In this Episode of the Secure Your Retirement Podcast, Radon and Murs discuss one of the biggest fears retirees face: How people run out of money in retirement—and more importantly, how to avoid it. Drawing from a widely shared Investopedia article, they break down five common mistakes that can derail even the best-laid plans and apply the Peace of Mind Wealth Management perspective to help you never run out of money in retirement. Whether you’re just beginning to plan for retirement or already retired, this conversation highlights why a thoughtful retirement spending plan and proactive retirement income planning are essential.

Listen in to learn about practical retirement planning tips that go beyond generic advice and focus on real-world retirement challenges like managing taxes, building a smart retirement withdrawal strategy, and revisiting your plan as life changes. Radon and Murs explain how knowing your spending, understanding IRA withdrawal rules, and implementing strategies like the Three Bucket Strategy and Roth conversion strategy can help you retire comfortably and secure your retirement for decades to come.

In this episode, find out:

• Why knowing your spending is the foundation of a sustainable retirement spending plan
• How retiring too early without a plan for retirement can increase the risk of running out of money
• How tax planning in retirement, including Roth conversions and IRA withdrawal rules, impacts long-term success
• How Medicare IRMAA and the IRMAA surcharge can surprise retirees without proper planning
• Why revisiting your retirement checklist regularly is critical to retiring comfortably

Tweetable Quotes:

• “It doesn’t matter how much money you have—if your spending isn’t aligned with your plan, you can still run out of money in retirement.” — Radon Stancil
• “A successful retirement income plan isn’t set it and forget it; it’s something you nurture year after year.” — Murs Tariq

This episode reinforces why comprehensive retirement planning, thoughtful tax planning in retirement, and ongoing adjustments are key to planning retirement with confidence. By focusing on retirement income planning, balancing growth and protection, and understanding how taxes affect your withdrawals, you can reduce anxiety and move closer to truly retiring comfortably.

Resources:

If you are in or nearing retirement and you want to gain clarity on what questions you should be asking, learn what the biggest retirement myths are, and identify what you can do to achieve peace of mind for your retirement, get started today by requesting our complimentary video course, Four Steps to Secure Your Retirement!

To access the course, simply visit POMWealth.net/podcast.

Here’s the full transcript:

Welcome to Secure Your Retirement Podcast. Today we have a topic that a lot of 

people are concerned about, and that’s run out of money. In fact, we were reading 

an article. Murs and I are always trying to keep in touch with what’s out there. 

And Market Watch and different things come out with articles all the time. And 

when we read the article, we go, wow, that’s a topic we run into. So why don’t we 

have a podcast where we kind of talk through what we read in the article and kind 

of give our slant on the tips and things that it might give. But here was the 

title of the article, Five Ways People Run Out of Money in Retirement and How to 

Avoid It. Well, that’s a, tell you in our in our world I don’t care if you’ve got 

a few hundred thousand or a few million dollars the number one thing people are 

worried about is my money going to last for the rest of my life and you might 

think well if Ihad a few million dollars I’d never think that it’s not 

it doesn’t change as same as with you if you’ve got a few hundred thousand a 

person with uh no money would say well why would you ever worry about running out 

of money and so It’s all perspective, and I tell people all the time, it always 

comes down to the idea of how much am I spending. And so, we’re going to really 

talk through what this looks like. So, if you ever have thought, do I have enough? 

What are some things I need to think about? I think this is going to be a great 

topic for us to discuss. And so we’re really going to take these five things that 

were brought up in the article, and we’re going to just break them down into our 

world as to how we look at those. But I’m going to take as a tip number one, and 

Murs is going to run with it here, but here was tip number one. It was your 

spending. And Murs, can you kind of talk about our way that we look at that? 

Yeah. I think spending is very important. You know, we often will tell the story of 

I’ve got one family that’s got a couple hundred thousand saved up for retirement. 

I’ve got another family that’s got a couple million saved up for retirement, and we 

will say it’s actually the family that has less money, has a more solid financial 

plan. So, what’s that key difference between the two? One has way more money than 

the other, but the key difference is how they are spending. And the one with more 

money is spending above their means for sustainability in their plan, whereas the 

other is rather frugal, and they’re not really touching those assets all that much, 

or they’re very responsible about how they’re drawing those assets down. So that’s 

what it comes down to is really knowing your spending. I think when you’re working, 

you’re earning a good salary; you’re checking all the boxes of what you’ve been 

doing all along, which is putting into the 401K, putting into your investment 

accounts, making sure your cash levels are where they’re supposed to be, living the 

life you want to live, paying the bills, and not building up any type of credit 

card debt. You’re like, hey, I’m doing everything. I don’t really need to focus on 

a budget because everything is just working very well. I’m checking on. 

really need to know, you know, what are my, my regular expenses or my needs? 

