Take Control of How Your Retirement Assets Are Spent — Or Someone Else Will

Most retirement planning is built around accumulation. For decades, the focus is on saving, investing, and growing account balances. Success is measured by net worth statements and portfolio performance.

But once retirement begins, a far more important question emerges:

Who will ultimately decide how your retirement assets are used—you, your heirs, or the government?

If you do not make intentional decisions about how your money is spent during your lifetime, those decisions will be made by default. In many cases, that means your estate beneficiaries receive far more than you ever intended, or a larger share of your assets is absorbed by taxes than necessary.

The Silent Drift Toward Unintended Beneficiaries

Many retirees spend far less than they safely could. The reasons are understandable—market uncertainty, longevity concerns, and a desire to “be conservative.” But the consequence of chronic underspending is rarely discussed.

When spending decisions are driven by inertia rather than intention, retirement assets tend to accumulate rather than support life. The result is often:

• Larger-than-planned estates

• Heirs becoming the primary beneficiaries of wealth you never fully enjoyed

• Increased exposure to income and estate taxes

• Missed opportunities for tax-efficient spending, gifting, or legacy planning

In effect, money that could have funded meaningful experiences, generosity, or comfort instead becomes a future inheritance or a tax liability.

The Government Is Always a Silent Partner

For many retirees, a significant portion of wealth is held in tax-deferred accounts. Without a coordinated lifetime spending strategy, withdrawals are often dictated by Required Minimum Distributions rather than personal priorities.

This approach can:

• Push retirees into higher tax brackets later in life

• Trigger unnecessary Medicare premium surcharges

• Increase the tax burden passed on to heirs

• Shift control of timing and taxation from the individual to the IRS

In other words, without planning, the government—not you—sets the rules for when and how your money is taxed.

Control Is About Intentional Spending

True control in retirement is not about maximizing returns or minimizing risk at all costs. It is about deliberately deciding:

• How much to spend while you are healthy and active

• How to coordinate spending across taxable, tax-deferred, and tax-free accounts

• How to balance lifetime enjoyment with legacy goals

• How to reduce taxes over your lifetime—not just this year

Without these decisions, your retirement assets will still be “well managed,” but they may not be well used.

LifeSpend Planning: Deciding Who Benefits—and When

LifeSpend Planner focuses on the most neglected part of financial planning: decumulation.

Rather than starting with accounts and products, LifeSpend Planning begins with the life you want to live and works backward to determine:

• Sustainable lifetime spending

• The most tax-efficient order of withdrawals

• Tradeoffs between spending more today versus leaving more later

• The likelihood of various outcomes under real-world conditions

This approach helps ensure that your money is used intentionally—by you—rather than accumulating by default for heirs or taxes.

LifeSpend Planning can complement traditional financial planning or stand on its own, because it addresses a fundamentally different question: not how much you have, but how effectively you use it.

The Choice Is Not Spend or Save—It Is Decide or Default

Leaving money behind is not a failure. Paying taxes is unavoidable. But leaving far more than you intended—simply because you never took control—is a choice made by default, not design.

Taking control of how your retirement assets are spent means deciding, in advance, who benefits, when they benefit, and why.

Because if you do not decide, the beneficiaries will be chosen for you—by your estate plan or by the government.