
For years, I have read articles about retirement that I frankly didn’t understand—the three-bucket system, buying a lot of SPIAs, time segmentation, etc. Let me rephrase: I understood the math and the finances. But I didn’t understand the point. Why bother? Mathematically, I thought all of these work out worse than a simple everything-is-invested strategy (i.e. total return). What in the world was the point of all these other income strategies?
Let’s look at the risks and benefits of each and why you might consider (or reject) them.
Income in Retirement and the Sequence of Returns Risk
First, before you start worrying about drawing from your investments, your retirement income should include guaranteed sources of income. This includes pensions, Social Security, SPIAs, and dividends. As we get set to retire in our mid-40s, we earn almost $1,000 a month in dividends in our taxable account and $1,000 after expenses from a single-family home rental. Our income starts at $2,000, and after that, we begin to think about drawing from our investments.
Your investments have been increasing during your working career. Once you retire and begin the decumulation phase of your life, plenty of things change. Instead of adding to your accounts, you are suddenly drawing from them. Since you don’t have an income from your job, you need to figure out how to create an income from your investments. On a practical level, how do you do this? The solution that seemed obvious to me was that every month I would sell some of my investments to meet my expenses for the previous month. This is the “total return” approach and the one most often discussed in retirement planning.
The problem, of course, is the sequence of returns risk. That is, if the market does particularly poorly when you first retire, your investments will be worth less. You still need to live and generate income for your spending, so you sell your investments. Now you have less invested, so when the market recovers, you will not benefit as much from the rise. This is the basis of the 4% rule—you can spend 4% of your invested portfolio and have a reasonable chance it will last 30 years. If returns are poor early on, you will be OK as long as you don’t spend more than 4%.
Now, imagine it’s your second year of retirement. You’re enjoying your life, and you have no plans to do any work. Your investments are doing fine. Then, the market takes a tumble. What do you do? Do you keep living your life and sell your investments while they’re down? Do you tighten things up and live like a hermit? How can you continue to feel OK about your spending when your investments are down? Numerous “solutions” to this conundrum have been devised, including the three-bucket strategy, time segmentation, and income protection. Let’s dive into these three.
More information here:
I’m Retiring in My Mid-40s; Here’s How I’ll Start Drawing Down My Accounts
A Framework for Thinking About Retirement Income
The Three-Bucket Strategy
In the three-bucket strategy, you have three buckets of money: cash, short-term investments (like bonds), and long-term investments (like stocks and real estate). You spend money from your cash bucket and replenish it periodically. If the market is doing well, you replenish it from your stocks (that is, you sell stocks and put the money into cash). If the market isn’t doing well, you replenish it from your bonds. You might have 2-3 years of your spending in cash. That way, if the market tanks, you can still spend your cash and keep your stocks invested. You can still feel good about spending money because you’re not having to sell your stocks while they’re down.
The bucket strategy can decrease your likelihood of running out of money but only if you execute it well and the market drops in very particular ways. In the worst case, imagine that the market is flat for a decade—depleting your cash and bonds—before a big drop. In the best case, the market decreases in years 2-5 and then rebounds dramatically. Since you were spending from cash and bonds, you kept your stocks invested and they benefited from the rebound. Big ERN from Early Retirement Now has a detailed analysis of this strategy and concludes the cash bucket may or may not be better than just diversifying with bonds. You can also interpret the three-bucket strategy as just forcing you to rebalance—for example, back to 60/25/15 stocks/bonds/cash regularly—which can be beneficial since you’re always buying the “discounted” asset.
The risk with the three-bucket strategy is that large amounts of cash will decrease your long-term returns. The benefits are that it simplifies your life, helps with the emotionality of selling assets in a down market, and forces you to rebalance.
