The Subtle Art of Doing Nothing (And Making More Money While Doing It)

When the next downturn comes and it will, don't look at your portfolio, don't read financial press more than once a week, don't call your advisor in a panic, don't engage in theorizing about whether this one is different. Do look at your cash buffer, do confirm it's still there, do read the letter you wrote to your future self in Comer Times, then go take a walk, make a meal, read a book that has nothing to do with money and let the storm move across the lake. 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, August preorder incentive for my book Real Wealth is now live, and this one is my favorite so far. Preorder this month, tell me you did at TylerGardner.com/book and I will send you a draft chapter of a new book that I'm already working on, and no, not even my editor at Norton has seen this writing yet. This sneak peek is yours to keep delivered to your inbox in early September. Preorder today, and you're locked in for every monthly incentive through December first. TylerGardner.com/book, now let's get into it. In 2008, in the middle of what would become the largest financial crisis since the Great Depression, a retiree I knew will call him Robert because Robert is a perfectly fine name and not as far as I know attached to anyone famous enough to sue me, sat down in front of his computer one Wednesday morning in October. He had just turned 68. He had retired three years earlier with about $1.4 million split between a traditional IRA and a taxable brokerage account. By that Wednesday in October, the balance read $911,000. He had lost, on paper, $489,000, a third of his retirement. Robert is an engineer by training. The kind of person who reads instruction manuals before he assembles furniture. The kind of person who keeps spreadsheets of his utility bills going back to 1994. He looked at the screen. He read the news. He read more news. He read in his words, every single article he could find on CNBC.com, which is a sentence that ought to be inscribed on the bedroom wall of every behavioral economist as a warning. And then on that Wednesday in October of 2008, with the market down 40% from its peak and the financial system genuinely teetering, Robert moved his entire portfolio to cash. This month's later, as we now know, the S&P 500 hit bottom and turned. By March 2010, it had recovered most of its losses. And by the end of 2013, it had set new all-time highs. And Robert locked in cash, missed every single minute of it. He has, by his own accounting, spent the last 17 years with significantly less money than he would have had if he had simply done nothing on that Wednesday in October. The single most expensive decision, Robert ever made, was the one he made the day the news got just a little too loud. Welcome to Part 4 of the D cumulation series, five parts, and we are four deep. Today we're talking about market downturns and retirement, and more specifically about how to tell the difference between weather and climate when the screen turns red and your stomach does the thing it always and understandably does. This is, I want to say up front, the most philosophically loaded episode in the series. Because what we're actually talking about today is not investing. It's the relationship between knowledge and panic, between forecast and fact, between the story your brain tells you in the dark and the math that keeps being true, whether you choose to believe it or not. So go grab a coffee, as this episode wanders a little bit by design. And as always, familiar ask if you found this show even remotely useful, if you've learned something about money or investing or yourself that you didn't know a few months ago, please consider leaving a review on Apple or Spotify. It helps others find the show and know what it's about and it helps me appreciate that this day in, day out endeavor to make financial literacy free, digestible and accessible to anyone who wants to sit through 45 minutes of talking about expense ratios and index funds is not done entirely in vain. Thank you and let's get into it. Part One. Weather is not climate. The single most useful frame I've ever encountered for thinking about markets and one I almost never see apply to retirement planning comes not from finance but from earth science. Weather and climate are different things. Weather is what happens on Monday afternoon, it's the storm, the heat wave, the sudden cold front, the morning when the wind shield is iced over and you have to scrape it. Weather is local in time, it's volatile, attention grabbing, sometimes dramatic and sometimes even life threatening but almost always in the broad sweep of geological history are relevant. Climate is what happens over decades, it's the slow average of all those weather days, smoothed out, indifferent to any particular Monday. Climate is what you build your house for. Climate is what you plant your garden around. You don't landscape your yard based on the weather forecast, you landscape it based on the climate. Now, the financial press, the financial industry and most of what passes for retirement advice on the internet, all of