You Just Retired (or Are About to). Now What?

Almost everyone has found themselves unnerved by recent events in one way or another. Many workers have likely thought nervously about their job security in an AI world, and consumers have pondered whether, when, and where they’d see higher prices. And of course, investors have been watching stock and bond prices ping-pong.

But if there’s a single group of people who are likely to be experiencing the most consternation over recent inflation and economic uncertainty, it’s those who have just retired or who are on the cusp of hanging it up. The past three years’ worth of robust gains had enlarged portfolio balances, and research suggests that this tends to prompt retirements. While market results have actually been decent so far in 2026, many new retirees are reasonably concerned about their plans if the market runs out of gas or inflation continues to run hot.

As with most things in life, the key for new- and near-retirees making it through this period with their sanity intact is to focus on what they can control—and to back-burner what they can’t. Here are the key jobs to focus on.

Assess Spending Rate

People who have just retired or are about to do so are particularly vulnerable to what retirement researchers call sequence-of-returns risk, which means that a bad market shows up early in your retirement. Not only does that early retirement selloff feel bad, it actually is bad because it imperils your portfolio’s ability to last throughout your retirement years. In our 2025 retirement spending research, Amy Arnott and Tao Guo found that the people most likely to run out of money in retirement were the ones whose portfolios lost value in the first five years of their retirements.

Retirees who are pulling cash flows from their portfolios can address that risk by adjusting their spending down to ensure that more of their portfolios are in place to recover when the market eventually does. And the good news is that those adjustments don’t need to be radical to make an impact. In our retirement income research, we found that even small tweaks like forgoing an inflation adjustment following a bear market help ensure that spending lasts over a whole 30-year period and can lead to more lifetime income than a strategy that ignores market movements.

If you haven’t yet retired, this is a great opportunity to assess your planned in-retirement spending and identify where you would be willing to make cutbacks if you needed to do so. It’s also a wonderful time to turbocharge savings if you can afford to do so. Catch-up contributions are available to all retirement savers who are over age 50. And if you’re between the ages of 60 and 63, you can make a “super-catch-up” contribution to your company retirement plan, for a total of $35,750 in 2026. High-income heavy savers may also be able to take advantage of aftertax 401(k) contributions, which enable them to stash even greater amounts in their company retirement plans.

Pull Cash Flows From Safer Assets

Another valuable way to address sequence risk relates to where you’re spending from. In a turbulent market environment in which equities have declined, it’s best to pull any portfolio cash flows from safer assets and leave your stock positions undisturbed. That’s the general logic behind the Bucket approach to portfolio construction. In good years for the stock market, like 2023-25, you’d be harvesting appreciated equity assets to supply your income needs. In bad ones, like 2022, you’re not touching stocks but instead sourcing cash flows from high-quality bonds, cash, or a combination of the two.

Of course, some retirees may find that their portfolios are riskier than they should be, even factoring in recent equity losses. In that case, I’d argue that it’s not too late to shift into a more situation-appropriate asset allocation that includes exposure to cash and bonds.

Play the Long Game With Social Security

Early in retirement, many people feel the pull to replace the income they had while they were working. Social Security beckons, in that it’s a secure, inflation-protected source of income, much like a paycheck. But the lifetime benefits of delayed Social Security are hard to ignore: a higher income stream that also happens to be fully inflation-protected and will last as long as you do. Delayed filing can be particularly impactful if you’re the higher earner in your family and you have a younger spouse who will receive that higher benefit for their lifetime.

In our retirement income research, we took a look at the pros and cons of delayed Social Security filing. We found that delaying filing up until age 70 did enlarge lifetime income, but the benefits are greatest if you have some other source of funds to draw from until your benefits start. And the benefits are also obviously more valuable for people with above-average life expectancies, in that they stand to receive those higher streams of inflation-protected income for a longer period of time.

Revisit Inflation Protection

Even without the threat of tariffs and energy-related price shocks, inflation is a key risk for retiree portfolios, because the income you receive from your safe investments is going to buy you less and less as you age. Moreover, retirees tend to spend more on healthcare, where prices have historically increased faster than the general inflation rate.

In my experience, many retirees focus exclusively on nominal bonds and underrate the value of inflation-protected bonds as a component of their retirement plans. You can address that by adding an inflation-protected bond fund to your portfolio; most of the better target-date series allocate roughly one-fourth of their bond portfolios to inflation-protected bonds. Alternatively, you could build a laddered portfolio of Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities that will mature and supply you with living expenses throughout your retirement; you could determine how much to buy in TIPS by looking at your fixed annual spending needs and subtracting the amount you expect to receive from Social Security.

Investigate Tax-Saving Strategies

Finally, one all-weather strategy for the early part of retirement is the opportunity to save on taxes. The early retirement years are typically an excellent time to consider strategies like converting traditional IRA balances to Roth or accelerating withdrawals on traditional IRAs and 401(k)s. The reason is that without income from work and because you won’t be subject to required minimum distributions until you’re 73, your income, and in turn the taxes you’ll owe on those conversions and withdrawals, will be lower.