Time Segmentation
In time segmentation, you own assets that mature at specific times (such as each year in the first 10 years of retirement). Ideally, these assets are fairly safe, such as CDs or Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS). As you reach that year of retirement, the asset matures and you move the money into your checking account. Then, you use the stock (or growth) investments to buy another year of safe assets. You are building a bond ladder for the next X number of years, usually 5-10. Some people will ALSO use the phrase “bucket” strategy for this or include the bucket strategy under time segmentation. The distinction is that, in time segmentation, you have specific bonds maturing intentionally each year, whereas with the three-bucket strategy I outlined before, you spend money from the three buckets depending on market performance.
At the most extreme end, you just put all of your money into safe assets paying 4% a year for 30 years and call it good. You have a bond ladder, where each year your bonds mature and pay you 4% of your assets to fund your spending. Then, you die at the end of year 30. I’ll only be 77 when we hit year 30 of retirement, so this won’t work for us. This assumes you live no longer than 30 years because all of your assets will be gone. A solution to this problem could be to build a bond ladder with 90% of your assets and invest the remaining 10% in stocks. At the end of 30 years, the stocks should be up and could sustain your lifestyle.
What if your stocks don’t perform well enough to buy another year’s worth of safe assets? You’ll eventually reach a point where your safe assets are all spent down and you’re left with your stocks. Some may argue that you just need your safe assets for 10 years—to get out of the peak sequence of return risk years. While the first 10 years matter the most, each subsequent decade also has an impact on your likelihood of success, particularly if you have a 40- or 50-year retirement, as Big ERN has pointed out. You could also use time segmentation to cover the time before you can collect a pension or Social Security—for us, that would basically be 13 years—when your portfolio will need to bear less of a burden to supply your income.
Given current high TIPS rates, using time segmentation seems like an attractive option. If the market is doing well when your bonds mature, you could spend from your stocks and reinvest the money from the TIPS into another year’s TIPS. However, Wade Pfau has done an analysis that suggests time segmentation is not necessarily better than a dynamic total return approach, since it’s effectively a forced glide path that increases your stock percentages, just like a dynamic total return.
The risk with time segmentation is minimal as long as bond returns are decent. It’s just complicated. The benefits are that it will get you through the most dangerous decade for the sequence of return risk and make you feel like you are allowed to spend your money.
More information here:
A Doctor’s Review of the Retirement Income Style Awareness (RISA) Profile
The Best Way to Create a Retirement Income Plan (and a $1 Million Example)
Income Protection
Income protection is pretty simple—you have a system to pay you regularly, just like you did when you were working a job. This can be done with one of the only good annuities: the SPIA. You give an insurance company a chunk of your money, and it deposits an amount into your checking account every month. There's no sequence of return risks—the insurance company takes on those.
There are several problems with SPIAs. First, there may be tax consequences associated with getting that big chunk of money to give the insurance company (e.g. selling your taxable account assets). By selling stocks each year, you could stay in the 0% capital gains tax bracket ($96,700 MFJ in 2025), but selling $1 million would put you into the 20% bracket. Second, there’s no inflation protection—SPIAs don’t increase their rates over time. Third, the insurance company needs to make a profit, so you are necessarily going to get less money than if you invested it yourself. Finally, there’s no potential for upside gain, where your portfolio grows dramatically. The money is gone and there’s no possibility of it growing. Also, there is no money left for a bequeathment when you die.
The benefit is that you never run out of money to spend. You can minimize the effect of inflation by buying serial SPIAs—for example, when you turn 70, 75, 80, and 85.
Our Strategy as We Get Set to Retire Early
So, what is our strategy? We’re in our mid-40s, and we're too young to buy a SPIA (and can’t readily do so anyway due to where our assets are currently). There’s some evidence to suggest that a partial time-segmentation strategy may be effective, more for 1929-like events than the stagflation of the '60s. On a behavioral finance level, I worry most about a 1929-like market event where our assets absolutely crater. I would have a hard time spending ANY money in that circumstance. If something like the stagflation of the '60s showed up, we could very happily cut our spending and still have a pretty incredible life.
