The Noises in the Night: Five Retirement Worries That May Wake You at 3 A.M.
My phone rang at 3 a.m. in a Dallas hotel room. Mrs. Desert FI's number always gets through my Do Not Disturb.
I answered, and the first thing I heard was a siren. Our home security alarm was screaming about 900 miles away, with our dog going crazy behind it. I tried to talk her through it, asking questions about a system I couldn't see, feeling useless in a hotel room.
The alarm tripped again later that night, and again the next night. The alarm company told Mrs. Desert FI to check the batteries. She had no idea how to do that, and our old house, the one from before we downsized, had a lot of windows and a lot of sensors. So we paid the company to do it. They replaced a couple of low batteries for several hundred dollars. It was worth it for her sleep and my peace of mind.
Then it happened again. On a weekend, the siren went off in the middle of the night, and this time I was the one flying out of bed with my heart pounding. Mrs. Desert FI gave me a tired smile, and I finally understood what her week had been like.
This time the alarm revealed the real problem: one bad sensor. The company we'd paid to check everything had missed it.
Smoke detectors chirp at the worst possible hour too. Noises in the night are always there, and they seem louder when you're planning a downshift. So I keep asking how many bad sensors are hiding in my own plan.
This is the last post in the Gear for the Trail series. It started with the pack, the five financial decisions that made my downshift possible. Then came the map, seven questions to ask when you build your retirement budget. Last week was about packing for the people who depend on us, your adult kids and your retirement budget. This final post is about the night, when the plan is built and the questions start anyway. I hear five noises, and each one gets a step you can take this week.
Noise 1: The Headlines
In college, my girlfriend, now Mrs. Desert FI, and I did humanitarian work in the jungles of the Yucatán with a group of students. The roosters started calling an hour or two before dawn and kept going until the sun came up. No matter how loudly they crowed, dawn arrived on its own time.
Headlines work the same way. They make a lot of noise, and they don't move the sunrise. As I write this, the market is choppy, rates are high, and the 10-year Treasury is paying around 5 percent. I've lived through the high inflation of the late 1970s as a kid, Y2K, 9/11, the Great Recession, and COVID.
My rule through all of it is simple: I have never sold a depressed asset out of panic, fear, or a rush to so-called safe assets.
At the bottom of the Great Recession, most of our money sat in retirement accounts, and I reminded myself that in 20 years it would all be noise. The S&P 500 closed at its low of about 677 on March 9, 2009. Through its close on October 22, 2026, it's up roughly 1,030 percent, which works out to about 14.8 percent a year before dividends. Some of the market's best gains came right after that low, exactly when selling feels most urgent. Thankfully, we didn't sell.
Knowing Is Different From Acting
I check my portfolio most days, and some respected voices in the FI community check once a year. I don't have that fortitude in an instant-information world. Knowing what the market is doing and changing my plan during a correction are two different things, though, and I'm committed to never doing the second.
The research backs the discipline. The Schwab Center for Financial Research compared five hypothetical investors who each put $2,000 a year into the S&P 500 from 2005 to 2024:
The perfect timer ended with about $186,000.
The investor who bought on the first trading day of every year ended with about $171,000.
The investor who bought at the market's peak every year ended with about $151,000.
The investor who stayed in Treasury bills ended with about $47,000.
The gap between perfect timing and the worst timing was about $35,000. The gap between the worst timing and staying in cash was more than $100,000. The study is hypothetical and ignores taxes and fees, but the lesson holds: staying invested beats timing.
A Live Example From My Own Plan
As I've shared before in Landing the Plane, Part 1, I hold a ladder of individual Treasury bonds that mature each December for five years. Each December 15, I will check how the market did that year and decide where the next year's spending comes from:
If the market is up more than 10 percent, I will pull from equities and roll the maturing bond out to a later year.
If the market is down, the bond will pay the bills.
If the market is flat, I will use a mix of cash and equities.
Your plan should already assume poor returns in the early years, so a bad headline confirms you planned for the right conditions. I wrote about why in The Sequence That Determines Whether Your Retirement Lasts.
One step this week: Write a one-page headline rule. Include how often you check, which specific events (a 20 percent drop, an inflation spike) trigger which response, and what you'll do at 4:30 a.m. instead of refreshing the screen.