that, all of what you hear on a daily basis, that's all talk about the weather, the daily move, the morning headline, the announcement from the Fed that earnings beat, the geopolitical incident, every breathless segment on mad money is fundamentally a weather report. It is information, about a single day, maybe even a single hour, presented as if it had consequences for the next 30 years of climate. Note, it does not, or rather, it does sometimes but you can't tell which particular day's matter and which don't until decades later and by then it's a moot point. Your retirement though is a climate question, the 30 year average return of the stock market is the climate, that 10% nominal return, 7% real with significant variance year to year, that's the climate and we always want to build and protect your portfolio for the climate. The bucket framework that I've gone over in several episodes is built for the climate, the withdrawal order we've gone over in this series is built for the climate. Weather is what comes for you in October 2008, weather is what comes for you in March 2020, weather is what comes for you in the year and there will be one when the market drops 25% in a six month stretch for reasons that seem entirely valid at the time and then nobody's talking about 10 years later. The art of being a retiree is the art of remembering in real time that weather is not climate and bluntly it is the hardest thing you will ever be asked to do, it is also the most important. There's a passage in Maryland Robinson's housekeeping and I apologize in advance for getting literary five minutes into this podcast but for those who have followed this show or the newsletter you know I just can't help myself. Under the narrator describes her grandmother's habit of watching storms come across the lake. The grandmother who lived through the depression and lost a husband to a train and a daughter to suicide watches the weather not with fear but with a kind of patient regard. The storms come, the storms pass and the lake remains the lake. That I think is the posture. The lake remains the lake. The market remains the market. Your portfolio structured properly remains your portfolio. The weather is doing what weather does. Your job is to not confuse it with the climate and choose not to retire to Florida because you heard there are some bad storms every now and then. Part two. The sequence of returns risk window properly understood. Okay, aside from the literature we'll get back to the math because I respect your time and this math actually matters. I touched on this in part two of this series but I want to go deeper today because it's the technical spine of everything else we're going to cover. The concept is called sequence of returns risk and it is one of the most consequential least understood mathematical features of retirement. Here's the basic idea. The order in which your investment returns happen matters enormously in retirement in a way it really doesn't matter that much during accumulation. During accumulation when you're earning, saving and not withdrawing. The order of your annual returns doesn't really matter. A portfolio that returns +20%, +20%, -10%, +10%, +10%, over 5 years ends up in the exact same place as one that returns -10%, +10%, +10%, +20%, +20%, +20%, same compound average, same ending balance. But in retirement, when you're withdrawing the same dollar amount every year, regardless of what the market did, the order of those returns, unfortunately, changes everything. Here's why. If the market drops 30% in your first year of retirement and you withdraw $80,000 anyway, you've withdrawn $80,000 from a portfolio that's already shrunk to $700,000 from a million, you've reduced your remaining portfolio not just by the drop and not just by the withdrawal, but by the interaction of the two. That $80,000 you withdrew is now 11.4% of the remaining portfolio instead of 8%. You've effectively raised your withdrawal rate by selling assets at the worst possible price. Now, if, in contrast, the market drops 30% in your 10th year, same withdrawal pattern, same average returns over the full retirement, the damage is dramatically less. Because by year 10, your portfolio has had 9 more years to compound. The 30% drop hits a much larger base. The forced withdrawal during the drop is a much smaller percentage of the remaining portfolio. The portfolio recovers and continues to fund your life. Same returns, same withdrawals, different outcomes, the only variable is when the drop happens. Now, here's the part that almost nobody draws out properly. The real danger window is actually quite short. The vast majority of sequence of returns risk in a 30-year retirement is concentrated in the first 5-10 years. By year 15, sequence risk has largely burned off. Either you've encountered a bad market and absorbed it through your cash buffer, or you haven't, and your portfolio is now large enough that future downturns are absorbable. This is a counterintuitive and underappreciated truth. People assume retirement risk is uniform, that every year of retirement is equally fraught. It isn't. The first 5 years are the gauntlet. After that, the math gets dramatically friendlier, which has implications for how you should actually structure those first 5 years that contradict almost everything mainstream retirement advice has ever told you. This episode is brought to you by Element. 