We’re planning to have two years of spending in cash and three years of spending in TIPS. If the market is good, we’ll sell some of our stocks and move the money into our checking account. If the market is bad, we’ll spend from our cash and then our TIPS. If the market continues to be bad after a couple of years and we’re looking at continued poor performance, we’ll adjust down our lifestyle so that our draw on our stocks will be 4% of the current portfolio value. This is different from a safe withdrawal rate because it is based on a percent of the current portfolio value rather than the value at the start of retirement. We’ll eventually have to sell stocks if the market is down for five-plus years, but by then, we’ll be 100% stocks so hopefully we can catch the upswing of the market and ride it back to positive territory. Having a rising equity glide path, where you move from 70% stocks to 100% stocks, seems to be helpful.
If it’s too overwhelming to figure out, you can always do a consultation with a good financial planner to double-check your numbers and help you have confidence you are on the right track. Ultimately, like most things in personal finance, your retirement income strategy is personal. It will be influenced by your retirement horizon, your withdrawal percent, your risk tolerance and capacity, any non-investment income sources (Social Security, pension), etc.
You DO have to figure this out, though, if you intend to retire one day. No one is going to care more about your money than you do!
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What is your retirement income strategy and when will you have to fully implement it? How flexible are you willing to be depending on what happens in the market? What other strategies can people use?
Nice article! It seems these bucket plans always leave out the rebalancing portion. So, the market went down, you spent cash and TIPS and are now 100% stocks. What is the formula for rebalancing back into cash and bonds? Never? Over a set amount of time? All at once? Depends if the market goes up or down even more? Depends on your emotions at the time?
I think you have to answer all these questions in advance when you do the bucket strategy. Big ERN says that the bucket strategy is really just a sort of behavioral finance hack for doing total return. As Erik says above, “ You can also interpret the three-bucket strategy as just forcing you to rebalance—for example, back to 60/25/15 stocks/bonds/cash regularly.”
Yeah, replenishing the buckets is basically market timing unless you have an a priori rule laid out. There are a wide variety of options for how to create that rule, but ultimately you’re just not going to see much of a difference between them.
I think writing down in advance how you will replenish is probably the best plan.
Your first paragraph resonated with me—why bother with all this stuff? You ask at the beginning how any of it is better than a total-return rebalancing strategy, and I didn’t see an answer to that question.
I guess your plan intends to over-weight asset classes that are underperforming? Is there any evidence from market history that this is helpful? Even theoretically? (Not sarcasm, genuinely curious.) And as Lance asks, how do you know when to rebalance?
Here’s Kitces on buckets v. static AA:
https://www.kitces.com/blog/managing-sequence-of-return-risk-with-bucket-strategies-vs-a-total-return-rebalancing-approach/
The issue of how much to spend versus what to spend is of course different, and I think it’s fun to get into the weeds on this, but I suspect in real life most of us here will spend less than we could on most years, and more than we should on some.
Personally I favor a risk-based guardrail using Empower’s monte carlo sims, but only as a very general guidepost to make sure I can afford the new roof, or the special vacation or what-have-you.
Here’s Kitces again, on risk-based guardrails:
https://www.kitces.com/blog/guyton-klinger-guardrails-retirement-income-rules-risk-based/
I think Erik’s point was that everybody is different in terms of their preference of total return versus tag segmentation versus guaranteed income in response to SORR. total return is probably the most optimal to make the most money overall in retirement but behaviorally you may not be able to tolerate the ups and downs in your income or selling equities low in response to a poor sequence of returns using this approach.
I agree with you about a guard rail approach in retirement. probably being the most optimal way if you wanted to maximize spending and have no legacy goals.