Noise 2: The Number
Two numbers get tangled in retirement planning, so I'll separate them. The withdrawal rate is the input, the share of your portfolio you take out in year one. The probability of success is the output, how often a simulated version of your plan lasts. The two move together, because asking for more certainty means starting with a lower rate. The one I think about most is the output, and what I can do to improve it.
Where the Input Comes From
If you're newer to this, start with the 4% rule of thumb. The Trinity Study, published in 1998, found that withdrawing 4 percent of a portfolio in the first year and adjusting for inflation afterward succeeded about 95 percent of the time over 30 years. Bill Bengen's updated research raises the starting rate to 4.7 percent using a broader mix of asset classes. Morningstar's 2026 estimate is 3.9 percent for a 30-year retirement at 90 percent confidence, and nearly 6 percent for retirees willing to adjust their spending. So the honest range for a starting rate is about 3.9 to 4.7 percent, and nobody knows the true number in advance.
How Much Certainty Is Enough
You don't need 100 percent. A target of 95 to 99 percent usually means oversaving and overworking, trading your best remaining years for money you'll very likely never touch.
Advisors disagree, and the targets I’ve seen run from the 70s to 90 and above. My own comfort zone is 90 percent. I’m happiest when my best and likely cases sit near 95 percent and my worst case stays above 90 percent with guardrails in place. My CFP friend “Jack” will endorse a plan in the 70s if the person has guardrails, a clear backup plan, and can say what they would do if assets fell behind.
The Income Lab team at Kitces.com makes the same point from the math. When you're willing to adjust spending, a lower target stops meaning failure and starts meaning adjustment. Shifting from a probability of success to a probability of adjustment, they write, can "take a lot of sting out of that result." A lower target buys more spending today in exchange for a willingness to adjust later. The levers below are what make that trade safer.
Levers That Move the Number
Your assets alone set one limit. Two willingnesses raise it: willingness to adjust your spending, and willingness to do some flexible work. If you want to spend more than your assets alone can support, these are the levers, and the numbers behind them are public.
Guardrails. I laid out my five in The Sequence That Determines Whether Your Retirement Lasts. Morningstar's research found that guardrails supported a starting rate of 5.3 percent for a 50/50 portfolio at 90 percent confidence, compared with 3.8 percent for a fixed approach. That is the same confidence with roughly 40 percent more spending at the start. The tradeoff is more variation in spending. For example, if the market drops 20 percent, you might agree to skip that year's inflation adjustment and trim discretionary spending by 10 percent. In my own modeling, guardrails improve the probability of success by anywhere from 5 to more than 10 points, depending on the model and how deep the cuts go.
A Next Endeavor you can ramp up or down. I ran this math in public in my Next Endeavor retirement math post, so you don't have to trust my private spreadsheets. Take Dana and Rick, a hypothetical couple, both 55, with $1.12 million and $72,000 in annual spending. On assets alone, their plan succeeded 79.4 percent of the time. Add a Next Endeavor ramp, starting at $20,000 in year one, rising to $40,000 by year three, held until age 62, and phased out by 67, and the success rate rose to 95.2 percent. Even $20,000 a year for just five years lifted them to 85.7 percent. These are hypothetical households, so treat them as illustrations and not predictions.
Stack the levers, and a plan that starts in the mid-70s on assets alone can climb toward the mid-80s in my modeling. That comes from my model, so treat it as anecdote and not research.
A written backup plan. Ask yourself while things are calm: if it all goes to heck, what will I do? It might be rideshare driving, seasonal work, teaching tennis or guitar, or part-time consulting. A list written in advance turns a panic into a plan.
The Review That Finds the Bad Sensors
I run more than one model. My own Excel model was strong. The model built with my CFP's software was strong too. Then a deeper review, with some AI help in the weeds, found a few weak spots, assumptions that may have overstated the impact of a few items. Even the best plans and the most skilled practitioners aren't foolproof. That's the alarm company all over again: a professional check can still miss the bad sensor, which is why a second set of eyes is worth having.
I’m now building a final Plan of Record that combines my spreadsheet with the professional model. Turning the knobs again is an easy rabbit hole, because we all want certainty in an imperfect world with no guarantees. So I plan the best I can and stay ready to be agile.
One step this week: Write down the lowest probability of success you'd accept, the first lever you'd pull if your plan fell below it, and one "if X, then I'll do Y" backup. Then run the plan through two different methods, not one. I wrote about the Monte Carlo side in Not the Lattes. Here's What Actually Retires You Early.