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That's drinklmnt.com/tiler, and even though I love this new flavor, this does nothing to diminish my feelings about mango chili and watermelon salt. This episode is brought to you by Copilot Money. I have a group chat with 4 of my closest friends from my finance days. Between us, decades of managing other people's money, multiple licenses, and an embarrassing amount of opinions about actively managed funds. These are not people who download budgeting apps, these are people who tend to mock budgeting apps, and yet every single one of them uses Copilot Money. The group text now contains, between Bond Market Commentary and Bill's Game Updates, sincere love letters to a finance app. One text did last week, I finally feel like my financial life is in one place. That's from a guy who manages 8 figure portfolios. Here's why people who actually know money land here. It tracks spending, net worth, investments, savings goals, and budgets in one dashboard. And it's beautiful to look at, which shouldn't matter, but does when you're building a habit. It auto categorizes transactions, it tracks subscriptions, so you'll finally find the streaming service you forgot about, and the gym membership you've been emotionally lying to yourself about since February. It works across iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Web. And best part, they don't sell your data. It's the only personal finance app to win an Apple Editor's Choice Award, an Apple Design Awards finalist, and it has 4.8 stars from over 28,000 reviews. So go to copilot.money/tyler, use code tyler2, that's tyler and the number 2 for 2 free months. That's copilot.money/tyler. Part 3. The rising equity glide path, yes, you heard that correctly. Standard retirement advice, the kind that fills every target date fund in America, tells you to decrease your equity exposure as you age. 60 years old, you should be 60% bonds, 70 years old, now you should be 70% bonds. The implicit theory is that you have less time to recover from a downturn, so you should hold less of the volatile asset, which in this two asset scenario would be stocks. The implicit theory is wrong, or at least it's right for the wrong reason, and the strategy it generates is the opposite of optimal. Here's the actual research, which comes primarily from two financial planners with legitimate academic chops, Wade Fowl, and Michael Kitsies. They published a paper a few years back that asked a simple question. Across thousands of historical and Monte Carlo scenarios, what equity allocation pattern produces the best retirement outcomes? The answer, which surprised even them at the time, was this, a rising equity glide path. Meaning, we start retirement with a lower equity allocation than you held during accumulation. Maybe that's 70/30, or maybe it's 55/45, but then here's the key, year by year. Gradually, you increase the equity allocation through retirement, ending at maybe 75/25, or even, dare I say, 90/10 by the time you're in your late 70s and 80s. This is the exact opposite of what target date funds do. It's the exact opposite of what most financial advisors recommend, and the math across virtually every back test shows it produces better outcomes for one specific reason. It minimizes equity exposure during the highest sequence risk years. That's the first 5-10 of retirement, and it increases equity exposure during the lower risk later years when the portfolio is either large enough to absorb shocks or has already been depleted enough that the equity exposure is doing the heaviest lifting. It is structurally the right shape. It is also almost never implemented because it's counterintuitive and the financial industry has spent 40 years selling you the opposite strategy. Now, I don't think most retirees should literally implement a rising glide path in mechanical form, meaning you don't need to go into your portfolio every single year and buy more equities or sell more fixed income assets. I appreciate for many that would be an administrative headache, and most people will simply fail to execute it cleanly, but the principle should inform how you structure those critical first 5 years. Practically, this means the following. Hold a larger cash buffer than feels comfortable for the first 5 years of retirement. That could be 18-24 months of spending in a money market, not 12, or you could hold a heavier bond allocation than for your long run optimal strategy for those same first 5 years. I want you to be aggressively conservative until the sequence risk window passes, then gradually rebalance toward your long-term allocation plan without being terrified of increasing your equity exposure. Additionally, and this is where I just don't get why this turns into as complicated a subject as many advisors pretend it is. If you look up one day and the market has gone down 30% from its peak, and is officially your second