6d • General discussion
The Wrong Question Has Been Costing You Decades
Most people spend their entire working lives chasing a number they were never told how to calculate correctly.
The financial planning industry has spent 50 years conditioning people to believe retirement is a net worth problem. Accumulate 25 times your expenses. Find your "retirement number." Save until you hit it. Simple, right?
Except it isn't. Because that number doesn't actually exist — not in any meaningful way.
It doesn't tell you when to take Social Security. It doesn't account for the way your spending naturally shifts over a 30-year retirement. And it certainly doesn't prepare you for what happens when a liquidity event rewrites your entire tax picture overnight.
You don't need a number. You need a spending path.
What you actually need is a plan that answers a very different question: How much can I afford to spend this year, next year, and every year after — without ever reducing my living standard?
That's the right question. And once you can answer it, something interesting happens: the net worth you need stops being a target you're chasing. It falls right out of the math. It becomes an artifact of the plan — not the objective of it.
That distinction matters more than most people realize. A more efficient, well-structured plan can actually mean you need less — not more. But without a Functional Consumption plan in place, you're left doing what most people do: relying on rules of thumb, rough estimates, and educated guesswork.
Here's what's frustrating: the financial planning industry has existed for half a century and has never formally solved for this. The methodology isn't missing — it lives in economics. The planning world just never adopted it.
Numbers aren't goals. Goals aren't numbers.
Retire smarter.
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The Wrong Question Has Been Costing You Decades
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