Halfway through the year, the same handful of conversations tend to surface: flexible retirement spending, financial help for adult kids, and how to think about market risk. Let’s take a look.
1. The 4% Rule Is a Starting Point, Not a Rule.
The 4% rule is a retirement income guideline suggesting that withdrawing 4% of your portfolio in the first year of retirement (and adjusting for inflation each year after) is intended to help portfolios have a strong chance of lasting 30 years. We hear it regularly from clients who have been treating it as a personal rule of thumb, a required rate of return, or a cap on what they are allowed to enjoy. It is none of those things.
The rule was developed in the early 1990s as a research guideline, during a period of higher interest rates and shorter average retirement durations than most of our clients are planning for today. It was never meant to be universal. It is a reasonable conversation starter.
The heart of the matter is cash flow. A good retirement income strategy has levers such as Social Security timing, portfolio distributions, and annuity income that can be adjusted based on market conditions in any given year.
In a strong year, we often see clients spending a little more. In a slower year, they pull back. That flexibility is the point. If you have been using 4% as a retirement ceiling, it may be worth revisiting what the plan actually supports. You may find you have more flexibility to comfortably spend at a rate above 4% without feeling like you're breaking a universal rule.
2. Helping Launch Adult Children
Summer tends to be when the big family financial conversations arrive. Weddings. Graduate school. First homes. Next homes. The instinct to help is almost universal among the parents we work with. Our clients also talk a lot about how these numbers seem to be getting bigger and bigger every year, which is harder and harder on their kids.
A few examples of costs our clients are thinking about:
The average wedding in the United States now costs $34,200, up roughly 30% since 2019.
U.S. home values climbed 45% between February 2020 and February 2025, packing more than a decade's worth of typical growth into just five years, according to Zillow.
The average annual cost of center-based daycare runs approximately $16,692 per child.
Tuition and fees at private nonprofit four-year colleges now average $45,000 per year in 2025-26, according to the College Board — up 4% from the prior year. (research.collegeboard.org/trends/college-pricing/highlights)
About one in five millennials who recently purchased a home received a cash gift from family to help with the down payment.
If any of these prompt a conversation about how to help, like where the money comes from, how to do it tax-efficiently, and how to make sure it fits the plan, that is exactly what we are here for.
3. Right-Sizing Risk: Too Much, Not Enough, and the Math That Decides.
Many retirement portfolio conversations start with one question: how much market volatility can you handle? That is a useful starting point, but not the whole picture. The more important question is how conservative or growth-oriented your plan should be and whether or not your portfolio matches that heading.
Too much risk. We often see clients carrying more volatility than their retirement plan actually needs. After a long run of strong markets, higher-risk allocations can feel comfortable because they have been rewarded. The problem is that the math of a bad early sequence is unforgiving. A 30% portfolio decline requires a 43% gain to return to even. If you’re too heavily invested in aggressive growth to deliver returns you don’t need, it also carries the risk of sharper declines. We don’t want to pursue growth we don’t need by risking stability we actually need.
Not enough risk. The opposite problem is equally real. Clients sitting in far more conservative positions are often attempting to protect themselves from the risk they can see while inversely accepting the one they cannot: the slow erosion of purchasing power over a 20 or 30-year retirement. Inflation does not feel like a loss the way a market drop does. Over time, it produces the same outcome.
The right amount of risk. One of the most practical ways we help clients think about this is through the lens of recovery time. Historically, diversified portfolios have recovered from most downturns within one to four years. A client who holds one to two years of living expenses in stable, accessible assets can potentially wait out a decline without being forced to sell at a low point. That buffer changes the risk calculation considerably and allows for a more growth-oriented long-term allocation without the vulnerability of having no runway when markets move against you.
The goal is not the most risk you can tolerate or the least you think you can survive on. It is the precise amount your plan requires, backed by enough stability to weather what markets will inevitably do at some point.
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