Hello Brian, getting into the weeds is pretty interesting. I have to say, just three months in to executing our retirement spending plan, my interest in the nitty gritty details has decreased dramatically. I think, like Dr. Dahle says, choose something reasonable and adjust as you go is the best advice. We’re not going to intentionally over weight underperforming asset classes in any systematic way. We’re going to do a slow rising equity glidepath over the first 5 years, basically reversing our bond tent.
I would agree with the above, stick with rebalancing a total return portfolio. I have always handled the money in the family and now that I am older than dirt in dog years, one thing I noticed for myself and my peers is the decline in cognitive flexibility. (Though some won’t admit that even if they tried to fall on the ground they might miss.) We just don’t think things through as well. The bucket strategy is a case in point: moving all of those holdings around in the bucket strategy makes my brain feel like it’s been chewed up and spit out.
Erik dominating article as always, and really summed up a lot of what Wade Pfau says, very succinctly and practically for the DIYer. it might be semantics, but I didn’t really understand the difference between time segmentation and the three bucket approach given to me It seems like the bucket approach is just a way to implement time segmentation Retirement income style. Doesn’t really matter to me if your safe bucket is actually maturing or not given even cash technically is something that has “matured” and bond funds have many bonds maturing within them. whether your time segmentation or using the three bucket approach strategy, you are liability matching different time points of your retirement.
Dude, I also love your drawdown plan! I’m kind of surprised though that you think behaviorally a great depression would freak you out more than the stagflation of the 70s. treasuries went absolutely freaking ballistic and increased exponentially during the great depression era, even though stocks tanked horribly. your allocation to US treasuries should really shield you in your retirement if the great depression occurs, correct? Is there something I’m not seeing that you are That’s particularly freaking you out?
The stagflation of the 70s however is much different. It would be like 2022 except for an entire freaking decade where bonds and stocks get freaking hammered. Behaviorally that would freak me out more no matter how much I cut my spending. Also having to cut my spending severely would really piss me off. Even your TIPS would go down if 70’s stagflation were to happen again just like in 2022 as TIPS don’t truly protect you against inflation when interest rates are skyrocketing. is there something in your asset allocation in particular that you think would get you through a 70 stylestagflation? International stocks? Small value stocks? Bitcoin?
Thanks for the support Rikki! I think you are probably correct about the theoretical foundation of time segmentation vs. three bucket. I think the difference is probably the details of how each is executed.
I think I am most worried about a Great Depression-style era because I grew up hearing stories about it from my grandmom and mom. They didn’t seem to have the same traumatic experience from living through the 60s stagflation. We do have 35% allocated to international stocks which _might_ help in a stagflation setting.
My actual “strategy” has drawbacks: fluctuation and of course not knowing when I will meet the Almighty. But so far it has worked: I take my life expectancy (my current age minus 100); the balance at year’s end; the five year average inflation rate and my – not a generic, but my – five year rate of return and put it into this calculator and magically I get my spending for the year. I just pull from the funds to keep their correct percentages. Not perfect, but what is? https://www.mycalculators.com/ca/retcalc2m.html#google_vignette
Nice article! You mention a few times, “If the market is good…” and “If the market is bad…”. How will you go about determining this? I’ve found that the answer to that question isn’t quite as obvious as it might otherwise seem, without a very clear definition.
Great question Casey and it would probably be good to have a mathematical answer to this (e.g. a 20% decline year-over-year). What I’m going with right now is comparing the current value to the value when we started our retirement spending plan on Dec 31st 2024. If it’s less, we use our cash, otherwise we sell stocks. Definitely imperfect, but, as I mentioned in another comment, since starting to execute our plan I have worried a lot less about the little details.
+1 For guardrails. Except you need to rethink how guard rails are implemented and what they mean. Risk-based guard rails look at the risk of portfolio depletion.
For some, this can be difficult for people to get their minds around. A better approach, also described by Kitces, is risk-based spending guardrails. Look around on the incomelab.com website for more information about this.
Secondly, I wish we could retire the phrase 4% rule. It was never intended to be a rule – more a rule of thumb. You use it to get a finger in the wind view of how much you need to retire, but that’s it.