year of retirement, maybe. Just maybe, don't be in a Tomaton ding dong and withdraw the identical amount you would have if it had not dropped 30%. Maybe, just maybe. Use some time to go watch more Netflix, play some more pickleball, and go for more walks in the woods. None of which require a 7% withdrawal rate. The intuition behind this reverse equity game, and it's worth sitting with, is that the first five years of retirement are when your time is most valuable and your risk tolerance is structurally lowest. You have the entire rest of your life, riding on getting these five years roughly correct, so be conservative when conservative is a matter's most, and take their risk when a risk has more time to work for you. Part four, the guardrail framework, or when to actually cut spending. Okay, I get this question all the time. When do we judge whether it's a good year for the market, or a bad year? Well, now we get to the part that's genuinely practical, and that almost nobody implements because it requires you to do something deeply unnatural for a retired person, which is, as I closed the last section, be willing to change your spending in response to market conditions. The framework I want to explore is called the Geiten Klinger Guardrails, named after the two financial planners who developed it in the early 2000s. The idea is simple. You start retirement with a baseline withdrawal rate. As the market moves up or down, you set upper and lower bounds, called guardrails, that when crossed, trigger predefined adjustments to your spending. Here's how it works in practice. Suppose you retire with 1.5 million, and set an initial withdrawal of $75,000 per year, that would be 5% of your starting portfolio. You set two guardrails, an upper guardrail at 4% withdrawal rate. If your withdrawal, as a percentage of your current portfolio, drops below 4%, you've effectively done so well that you can afford to spend more. So you give yourself a 10% raise, yippie hurrah, and then you establish a lower guardrail at 6% withdrawal rate. If your withdrawal as a percentage of your current portfolio rises above 6%, your portfolio has shrunk enough that you need to tighten the belt. So you cut your spending by 10%, bummer, but helpful. That's it, that's the framework. Two rules applied annually. What this does mathematically is dynamically adjust your spending in response to portfolio performance. When the market is good, spend a little more. When the market is bad, spend a little less. The cuts and raises are modest, 10% in either direction, but their cumulative effect over 30 year retirement is enormous. The research on the guardrail approach shows that it can support sustainable withdrawal rates of 5% or higher compared to the more conservative 4% rule that assumes no dynamic adjustment. And, as you all know, the last thing I want any of us to do ever is blindly follow a rule that no longer even exists. Why do the guardrails work so well? Because the 4% rule was designed to survive the worst case scenario. I've said this so many times, but I'll remind you forever. It was designed to hold up during the worst 30 year period in US market history. It was also built for someone who refuses to adjust their spending regardless of what the market does. So if you're willing to adjust, even a little, you can spend more in good years without endangering the bad years. The practical implication, build guardrails into your annual review just as a guide. Once a year, you check your current withdrawal rate against the guardrails. If you're below 4%, you can afford to live a little. If you're above 6%, cut it back a little. The middle ground, between 4% and 6%, is what we'd call your cruising altitude, stay the course. And when to do this? Well, not to sound too snarky, but we do have a calendar year and a good time to do this might be at the end of a calendar year. This episode is brought to you by Anthropic, the makers of Claude. Here's something I probably shouldn't admit publicly. That is the cheapest business partner I've ever had, and it's also the only one who's willing to tell me I'm wrong before the internet does. Recent example, I was writing a script, about the 4% rule, and I had this number in my head that I was completely certain about. Claude went to the original Trinity study, pulled the actual table, and told me my number was a little off, politely mind you, which is a considerably better experience than learning it from a comment section at two in the morning. That's most of what I use it for. Podcast research, newsletter brainstorming, sponsor decks, and a second set of eyes on anything with a number in it before 6 million people see it. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. So for problems worth solving, get started with Claude at Claude.ai/tyler, that's Claude.ai/tyler, and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode, Claude.ai/tyler. This episode is brought to you by Built. 