Review: How Much Can I Spend in Retirement?: A Guide to Investment-Based Retirement Income Strategies

How Much Can I Spend in Retirement?: A Guide to Investment-Based Retirement Income Strategies by Wade Pfau
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’d call this a situational review of Wade Pfau’s wonderfully insightful book on different schemes for milking your investments during your golden years of retirement. Here’s my situation – I’ve planned for an early retirement for most of my career, and found myself pretty well positioned for it financially when my employer provided that last not-so-gentle nudge leaving me unemployed during the pandemic. Thank you sir, may I have another. But while my buckets of investments are roughly right, those buckets are disorganized. This, on occasion, leads me to thoughts of personal financial peril and thoughts of ruin. It was during one of these low times when I found Pfau’s book and dived in.

First, it should be noted that this is often categorized as a business book, or for those with more refined classifications, as a personal finance or retirement book. I am here to tell you that in my reading it was better classified as horror. Pfau follows the typical horror book method. He begins by laying out a typical retirement financial planning scenario, one that I felt was very familiar to my own. He then starts knocking away at the foundations of that plan, pointing out how unrealistic this part was, and that part, and how history was up for interpretation, and by the end of his introductory sections, I knew that I had been horribly mistaken to think for one minute that I could ever stop working for “the man”. I found myself reading this section faster and faster, not wanting to believe the often simple math and the conservative takes on historical market numbers and trends. My blood pressure and heart rate rose, despite good drugs to counter. By the middle of the book, the story took on a more academic feel, where Pfau devoted chapters to working on different withdrawal schemes. There are a lot of these, and not all ones that I was overly familiar with from other books and articles I had read. The author defined his topics well and provided insightful commentary at a level deeper than most personal finance books. Reading these sections was when, like in a good horror story, I started to see seeds of hope. By understanding the attributes and the outcomes of these different withdrawal schemes, you could see that there was a way to limit your risks of failure and to limit the negative impacts to your life along the way. I could suddenly see a path that led, strangely, right to how I always thought I would handle my retirement investment withdrawals, and they made sense. So while starting like a horror book, it ended up more positive, like a self help tome. I can only hope that Pfau didn’t plan on this coming across as a horror book, where the foolish bit player thinks he’s eliminated the evil, only to be surprised by that evil’s resurgence hinted at in the conclusion. I didn’t get the Stephen King vibe at the end here, so I believe I am safe. Knock wood.

I should also add here that I see this as being a personal take on the book. I don’t expect a majority of readers would feel the same about this book, as they probably haven’t had the same kinds of long-standing financial thought experiments on this topic as I’ve had, often driven by overheard snippets of commentary from CNBC playing in the background. I’ll admit I can be obsessive. But I found Pfau’s book a good balm for my self-inflicted financial trauma. And once I work up enough psychological wellness on this topic, I’ll take on another of Pfau’s books with the hopes that it comes across as just a good finance book. Five stars for me, your mileage may vary.


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