Anyone who tries to use it as a withdrawal strategy is likely to either run out of money early, or leave a lot of money on the table that they could’ve enjoyed while they were still alive.
I try to use the phrase “4% guideline” which I think is probably more accurate. And I agree it’s kind of a bad withdrawal strategy. The point of the Trinity study was that you can’t take 8% out of your portfolio every year even if it returns 8% on average due to SORR.
Hi,
This is regarding backdoor Roth IRA.
I do backdoor Roth every year for myself and my spouse, via Charles Schwab.
However Charles Schwab made a mistake for my backdoor Roth for 2024. In addition to rolling out the 7k contribution from Traditional to Roth IRA, it made another 7 k contribution directly into Roth from my brockerage account. I had to call Charles Schwab to reverse that excess contribution (in March 2024)- against which it generated a 1099R with distribution code of ‘8J’ in box 7.
Couple questions:
1. How do I input this 1099R in turbo tax? Should I put $0 in box 1 since it was reversed? Please note, the form reports $7k in box 1 (gross distribution) which makes my aggregate distribution for myself and my spouse to $21K. In reality it’s just 14k.
2. Are there any tax consequences of excess contribution that is reversed before tax filing deadline?
Looking forward to hearing from you you at your earliest convenience.
Thank you!
1. I’m certainly not a Turbotax expert. I haven’t used it in years. I’d call their help line. But my usual recommendation is to see if box 2b is checked. It often is which basically allows you to put whatever you want on line 2a. I bet that solves your problem. The instructions say this about code 8J:
https://www.irs.gov/instructions/i1099r#en_US_2024_publink100021668
8—Excess contributions plus earnings/excess deferrals (and/or earnings) taxable in 2024.
Use Code 8 for a corrective IRA distribution under section 408(d)(4), unless Code P applies. Also, use this code for corrective distributions of excess deferrals, excess contributions, and excess aggregate contributions, unless Code P applies. See Corrective Distributions , earlier, and IRA Revocation or Account Closure , earlier, for more information.
1, 2, 4, B, J, or K
2. Shouldn’t be. No way I’d pay more in tax for this.
Thank you so much for responding.
The only boxes with values are:
Box 1: $7000
Box 2a: $0
Box 7: 8J
If I enter box 1 value in turbo tax, gods distribution reflects as $21000 instead of $14000 (the correct amount between myself and my spouse). So I e termed $0 because the contribution to Roth IRA was reversed. Wonder if that will create any future complication for my backdoor Roth.
Do you have any thoughts/suggestions?
Thank you!
If the 1099 is wrong, ask the issuer to give you a new one. It doesn’t sound like 2b is checked. Either it should be, or box 1 should be 0. Or you can take that $7K deduction somewhere then give it back as taxable income.
Hi Erik,
Thanks for the interesting article/post. In your article you said “Second, there’s no inflation protection—SPIAs don’t increase their rates over time. ” This is not really correct. While you cannot currently buy SPIAs linked to the CPI, you can buy SPIAs with fixed annual increases ranging from 1% to 6%. So you can get SPIAs that increase their rates over time consistent with whatever you expect inflation to average over the term of your SPIA. A friend of mine bought a SPIA with a 4% annual increase in the last year. Just to be clear, however, buying a SPIA with a COLA will reduce your initial monthly payment over buying the same SPIA without the COLA.
That might be better than just buying multiple SPIAs over the years (or not) or just buying a bigger SPIA benefit, but it isn’t true inflation protection. If inflation spikes to 12% and stays there for 5 years, you’re still out of luck. That sort of thing matters when you’re buying something primarily for the guaranteed income.
Good overview of retirement income sources and sequence of returns risk. Highlighting guaranteed income first is key, and the explanation of how early market downturns can impact a portfolio’s longevity is well done. The 4% rule mention provides valuable context.