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Terms and limitations apply. Subject to approval and eligibility. Built cards are issued by column NA, member FDIC, pursuant to license for MasterCard International Inc. Now, the philosophical part of this, which the original Geight and Klinger paper didn't quite reach, the guardrail framework only works if you have the psychological capacity to actually cut your spending when the math tells you to do so, and that capacity is, for many retirees, the hardest behavioral muscle in the entire decumulation project. Cutting spending in a downturn feels like you're being punished. It feels like the market is taking from you, and now you're taking from yourself too. But the alternative, refusing to adjust, watching your portfolio shrink, even potentially running out, is so much worse that the framework essentially weaponizes a modest sacrifice now against a far more catastrophic outcome later. The retirees who do this well do not experience the cuts as punishment. They experience them as the natural rhythm of being in the right relationship with reality. The market giveeth and the market takeeth, so ride the current rather than fighting it. There's a passage in KEMMU's The Myth of Cisophists, and I know, two literary references in one episode is a little excessive, but listen, you opted in to spend your time with a former portfolio manager and a former English teacher, where KEMMU argues that the absurdity of existence isn't a tragedy, but a beautiful clarification. Once you accept that the universe is indifferent, once you accept that you, like Cisophists, will be rolling that rock back up that hill every single day for the rest of your life. You stop expecting it to be otherwise, and you start finding freedom inside that acceptance. The market is your universe in miniature, it doesn't owe you a stable return path, and the sooner you stop expecting one, the sooner you can structure your life around what is rather than what you wish were true. The guardrail framework is the technical version of that philosophical posture. It says, "The market will do what the market does, I will adjust, I will keep going, the rock remains the rock, and the lake remains the lake." Number 5, the behavioral trap that costs more than any market crash. I want to come back to Robert from the beginning of this episode, because his story is the story of an entire generation of retirees, and I want to make absolutely sure you don't repeat this mistake. Robert did not lose his money because the market crashed in 2008. The market crashed in 2008, and then the market recovered, and people who did nothing got their money back and then some. Robert lost his money because he sold during the crash. This is, by an enormous margin, the single largest financial mistake retirees make. It is not picking the wrong fund, it is not paying too much in fees. It is not failing to optimize your Roth conversion. It's not even failing to withdraw the right amount. Those things matter at the margins. But panic-selling during a downturn destroys retirements wholesale full stop. And the data on this is brutal and consistent. Dalbar's annual quantitative analysis of investor behavior. And yes, there's a reason I mentioned this stat in every fourth episode. It shows that the average investor underperforms the average fund by three to four percentage points per year. Per year. Not over a lifetime. Annually, that gap isn't explained by fund selection. It's explained by the fact that the average investor sells during downturns and buys back during recoveries. Locking and losses on the way down and missing the gains on the way up. And you need to hear this. Three percentage points compounded over a 30-year retirement on a $1 million portfolio is roughly $1.2 million in foregone returns. The cost of one bad day of decision making, multiplied across your retirement, is more than the entire initial portfolio. Now here's what's strange. Almost every retiree I have ever spoken to knows this intellectually. They know they shouldn't sell during a crash. They know it's the wrong move. They've read the same charts. They've heard the same advice. And then when the moment actually arrives, when the screen actually turns red, when the news actually gets so loud, when the friend at the dinner party actually says the most cliche and useless and often false words in financial history, this time it's different, they sell. Why? This is I think the most underappreciated part of retirement planning. Knowledge never saves you in the moment because the moment is just too vivid. The moment's too immediate. This is my single least favorite part of our living in a world with such immediate access to information. I would give anything for me, for you, for all of us as retail investors, to go back to a world in which we only received market updates once a quarter. Really, and as always, the most helpful tip I can give you. And the best way to think about your portfolio is like your primary residence. You don't check red-defin daily to see the value of your home. And even if you do, the last thing you would do in a housing market crash is call up the local realtor and try to get out as quickly as possible. So why do we act this way when it comes to our liquid assets? Beyond always thinking about your portfolio like we would about our primary residence, here are two more pieces of infrastructure for you to take forward to protect against being your own worst retirement enemy. First, the cash buffer. 