Noise 3: What Will People Think?
I don't know anyone in real life outside the FI communities who has retired at 52 or 53. On social media and at conferences, I meet plenty of people who reached FI in their 40s. In my circles it's exceptionally rare. Many successful people are financially ready, but the idea wouldn't occur to them because they can't picture a life without the grind.
Age changes the question. If you retire at 70, nobody wonders or asks. If you downshift in your 50s or even your 40s, people will wonder what you do all day. When you don't give them a story, they write one for you, and their version is rarely as good as yours. I wrote about the status trap in You Can Look Wealthy or Build Wealth.
I've also been careful with my words. I avoid the phrase "early retirement" and I'm training myself, and Mrs. Desert FI, to say "downshift" instead. It's the truth, and it sends a very different message than "do nothing for the next forty years." Those words have to work for Mrs. Desert FI too, because she will field some of these questions before I do. Choose yours before the questions start.
Availability is the other piece. Once you're "retired," you'll hear pitches for boards, the homeowners association, and volunteer committees. Decide in advance what you'll say yes to.
Give People a Sentence
A Next Endeavor gives you a natural answer to "so what do you do?" I wrote about that in Already Gone, Not Yet Gone. Here are three ways it might sound:
"I'm a 30-year educator. When I left full-time teaching, I started tutoring children with learning disabilities, exceptional talent, or strong academic drive. It's flexible, it gives me purpose, and it fits around my schedule."
"I'm a former business owner, and now I coach small company owners and their key people on growing and managing their businesses. I love helping them get better at running things and helping them employ people in the community."
"When I left full-time work after a long corporate career, I focused on writing, teaching, and coaching people looking for purpose, passion, and financial freedom in midlife. I want to help others retire or downshift earlier and build a meaningful second half of life. I also take on select consulting projects where the fit is right, on fixed-length engagements."
A second question usually follows the first: "Would you ever consult for us?" I plan to answer it plainly and kindly: "I'm done with full-time corporate work. I still take on a few hand-picked consulting projects through referrals, and I keep plenty of room for everything else I care about." That answer covers one lane of my Next Endeavor. The other lane, this site, gets the same kind of limits, and I'll lay out both in Noise 5 below.
One step this week: Write your own one-sentence answer to "so what do you do?" and say it out loud to someone. Then pick the words you'll use, such as "downshift" or "retired," so you aren't choosing them on the spot.
Noise 4: The Open Calendar
With our son in college, our weekends are already low-key and flexible, so a weekend is a poor rehearsal for retirement. The real test is a Tuesday morning with nobody pushing you.
In my working life, one of my best habits was a Weekly Compass, planned early on Monday morning or the Friday afternoon before. I chose the two or three things that mattered most that week in each of four areas: urgent and important work, important but not urgent work, family and friends, and personal, which covers fitness, faith, and health. When I ran a large business, I checked it daily so the crises wouldn't squeeze out the priorities.
Lately I've been applying the same discipline to life after full-time work, without the corporate intensity, but with a compass for what matters: family, friends, creativity, reading, health, faith, coaching, and teaching.
A weekly planner built on Stephen Covey's big rocks helps:
Put the big rocks in first: exercise, friends, hobbies, spiritual refreshment, Next Endeavor work, volunteering, and community service.
Let the errands, chores, and admin fill in around them.
Add mid-week hikes, coffee shop writing sessions, meetups, and social time, and a nap if you want one.
Try journaling away from your desk, at a coffee shop or on the patio. What do you want from this life? What did you love earlier that you'd like to get back to?
Who Do I Do Things With?
In The Weekday World I Never Saw, I told you I went looking for a midweek men's Bible study and couldn't find a daytime one. So a friend and I are planning to start our own. He's the friend I mentioned in Landing the Plane, Part 2. We're planning a biweekly breakfast for men of faith, some early retirees and some in their early 60s, for encouragement and fun, and maybe a hike afterward. I'm also looking for other friends with flexible schedules to hike and kayak with. Mrs. Desert FI and the dog are my daily anchors.
Purpose matters here, and the research is encouraging. A 2009 study by Rush University researchers followed 1,238 older adults for nearly three years and found that those with a stronger sense of purpose were about half as likely to die during that time, even after accounting for depression, chronic conditions, and disability. It shows an association and not proof, but it's a reason to plan for purpose as carefully as I plan for money.
