®
Devin Carroll
4.7 • 545 Ratings
🗓️ 9 March 2026
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Most people assume the future will look like the recent past. That's called recency bias, and it can quietly wreck a retirement plan.
If the market has been strong for years, investors start believing those returns will continue forever. If the market crashes, people assume things will only get worse.
But retirement planning isn't about the last five years. It's about the next thirty.
In this episode, I explain how recency bias influences investment decisions, why it can lead retirees to take the wrong risks at the wrong time, and how to build a retirement plan that works even when the future looks very different from the past.
Although this show does not provide specific tax, legal, or financial advice, you can engage Devin or John through their individual firms.
📍Contact Devin's team at https://carrolladvisory.co/podcast1
📍Contact John's team at https://www.rossandshoalmire.com/
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Big Picture Retirement Show does not provide tax, legal, or financial advice. |
| 0:04.3 | Listeners are encouraged to seek out their own advisors in these areas. |
| 0:10.5 | Hey, everyone, welcome to the Big Picture Retirement Show. |
| 0:13.1 | I'm your host, Devin, joined by my co-host, John Ross. |
| 0:16.7 | Howdy? |
| 0:17.4 | John, we spend a lot of time worrying about things, right? |
| 0:22.0 | We worry about market crashes. We worry about things, right? We worry about market crashes. |
| 0:26.2 | We worry about taxes going up. We worry about government policy changing. We worry about inflation. |
| 0:32.2 | Now, all these worries are relating to retirement planning and what happens once we retire, right? |
| 0:39.6 | There's a lot to worry about. And so we try to create plans that can plan around some of this. But let me tell you, |
| 0:47.1 | I think that potentially one of the biggest risk that I'm seeing people taking in their retirement planning isn't something that can happen in the future necessarily. It's relating to something |
| 0:53.5 | that's already happened. And that's the |
| 0:55.8 | experience that we've had over the last 10 to 15 years. Ah, yes. It's been a good time. It's been a good run. |
| 1:01.7 | The last decade and a half has been incredible. You know, we've seen markets growing very quickly. |
| 1:09.0 | Bear markets that we've had in the last 10 to 15 years have |
| 1:11.6 | recovered extremely rapidly. And U.S. stocks have dominated everything up until 2025. |
| 1:21.0 | But leading up until 2025, you were just a fool if you didn't have all of your money in the S&P 500 |
| 1:25.5 | or something that was large U.S. |
| 1:28.5 | companies, right? |
| 1:30.2 | Yeah, sure. |
| 1:30.7 | And the problem is that when people experience a long stretch like that, it's easy just to |
| 1:35.6 | start assuming, well, yeah, that's the way things work. |
... |
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