.avif)
There is a piece of conventional wisdom about retirement that sounds reasonable on the surface and turns out to be subtly wrong.
It goes like this: Retirement is a marathon, not a sprint. Pace yourself. You have got plenty of time.
The problem with this advice is that it treats retirement as though all your years are equal, as though the energy, health, and physical capability you have at 63 will still be there at 73, and again at 83. The data says otherwise. And the retirees who act on the data, who understand that the best years of retirement are front-loaded, tend to build more meaningful, more adventurous, and ultimately more satisfying lives than those who hold back.
This is not a call to reckless spending or an argument to blow through your savings. It is something more important than that: a framework for understanding that your most valuable retirement resource is not money. It is health and energy. And those are finite in ways that money is not.
Here is what the research shows, what we have observed working with retirees over the years, and what it means for how you should be living right now.
Retirement researchers and financial planners use shorthand to describe how physical capability changes over a typical retirement. You may have heard these terms:
The Go-Go Years. The early years of retirement, typically the mid-60s through early 70s, when health, energy, and mobility are generally still strong. You can hike, travel, take on physical adventures, play with grandchildren, and pursue experiences that require stamina and physical presence. These years are the most valuable in retirement. They are also the most time-limited.
The Slow-Go Years. As you move through your 70s, the pace naturally slows. Travel becomes more planned and less spontaneous. Physical limitations begin to shape what is feasible. You may still do meaningful things, but the menu of options narrows. The long hikes get shorter. The international adventures become closer to home.
The No-Go Years. By the 80s and beyond, health challenges usually become the dominant reality for most people. Life can still hold joy and meaning, but the physical adventures that defined the Go-Go years are largely behind you.
The average age at which health begins to decline is 63.9 years, which means the Go-Go window, for most people, is narrower than they assume when they retire. And critically, the current gap between healthspan and lifespan is approximately 12.4 years, meaning the average person spends more than a decade at the end of life with meaningful health limitations before they die.
That 12.4-year gap is the slow-go and no-go years combined. It means that if you retire at 65 and hold off on your biggest experiences until later, later may look very different from what you imagined.
Most retirement planning conversations focus on financial risk: running out of money, sequence of returns risk, inflation, healthcare costs. These are real and important.
But there is another risk that rarely shows up in a financial plan: the risk of unused capacity. The risk that you had the health, the energy, and the financial resources to do the things that mattered most to you and you waited.
Think about the experiences on your mental bucket list. The world cruise you have been talking about for a decade. Taking your grandchildren to see the national parks before they are teenagers. Learning to fly fish in Montana. Spending a month abroad. The physical ones, specifically. The experiences that require being energetic and reasonably healthy. These have an expiration date that your IRA balance does not.
Here is something that surprises many clients when we model it: front-loading experiences in retirement is often more financially sustainable than it feels.
This is partly because retirement spending follows a natural arc. Spending tends to be highest in the Go-Go years, including travel, activities, and experiences, and declines significantly in the Slow-Go years as physical limitations reduce the appetite and ability to spend. By the No-Go years, discretionary spending often drops dramatically, while healthcare spending increases.
This means that a retirement plan which front-loads slightly higher spending in years one through ten, then models declining discretionary spending afterward, often looks quite healthy in terms of long-term portfolio sustainability. The math can support spending more early in ways that clients intuitively feel is risky but actually is not, when modeled correctly.
We also know that most retirees die with more money than they spent. The academic literature on this is consistent and somewhat striking. Retirees, on average, significantly underspend relative to what their portfolios could safely support. The psychological difficulty of transitioning from saver to spender, built up over 30 or 40 years of accumulation, is real and powerful. Understanding that the plan was designed to be spent, and that early spending on experiences is not a threat to financial security but an expression of it, is one of the most liberating things a retirement income plan can do.
None of this means abandoning financial discipline. It means building a plan with eyes open to both financial risk and the equally real risk of an unlived retirement.
Most people plan for lifespan: how long they might live. Fewer plan for healthspan: how long they can expect to live in good health, with the physical capability to do what they want to do.
The gap between the two is where the real planning lives.
If your lifespan is projected at 88 and your healthspan declines meaningfully at 76, you have roughly 11 years of high-capability retirement before limitations become the dominant reality. That is a meaningful window, but it is not indefinite, and it starts the day you retire.
