A listener wrote in with a problem I hear more often than you’d think. He and his wife were both locum tenens physicians, ran a disciplined FIRE plan from the start, worked the shifts nobody wanted, and hit their number three years ago at 45. The plan called for $200,000 a year in spending. They’re actually spending closer to $100,000. His wife thinks he’s being too conservative and wants to increase spend. He wants to know if she’s right, and how he lets go and trusts the plan they built.
The Switch Nobody Warns You About
This is far more common than people expect, and not just in the FIRE community. Aggressive savers spend years in one mode: chase income, cut expenses, watch the accounts grow, hit the target. Then retirement arrives, the paycheck stops, and the goal flips from growing the number to spending it down. That’s a much harder switch to flip than it sounds. You’ve spent a decade or more building the exact opposite instinct, and now you’re being asked to reverse it overnight.
Give Your Spending Money Its Own Home
One fix I like a lot is splitting your accounts. Keep your main joint brokerage account doing what it’s supposed to do: staying invested, following the plan, growing quietly in the background. Then open a second account that exists purely for spending. Once a year, transfer the amount you’re planning to spend into that account, and pull from it into checking as needed. That separation matters more than it sounds like it should. When your spending money isn’t sitting in the same account as your long-term growth money, you stop flinching every time the market has a rough month and start actually using what you transferred.
Your Number Is a Range, Not a Ceiling
If your plan called for $200,000 a year and you’re only spending $100,000, that gap is discretionary money you have permission to use, not a cushion you’re obligated to protect. A well-built plan already has buffer built into a number like that, and if it was constructed properly, there’s room in it even before you account for the gap between planned and actual spending. Treat $100,000 as the amount you’ll spend indefinitely, and the other $100,000 as money you get to spend when markets cooperate. That’s the logic behind a guardrails approach, or what some call a variable safe withdrawal rate: instead of being locked to one fixed figure, you’re spending somewhere in a range, say $120,000 to $200,000, and adjusting based on how the portfolio is doing in a given year. In a strong market, you lean toward the top of that range. After a rough year, you pull back toward the bottom, and you already know that’s part of the plan rather than a sign something’s gone wrong.
One caveat: don’t let that extra spending lock in permanently higher fixed costs, like new debt or a second property. Discretionary spending only stays discretionary if you can pull it back when you need to. Spend it on things you can walk away from in a lean year, not obligations that follow you regardless of what the market does.
Rebuilding the Muscle You Spent Years Not Using
Here’s the part that surprises people. You don’t just need permission to spend more, you need practice. If you’ve been living on $100,000 with room for $200,000, set next year’s goal as spending $150,000. It’ll feel uncomfortable, maybe even wasteful, at first. But the discomfort is useful. It forces intentional decisions about where that money goes: time with family, travel, experiences you’ve been putting off. Most people who do this find the money doesn’t disappear into nothing, it goes toward the things they were saving for in the first place.
What You’re Actually Protecting by Not Spending
The real risk in this situation isn’t overspending. It’s spending so little that you never actually get the return on all those years of sacrifice. If you’re this far under your number three years into retirement, the plan isn’t broken, your relationship with spending is just lagging behind your relationship with saving. That’s a solvable gap, and if flipping that switch feels harder than it should on your own, loop in us, your advisors. Helping clients trust a plan they spent decades building, and finally let it do its job, is exactly the kind of work we do best.
This post is adapted from a recent episode of the Scholar Wealth Podcast. For more perspective on shifting from saving to spending in retirement, listen to the full podcast episode here.