We talk about needs, you know, paying the bills, staying fed, staying relatively 

happy. And then what are my wants? What are my desires when it comes to my 

retirement lifestyle? Is it memberships? Is it travel? You know, what am I going to 

want to do that I’ve been neglecting while I’ve been working, earning and saving and 

raising my family? And so, understanding those is going to be really important to set 

a retirement baseline of spending. And then, you know, through what we do and 

building out these roadmaps is what we call it, we call it the peace of mind 

roadmap, which is the retirement focused financial plan saying, here’s where we are, 

here’s where we want to go, which is I want to retire at a certain date. So, what 

do I need to think about? And it is my spending in line with the assets that I’ve 

built up. And we review that constantly, making sure that, you know, life changes 

that are happening along the way, everything is still in place for a successful 

retirement. That’s the end goal. If you’re not paying attention to your spending and 

walking into retirement and just hoping everything’s going to be okay, it could be 

detrimental to you. So that’s the tip I would give anyone out there is know your 

spending before you think about retiring. The next one is, well, don’t retire too 

early without a plan. Tip number two, Raiden, what do you say about that? Yeah, I 

think that this is, I think, really, really big. And, you know, our relationships, 

when we start meeting with somebody, as we start looking at and we evaluate the 

situation, we go through an evaluation, making sure that we’re looking at what we 

call the five critical areas of a successful retirement plan. And this looks at a 

lot of different areas, and that’s really about what these drives toward is actually 

getting a plan. But those five key areas are risk analysis on my investment plan. 

Do I have a good investment strategy that’s built for getting to and through 

retirement? Do I have an optimized income plan? Income planning is extremely 

important. We’re talking about income here on this, but it’s an important part, and 

it ties right to the investment plan. And then we’ve got, you know, 

when we look at things, we’ve got healthcare we got to think about. So, health care, 

you know, am I retiring before 65? How do I deal with health care? How do I deal 

with if I am retiring younger than 65 or how do I deal with Medicare when I turn 

65? Really, really important. And then the next one is huge and that is taxes. 

Where am I going to, how am I going to deal with taxes? Am I doing tax strategy 

and tax planning, different than just doing a, you know, 

preparing my tax return after the fact? I have to do pre -planning to be able to 

optimize my tax plan. And then finally, the estate plan. If I’m not looking at all 

five of those things prior to retirement, so I’ve got a very clear picture. And it 

goes back to what Murs says. It’s what we call the peace of mind roadmap. This 

roadmap is built out with those five key areas. And I will tell you, when we put 

that in front of somebody, it is extremely eye -opening. So, once we go through 

verifying that with a new client, that, yep, they’ve got some issues that they want 

to talk about or think about, the next thing we’re going to do is a comprehensive 

retirement -focused financial plan. All of our clients have that. And so, on top of 

that, we have to continue to look at it, and we’ll talk about that here in a 

minute, but I think looking at all of those aspects, tying it together, extremely, 

extremely important. Now, we talked about you put this plan together, and a part of 

this plan really takes us to the next area once you’ve built this plan out, and 

that is our tip number three, manage withdrawals and taxes. So, Murs is going to go 

a little bit more into the nitty gritty on that. Yeah. So, you know, we talk about 

buckets a lot on this podcast. We talk about investing buckets, but also there’s tax 

buckets in the sense of, as we have saved and grown our wealth over the years, we 

tend to have different categories of taxation that we need to be very aware of, 

especially as we get to the withdrawal phase of life into retirement. So, the tax 

bucket, there’s three of them. One is your pre -tax buckets. So, think about your 

IRAs, your 401Ks, the different types of accounts that gave you tax benefit for 

contributing to them, you haven’t paid a dime of tax on those yet. And so sometimes 

that’s forgotten about. And then so the next bucket is your taxable bucket. 

These are dollars that you put into, after tax dollars that you’ve put into, 

say, a brokerage account in most cases. You know, you wanted to So buy that Nvidia 

stock or that Apple stock, and it’s grown, it’s grown, it’s grown. And now you’ve 

got long -term capital gains and short -term capital gains and interests and dividends 

that are the things that you need to worry about in that type of account from a 

taxation perspective. And then the best bucket of all is the tax -free bucket. 

That’s the Roth bucket. 

And there’s a lot of strategies around that too. But when you withdraw on that 

money, it comes out tax free. So very enticing to use. So, when it comes to 

managing your withdrawals, you want to have an understanding of how that money is 

taxed for one, because that’s going to help us create an efficient withdrawal 

strategy when it comes to taxation year over year. But we also want to understand, 

you know, where is the best place to be taking from with our goals in line? So 

what does that mean? Well, a big part of tax and what we do here at peace of 

mind is we do an annual tax strategy meeting. That’s going to really help someone 

understand what their taxes are going to look like for the year when it comes to 

withdraw the amount of withdrawals they take and, you know, what are they going to 

owe? That’s the beginning of it. But that helps lead into, well, if we’re going to 

withdraw from certain areas, we’re going to owe a certain amount of tax. And so, We 

want to make sure our withholdings or our quarterly payments are in line, so we 

have no tax surprises come April of the following year. But then I said, well, 

you want to do it with goals in line, right? I could have one family that could 

care less about what their legacy of inheritance is, and they just want to withdraw 

in a smart way for taxation that’s going to benefit them while they’re living. I 

could have another family that says, I’m willing to pay some taxes now up upfront 

over my years so that when my heirs do inherit, I want them to inherit as much 

tax -free money as possible. I want to take on that tax burden while I’m living so 

they don’t have to deal with it when they inherit my money. Two completely different 

goals, and we would drive the withdrawal strategy all around that. Some things that 

are some common mistakes that we see is sometimes taking everything from the raise 

first, it may not make sense depending on the goals or ignoring Roth planning. 