18 to 24 months of spending in cash available untouched just sitting there. Money market bonds don't care as long as it keeps up with inflation and it's stable. Because the entire reason people panic sell is that they're afraid they won't have money to live on if the market continues to fall. That cash buffer makes that fear factually wrong. You'll have money to live on for two years, regardless of what the market does. Look at the buffer, touch the buffer, reread your statement, the buffer is still there. The market can drop another 40% and you will still eat next month. Second, and this is the part nobody I know actually does, but you should, a pre-committed decision. You decide in advance in writing when you're calm exactly what you're going to do in a downturn. The decision is nothing. Write it down, sign it, keep it somewhere accessible. And when the moment arrives and your hand drifts towards that cell button, you do not consult your panic self. Consult the document. Read the words you wrote to your future self in a moment of clarity before the storm came. This sounds quaint, it's not quaint. It is one of the most effective behavioral interventions in personal finance and I have watched it save real retirees from real ruin. Write the letter, sign the letter, read the letter when the lights flash red, trust the version of yourself who wrote it more than the version of yourself who's tempted to sell. And yes, there's an Odyssey reference just begging to be made here, Odysseus tying himself to the mast so he can hear the sirens without steering toward them. But I'll spare you the full Greek mythology unit. The principles the same. You bind your future self to a decision you made when you were thinking clearly. You assume your future self in a moment of panic will not be thinking clearly. The binding is the protection. Part six. The difference between a downturn and a catastrophe. There's a final question that lurks underneath everything we've discussed so far. And I want to address it directly because I think most retirement content avoids it for unclear reasons. The question is what if this time actually is different? What if this particular downturn, the one you might be sitting in right now, is the catastrophe? What if the US financial system actually fails? What if the dollar collapses? What if we're in 1929 and not 1987? I want to take that question seriously because dismissing it is part of why so much financial content fails to actually help people make decisions in tough moments. The honest answer is maybe this time is different. Maybe this is the catastrophe. The honest probabilistic answer is that any given downturn has roughly a 95 to 98% chance of being weather and a 2-5% chance of being climate changing in a way that genuinely alters the long term return assumption. The problem we can't tell which one we're in well we're in it. But here's what we can know. Every downturn feels like the catastrophe while you're in it. In 2008, very serious people genuinely believe the global financial system was about to fail. In 2020, very serious people genuinely believed we were heading into a depression. In 1987, very serious people genuinely believed we were entering a new era of permanent market dysfunction. None of those were the catastrophe in retrospect, but they all felt indistinguishable from the catastrophe at the time. The 1929 catastrophe, when it actually happened, also felt like every other downturn until it didn't. What this means is you cannot make decisions based on the assumption that this downturn is the catastrophic one because you'd be making that assumption in roughly 15 out of every 15 downturns and you'd be wrong 14 of those times. The cost of treating every downturn as the catastrophe, selling out, going to cash, missing their recovery is enormous and certain. The cost of treating one actual catastrophe as a regular downturn is in the worst case, severe but bounded. The math in other words will always point toward holding. Always, even when it feels foolish, even when the news is dire, even when the Reddit forums are so confident that this one is different. And if you genuinely believe a downturn is the catastrophe, if you believe the entire US economic order is about to collapse, there is no portfolio strategy that protects you from that. You'd need gold, ammunition, and a remote piece of land, and at that point, you're no longer doing retirement planning. You're doing apocalypse planning, and that's a different podcast entirely. For everyone else, for the 95 to 98% of downturns that turn out to be weather rather than climate, the answer is the same as it was when the sun was shining. Hold, live off the buffer, adjust your spending modestly if the guardrails tell you to, trust the system you built when you could think clearly. Part 7. The practice of doing nothing. I want to close with something that I think gets to the heart of why this episode exists. The single most important skill and retirement investing is the skill of not acting. The skill of