Four Things That Can Sabotage Retirement

Dr. Chris Mullis, PhD, CFP®: Hi there, Dr. Chris here. Before we dive into today’s show, I wanted to mention that if you’re looking for professional retirement planning, I’d love to see if my firm’s expertise is the right fit for your needs

We provide highly customized investment, retirement, and tax planning. To help you evaluate what we do, we offer a free retirement assessment, which includes a deep dive into your tax strategy, investments, and overall retirement health. To learn more, head over to retirementisntrocketscience.com and click Free Assessment in the top right corner.

Now, on to our show.

Introduction

Dr. Chris Mullis, PhD, CFP®: What if I told you that the traditional spreadsheets and financial models we’ve all been relying on are completely blind to the two most dangerous risks threatening your retirement security? Today, we’re going beyond the stock market to look at what really drives a successful long-term retirement. Are you ready?

NASA: 3, 2, 1, 0 and lift off. Lift fell Americans return to space as discovery clears the tower.

Dr. Chris Mullis, PhD, CFP®: Welcome back to Retirement Isn’t Rocket Science. This is episode 21. I’m your host, Dr. Chris Mullis. I spent my first career as a astrophysicist using NASA space telescopes and the largest telescopes on Earth to map the outer reaches of the universe. Today, I’m a certified financial planner and retirement firm owner helping you steer clear of financial black holes that threaten your hard-earned retirement.

Our mission is clear: lower your taxes, strengthen your portfolio, and give you the confidence and the capacity to spend more. Buckle up, we’re gonna master your money and explore the mysteries of the universe along the way

Dr. Chris Mullis, PhD, CFP®: In today’s show, are you planning for the wrong retirement risks? What happens when you delay Social Security to age 70, but pass away before reaching that milestone? And we’re looking 12 million , light years, into the deep cosmos to see how a galactic retirement party of epic proportions is revealing its secrets to us thanks to a 65-hour observation with the James Webb Space Telescope

Retirement Briefing Room

Dr. Chris Mullis, PhD, CFP®: Welcome to the Retirement Briefing Room. Now, as a former rocket scientist, I know a thing or two about modeling trajectories and predicting outcomes based on math.

In the financial world, retirement planning has traditionally been framed almost exclusively as an investment problem. We model historical returns, optimize asset allocation, run sophisticated Monte Carlo simulations and evaluate how a portfolio reacts to various market downturns.

The underlying assumption is that if we can get the investment strategy exactly right, the rest of the plan will naturally follow. But in the real-world practice, while our industry has developed incredibly advanced approaches to managing investment portfolios, it has been far less successful at identifying and mitigating the full range of risks that actually drive human behavior and retirement outcomes.

Building a rocket is a complicated problem. It requires a rigid blueprint, and once solved, it stays solved. Retirement planning, however, is a complex problem. It’s constantly shifting, adapting, and evolving over an uncertain time horizon across multiple areas of your life. In this segment, we’re breaking down a groundbreaking article titled “beyond Sequence of Returns: The Four Risks to Retirement Security,” written by Dr. Chris Hay, PhD, and published in the June 2026 issue of the Journal of Financial Planning. Dr. Hay is a leading pioneer in shifting how the financial industry views the critical intersection of longevity, cognitive health, and long-term wealth preservation.

In his article, Dr. Hay points out that longer retirement periods, accelerating healthcare costs, and growing planning complexity are dramatically reshaping the landscape. He argues that we need a new framework based on how families are actually experiencing risk. He breaks this down into four major risk categories: longevity risk, market risk, health risk, and decision risk.

Now, let’s explore how these look on paper and, more importantly, how the nation’s leading financial advisors are successfully managing them in the real world for clients just like you

The first category is longevity risk, which Dr. Hay calls the OG or organizing principle of retirement planning. This is the classic risk of outliving your assets. Because life expectancies are increasing and traditional corporate pensions have largely vanished, the responsibility of funding an unknown lifespan has shifted entirely onto your shoulders.

What makes longevity risk unique is that it’s highly tractable, meaning it lends itself beautifully to statistical modeling, mortality tables, and stress testing. However, leading advisors know that longevity isn’t just a math problem to solve on a spreadsheet. After spending thirty or forty years strictly in a saving and protecting mindset, it is psychologically brutal to flip the switch to spending. I think of it as a denominator problem, where a client may have a beautiful four million dollar nest egg on paper, but remains completely terrified to pull the retirement trigger.

This ambiguity leads to a phenomena called the fear of running out of money, which inadvertently turns diligent savers into the richest person in the graveyard, failing to enjoy the wealth they spent a lifetime building.