One step this week: Open your Notes app or grab a piece of paper and write down your top two or three priorities across different areas of your life, the things you want to get done no matter what. They can be simple, like "schedule lunch with a friend" or "take two hikes this week."
Noise 5: What Does "Retired" Even Mean?
Plenty of people in the FI community call themselves retired and still do some paid work. For them, retirement means work becomes optional, and they choose the hours, the clients, and the pace. That idea sits underneath the Next Endeavor in the FINE framework: financial independence first, then work you choose.
Before you can protect the calendar, you have to know what you want it to hold. For me, that's some part-time work after I leave full-time work, in two lanes: personal finance, which includes this site and is a passion, and my profession, where I can keep connections and use what I've learned through consulting. In the early years I plan to experiment with both and keep what fits the schedule I want. I've written business plans for both, with limits on my hours.
After a couple of months fully off, my "too much" line is more than 20 hours a week on Next Endeavors, or working more than nine or ten months of the year. I want at least two months of zero work, and I want to plan two-week trips here and there regardless. I won't hold standing meetings on Mondays or Fridays, because those days are mine.
For consulting or coaching, I plan to work in fixed-end batches, such as a two- or three-month engagement or about six coaching sessions with a clear end date. Consulting could easily fill a full-time schedule if I let it, so this structure is my guardrail.
How Will I Know It Works?
Define "working" before you start. I use three measures: hours a week, months a year, and a stop signal that tells me to pull back. My plan is strong without Next Endeavor income, so I can afford to be choosy. I don't know of research on how much part-time work is too much. That line is personal, which is why I wrote mine down.
Retired doesn't have to be a switch. As I covered under Noise 2, work you can ramp up or down gives your plan an extra lever.
One step this week: Write your ceiling in three numbers: hours a week, months a year, and the stop signal. Then agree on the hours ceiling with your spouse. For a place to start, read How to Find Your Next Endeavor and Three Versions of Enough.
The Goodnight Song
On the last night of that trip in the Yucatán, after many of us had already crashed for the night, several adults from the village came to sing us a goodnight song, a cappella. It was their thanks to the college and high school students who had helped pour concrete floors and build sturdier roofs before the rainy season. Some noises in the night are a celebration.
Lately my mornings with God have been better, now that the finish line is in sight. One verse has been speaking to me this season: "Commit your work to the Lord, and your plans will be established" (Proverbs 16:3, ESV).
For me, that starts with prayer, with an open book and an open heart. If you're a person of faith, I'd encourage you to lean in. If prayer isn't your practice, find your version, whether that's a long walk, a run, or coffee on the patio before the house wakes up. Either way, give the noises somewhere to go.
The noises won't stop. Name each one, give it a test, and tell someone. Plan the best you can, put wise principles to work, and stay ready to be agile.
I have two questions for you before you go. Which of these five noises is loudest for you right now, and what's one step you could take this week? And what noise in the night did I miss?
Let's make wise choices and live a great life together.
🌵 Desert FI
Want to go deeper? Become a Desert FI Insider. The noises get quieter when you have company and a plan you can test. Insiders get Weekend Reflections every Sunday morning plus free Insider-only resources, including the Well-Timed Exit Checklist, the FINE Number Calculator, and reflection guides to help you name your own noises and navigate them. If you're not on the trail with us yet, join at desertfi.org/join.
Already an Insider? Here are three posts worth exploring:
Landing the Plane, Part 1: Building Your Drawdown Framework: on the five-year ladder and the December 15 check that decide where your spending comes from
Not the Lattes. Here's What Actually Retires You Early.: on the big levers behind an earlier exit and how to test them
The Weekday World I Never Saw: on what an ordinary weekday looks like when you go looking for it
Sources cited in this post
Schwab Center for Financial Research, "Does Market Timing Work?"
Bill Bengen's updated safe withdrawal research, via Advisor Perspectives (Aug. 2025)
Trinity Study (Cooley, Hubbard, and Walz, 1998), via Retirement Researcher
Morningstar, "What's a Safe Retirement Withdrawal Rate for 2026?"
Income Lab on Kitces.com, probability of success vs. probability of adjustment
Morningstar, "Want to Boost Your Retirement Income? Guardrails Could Help"
HealthDay, "Have a Purpose in Life, You Might Live Longer" (2009 Rush University study)