That’s a big one. And a lot of times we try to catch up, and it can be hard to 

catch up on Roth planning. You want to be talking about that every single year, 

whether it makes sense or not. And then the other one that you really want to 

avoid in most cases, there’s good reasons to go into it. And we’ve done podcast 

episodes on this, but sometimes people accidentally trigger Medicare Irma charges. 

That’s a tax on top of your Medicare if you generate too much income. So those are 

just some ones that come off the top of my head, though. But it all kind of ties 

back into this idea of the peace of mind pathway, the peace of mind roadmap, you 

know, making sure all of these elements of our financial plan are linked together so 

that when we turn one knob, we’re not surprised that it’s turning a bunch of other 

knobs. We’ve planned for it. All right. Tip number four, this one’s really important, 

balancing growth and protection. What do you get on that, Radon? Yeah, this one is 

important. It takes us back to that first critical area within the retirement 

planning process, and that is risk management. And, you know, what you were doing 

when you were 30 may not be what you should be doing when you’re close to 

retirement. And we really talk about this all the time. Three bucket strategies, 

super simple. Bucket number one, I want to have some money in cash. Bucket number 

two, I want it to be income -oriented and safer than being in the stock market. And 

then bucket number three is my growth bucket, but I need to have a really good 

strategy in that bucket to make sure that I’m growing my money in a proper way for 

when I’m close to it in retirement. And I may want to have some risk on that 

money, and that’s fine. But if I’m structured that way, I now can live on income 

and live on money out of my income safety bucket if my growth bucket is going 

through a downturn or a cycle. So, I’m not having anxiety. I’m not thinking about 

while this bucket’s down. I can’t get access to it. Super simple process, but it’s 

something that is absolutely critical to make sure that we can live throughout that 

retirement process or the phase of retirement and not be all stressed out all the 

time and worried that I’m going to run out of money. It’s all this concept is 

saying, how do I void this anxiety around running out of money. All right, that 

takes us to tip number five, revisit the plan regularly. This one is key. 

In what we do, we believe that there is no financial plan that is a set it and 

forget it. It needs to be monitored regularly. In the peace of mind pathway, this 

is the third phase, which we call the nurture phase. So, we’ve built the roadmap. 

We’ve implemented the strategies, and now we’ve got to nurture it just like you 

would nurture a plant in your house. You’ve got to make sure it’s getting the 

sunlight, it’s getting the water, and being taken care of. You’ve worked very hard 

to get to this point. The last thing you want to do is forget to revisit your 

financial plan, just like you go to the doctor every single year. It’s very 

important. Now, you know, why do we need to revisit so much? Well, things happen. 

Life changes like health issues, family things that come up. You know, the markets 

are always going to be an issue that we need to worry about. Tax law change, you 

know, in 2025, there was a big tax law change with the one big beautiful bill act. 

So, making sure that our financial plan is keeping up with the things that life 

brings to us. The biggest risk that we know is that if you try to create this set 

in and forget it and you don’t revisit it; you could have a lot of parts of your 

plan that eventually just get out of whack. And if we’re spending too much and 

we’re not revisiting the plan; it may be too late to recover from that. So, this is 

all nurture to us that’s, you know, really two major meetings a year. One is all 

around financial planning strategy. That’s in the first half of the year. That’s 

saying, what are our goals for the years? What do we need to accomplish? Is 

our risk in line? How are we feeling about the markets? Is our cash flow in line 

and everything like that? the second meeting of the year is all around tax strategy 

so that if there are strategies to run, we make sure we’re talking about that with 

holdings, no surprises come tax time. And that is a wash, rinse, and repeat every 

single year because life changes. We’re at a conference here recently, and the guy 

got up on stage talking about financial planning in our industry. And he said, you 

know, a lot of times what the client or the family is planning for is a 30, 

40-year time horizon of retirement. I got to have the assets to be able to manage 

that 30 years of not generating any income. And how we look at it is, 

yes, it’s 30 or 40 years, but it’s 30 or 40 years one year at a time. That’s the 

mentality that you got to take is that one year at a time, every year is going to 

be different. So, we need to have a plan that can be flexible to what life brings 

to us. 

confident about not running out of money. Have a great week. We’ll talk to you 

again, next Monday.