seeing the screen, registering the number, feeling the feeling, and then doing absolutely nothing. The financial industry will sell you a thousand products designed to help you to act. There is no product that I know of that is designed to help you not to act. Not acting is the whole game, and it's the one thing nobody gets paid to teach. There's a concept from the Stoic tradition, Marcus Aurelius wrote about it constantly, called Prosoké, which roughly translates as attention and watchfulness. The Stoics believed the goal was not to suppress your emotions, but to watch them accurately as if they were weather passing through. You feel the fear, you notice the fear, doesn't mean you act on the fear. You watch it move through you the way you'd watch a storm move across the lake. That is almost word for word. The posture you need in retirement when the market turns. You will feel afraid. That fear is appropriate because you've spent 40 years building this thing and now the thing is shrinking and your nervous system is doing what nervous systems do. The work is not to make that fear go away. The work is to notice it accurately and to not let it move your hand toward that cell button. I think the Stoics would have made excellent investors. They were practicing in essence the exact discipline that the entire field of behavioral finance has rediscovered in the last 40 years, that the value of not acting on your strongest impulses is over time almost incalculable. So here's the practice to still into something you can actually do. And the next downturn comes, and it will, and it might be next month, and it might be in three years, but it will absolutely come. Don't look at your portfolio. Don't check your accounts daily. Don't read financial press more than once a week. Don't call your advisor in a panic. Don't engage in theorizing about whether this one is different. Do look at your cash buffer. Do confirm it's still there. Do read the letter you wrote to your future self in Comer Times. And go take a walk, make a meal, read a book that has nothing to do with money, and let the storm move across the lake. Personally, I often do the following when I'm having a day in which I feel like I need to change something about my life. I go outside, I take a walk, I come back, I read a chapter of a book, I play with the hounds, and I remember nothing that I just did cost money, and nothing that I just did needs to be different because the entire pie might be valued lower today than it was yesterday. That's the practice. And the entire episode in one sentence again, the lake remains the lake. That's part four. The takeaways, briefly, number one, whether's not climate, the financial press reports weather. Your retirement is a climate question. Number two, sequence of returns risk is asymmetric, the first five years of retirement are the gauntlet, be most conservative, one conservativeism matters most. Number three, the rising equity glide path is genuinely the right shape. Even though it's the opposite of what every target date fund does, found kitsis were right, the industry hasn't yet caught up. Number four, the Geiten Klinger guardrails are the technical version of being in the right relationship with reality, build them into your annual review, cut modestly in bad years, raise modestly in the good ones. Number five, knowledge does not save you in the moment. Infrastructure does, build the cash buffer, write the letter to your future self, trust the version of you who was thinking clearly. Number six, every downturn feels like the catastrophe, almost none of them are. The math says hold, and number seven, practice the art of doing nothing because it's the rarest skill in finance and easily the most valuable. Next week, part five, our final episode in the decumulation series from Saver to Spender, the behavioral and psychological clothes, how to actually give yourself permission to enjoy what you just spent your life building. This is the episode the whole series has been pointing toward. And if this was useful, given that we just spent 40 minutes on the philosophical underpinnings of doing absolutely nothing, you'll either love it or unsubscribe from this podcast forever, please consider sharing it with someone who's approaching a difficult market and could use the framework before they need it. This is the decumulation series, five parts one to go. And as always, hope this gives you something to think about throughout the week ahead. Thanks for tuning in to your money guide on the side. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to visit my website at tylergardener.com for even more helpful resources and insights. And if you're interested in receiving some quick and actionable guidance each week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter where each Sunday, I share three actionable financial ideas to help you take control of your money and investments. You can find the sign up link on my website, tylergardener.com, or on any of my socials at SocialCap official. Until next time, I'm tylergardener, your money guide on the side. And I truly hope this episode got you one step closer to where you need to be.