The implication is straightforward: the experiences that require your body to cooperate belong in the first decade of retirement, not the second. The international adventures, the physical bucket list items, the experiences that demand stamina and mobility. Plan them as such.
The good news is that your healthspan is not entirely fixed. The research on exercise and longevity is among the most consistent in medicine: regular physical activity, including cardiovascular exercise, strength training, and flexibility work, is the single most effective intervention for extending healthspan. Not a pharmaceutical. Not a supplement. Movement.
Retirees who prioritize physical health aggressively in their 60s and 70s, who treat exercise as a non-negotiable daily commitment rather than an optional activity, consistently extend their Go-Go years. They push the arc. They delay the Slow-Go. This is not speculative. It is well-documented in the longevity research.
The financial parallel is exact: just as you should compound your investments early to maximize long-term wealth, you should compound your health investments early to maximize long-term capability.
Sprinting in retirement does not mean abandoning financial discipline or booking everything on your bucket list simultaneously. It means being intentional about the timing of your most important experiences and not deferring them indefinitely on the assumption that later will be just as good.
Here is how we think about it with clients:
Go through everything you want to do in retirement and sort it by physical demand. Experiences that require significant stamina, mobility, or physical capability. Those go on the front-loaded list. They need to happen in your Go-Go years.
Experiences that do not require physical capability, such as attending a grandchild's wedding, hosting extended family for a long holiday, or making a meaningful charitable gift. These can be distributed more flexibly through retirement.
This exercise alone often clarifies the urgency of the Go-Go years in a way that abstract planning does not.
Work with your advisor to model a retirement spending plan that reflects how spending actually evolves, higher in the early years, gradually declining as physical activity slows, with healthcare spending increasing in later years. Most people assume a flat real spending trajectory throughout retirement. The research suggests that is not how most retirements actually unfold.
A well-modeled retirement plan can often accommodate meaningfully higher spending in the first 10 years without threatening long-term financial security. Knowing this, seeing it in the numbers, helps clients give themselves permission to spend on what matters.
Every year in retirement, make a specific list of the experiences you want to have that year. Not a vague aspiration, but a concrete plan with dates, costs, and commitments. The bucket list in your head rarely becomes the bucket list in your calendar unless you force the transition from intention to action.
This is not a financial exercise. It is a life planning exercise. But it is one of the most important things you can do to avoid the quiet drift toward deferred living that catches so many retirees by surprise.
The returns on exercise are not speculative. A growing body of research, including foundational work by physicians like Peter Attia, whose book Outlive has become essential reading on the science of longevity, shows that cardiovascular fitness, strength training, and mobility work are the primary drivers of extended healthspan.
Many of our clients have worked hard, saved diligently, and built financial security, and then find it psychologically difficult to enjoy it. The habits of accumulation are strong. The habits of expenditure take practice.
Part of what a good retirement income plan does is give you the psychological foundation to spend without guilt. When your advisor can show you that a specific trip, a family experience, or a meaningful investment in your Go-Go years is fully within your plan, not a threat to it, spending becomes something different. It becomes the point.
Here is a simple observation from a career spent working with people at this stage of life: we have never had a client come back and say, 'I really wish we had not taken that trip.' We have had clients come back and say, 'I wish we had not waited so long.'
The regrets of retirement are almost never about doing too much too early. They are consistently about deferring what mattered.
This is not a guarantee that nothing will go wrong. Markets correct, health surprises, plans change. But the evidence from lived experience points in one clear direction: the people who treated their Go-Go years as the precious, finite resource they are, and who spent those years accordingly, look back on their retirements with the most satisfaction.
The people who treated retirement like a marathon: steady pace, conserve energy, save the best for later, often found that later arrived on its own schedule and did not look quite the way they had imagined.
Retirement is not a marathon. It is a sprint followed by a walk followed by a rest, and the sprint comes first.
The window of full physical capability and good health that opens when you retire is the most valuable period of your retirement. It is also the most time-sensitive. The things on your list that require a working body, reasonable stamina, and the energy to show up fully. Those things have an expiration date.
Plan for it. Budget for it. Give yourself permission to live it.
At Arcadia Private Wealth, helping clients understand that retirement planning is about more than not running out of money, it is about making sure you actually live the retirement you planned for, is central to how we work. If you would like to build a retirement income plan that gives you the financial confidence to sprint during your Go-Go years, we would welcome that conversation.
Grant Webster, CFP®, TPCP®
Founder, Wealth Advisor