How much should you withdraw from your retirement savings in 2025 to help pay for your living expenses throughout the year? There are many reasonable answers to this question, some that are fairly straightforward and others that are quite complicated to understand and implement.
The right solution for you depends on several factors, including your tolerance for risk, how you’ve invested your savings, and what other sources of retirement income you might have. As a result, there’s no one solution that’s best for all retirees.
This post focuses on one method retirees can use to calculate their withdrawal amount. It’s simple to understand and should enable your retirement savings to last the rest of your life, no matter how long you live. It’s part of the “Spend Safely in Retirement” strategy, which resulted from research I conducted at the Stanford Center on Longevity.
The strategy has two components:
- Optimizing your guaranteed, lifetime income from Social Security
- Generating a variable retirement paycheck from your retirement savings
In this post, we’ll describe the second part of the strategy—generating a variable retirement paycheck.
The Advantages Of A Dynamic Withdrawal Strategy
The strategy uses a dynamic withdrawal strategy. This means that your withdrawal amount will change every year, in part depending on the investment performance of your retirement savings. A dynamic strategy has two powerful advantages:
- If your savings earned good investment performance in prior years, you can safely increase your withdrawal amount. This might apply to many retirees who’ve experienced good investment performance in the last few years.
- If your savings lost money or performed less well than you expected, you reduce the withdrawal amount. This feature helps make your money last for life.
The strategy mimics how you might have managed your income and expenses while you were working. If you had a good year—one with bonuses or overtime higher than expected, for example—you might have increased your spending. On the other hand, you might have tightened your spending if your income dropped compared to previous years.
A dynamic withdrawal strategy works best if you have significant sources of other guaranteed retirement income that aren’t affected by investment performance, such as Social Security, pensions, and income annuities.
Selecting Your Withdrawal Rate And Calculating Your Withdrawal Amount
The strategy uses the withdrawal methodology of the IRS Required Minimum Distribution (RMD), which determines the minimum amounts that retirees age 73 and older must withdraw from pretax IRA, 401k, 403b, and 457 accounts. The actual RMD strategy divides your savings by a life expectancy factor to determine your withdrawal amount.
To make it easy to apply the strategy, and to accommodate retirees who are younger than age 73, I developed the table below that shows withdrawal rates that apply to each age from ages 60 to 90.
To determine the amount to withdraw from your savings for 2025, select the withdrawal rate based on the age you’ll attain in 2025. You’ll apply this withdrawal rate to the value of your retirement savings at December 31, 2024.
Here’s a simple example:
- Suppose you’ll be age 65 on your 2025 birthday. Your withdrawal rate would be 2.9499%.
- Now suppose your retirement savings has a value of $500,000 at year-end 2024.
- Your withdrawal amount for all of 2025 would equal $14,749.50 ($500,000 x .029499).
The withdrawal amount is what we call your “variable retirement paycheck”—the amount of money generated by your retirement savings that you can use to supplement Social Security and any other retirement income you may have.
If you’re married, then the best way to apply the strategy is for each spouse to individually determine their variable retirement paycheck by using the withdrawal rate based on his or her age and applying it to his or her retirement savings.
The strategy is most applicable if your retirement savings is invested in a low-cost target date or balanced mutual fund or ETF, which are common in many employer-sponsored 401k savings plans. You can also use it to calculate withdrawal amounts from Roth accounts or other after-tax savings.
Adjustments To Meet Your Goals and Circumstances
The RMD methodology is conservative, starting with low withdrawal rates that increase as you age. This can appeal to cautious retirees who are very concerned about outliving their savings.
However, the Spend Safely in Retirement Strategy is flexible to meet your goals and circumstances. For example, the research used to develop the strategy shows that retirees can increase their annual calculated withdrawal amount by 25% to 50% and still make your money last for as long as you live. You might want to increase your withdrawal amount if you need more income, or if you experience a one-time increase in your living expenses.
In the above example, these adjustments would result in withdrawal rates of 3.69% or 4.42%, respectively. You could increase your withdrawal amount just for a specific year or consistently increase it for all years into the future. Just know that increasing your withdrawal amount at any point will likely leave less savings to grow—and thus reduce your future withdrawals, all other things being equal—compared to using unadjusted withdrawal amounts. It’s an example of the “Pay me now or pay me later” phenomenon.
The Spend Safely in Retirement Strategy is designed to help retirees who don’t work with an advisor and have most of their retirement savings in an IRA or 401k plan. If you have additional savings sources or a more complicated situation, you may want to work with a retirement advisor who’s trained in developing retirement income portfolios.
My wife and I are in our early 70s, and we use a version of the Spend Safely in Retirement strategy to determine our variable retirement paychecks. We consider it an important part of our retirement planning—it helps us sleep better at night and enjoy our retirement.
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