To combat this, I don’t just show my clients the math. I create structural permission to spend. My firm uses automated structured retirement paychecks to systematize cash flow, giving our clients the total peace of mind

It’s about shifting focus from maximizing investment returns to maximizing cash flow certainty. We champion optimizing Social Security by delaying benefits , creating an inflation-indexed longevity hedge that serves as a permanent income floor. We also build dynamic spending models that protect your later no-go years so you have the confidence to fully fund and enjoy travel during your go-go years

The second category is market risk, which encompasses market volatility, inflation, and sequence of return risk. Sequence risk is the hazard that a sharp market downturn occurs right as you begin withdrawing funds, permanently damaging your portfolio’s long-term sustainability. Because market risk can be measured with extreme precision, it has historically dominated traditional retirement strategies, sometimes at the expense of other vital risks.

In the trenches of real-world planning, advisors protect clients from market risk using structural portfolio design rather than expensive, complex insurance products. We highlight to our clients a concept known as the retirement risk zone, the critical ten-year window spanning the five years before to the five years after your actual retirement date when your nest egg is most vulnerable to volatility.

 To navigate this zone, we implement a guardrails framework where clients know exactly where and when they will temporarily adjust portfolio distributions. And this will happen when, not if, the market takes a temporary pullback. Having this framework in place prevents our clients from facing panic-driven choices

Operationally, this decouples a client’s lifestyle from short-term market movements. When a market correction hits, you can look at your plan and realize that your retirement income runway is completely locked down and insulated for many years. You don’t have to sell a single share of stock at a loss, giving your growth equity portfolio the necessary time to fully recover

Now let’s move into the territory that traditional planning often ignores: health risk. Dr. Hay brings forward some deeply sobering population-level data. Chronic illness in later life is no longer a rare exception. It is the statistical norm. Approximately seventy-six percent of older adults in the United States live with at least one chronic condition, and more than half have two or more. Alarmingly, the gap between our lifespan and our healthspan, that is, how long we live versus how long we remain healthy, that gap between lifespan and healthspan has widened. Estimates suggest Americans may spend more than a decade of their lives managing chronic disease, disability, and cognitive decline.

Furthermore, medical care prices have risen at more than double the rate of overall inflation since nineteen seventy. Long-term care introduces an even heavier burden. Seven out of ten adults will require some form of long-term care, and those services can easily exceed a hundred thousand dollars per year, which is typically not covered by Medicare.

Dr. Hay notes a vital distinction. Market risk is episodic and historically recoverable, but health risk is progressive, persistent, and often irreversible. It permanently alters your spending patterns, tax liabilities, and income needs, and sometimes those changes happen overnight. How do retirement planning specialists act on this?

My firm integrates healthcare, tax, and insurance planning seamlessly. For early retirees bridging the gap before Medicare at age sixty-five, we expertly structure income to manage a client’s modified adjusted gross income. That’s their MAGI. By strategically balancing withdrawals between pre-tax IRAs and Roth accounts, we can artificially lower a client’s declared income, allowing them to qualify for massive Affordable Care Act premium tax subsidies and saving them tens of thousands of dollars in health insurance costs

As clients transition into Medicare, we focus heavily on navigating parts A, B, and D while actively managing income to avoid the dreaded IRMAA surcharges, which are steep Medicare premium penalties based on a two-year tax return look-back. We also review protection planning beyond health insurance, such as optimizing umbrella liability insurance to shield a multi-million dollar nest egg from legal or medical crises.

When addressing long-term care, rather than relying on traditional long-term care insurance with skyrocketing premiums, we run the math on self-funding, often identifying home equity as the ideal reserve fund

This brings us to the final most hidden threat, decision risk. Dr. Haigh defines this as the danger that your financial outcomes are ruined by limitations in human decision-making capacity. This is driven by two factors: behavioral biases like loss aversion and overconfidence, and age-related cognitive decline.

While behavioral biases often affect how decisions are made, cognitive decline impairs the ability to make decisions at all. Approximately fourteen percent of adults over sixty-five have dementia, and another fifteen percent experience mild cognitive impairment.

Research proves that financial difficulties, missed payments, and disorganization frequently emerge years before a formal diagnosis is ever made. Crucially, our financial decision-making abilities peak in midlife and gradually decline thereafter, meaning our financial complexity spikes at the exact stage of life when our cognitive capacity may begin to naturally deteriorate.

To insulate you from decision risk, a good retirement plan acts as a behavioral guardrail. Cluttering a plan with too many moving parts and scattered accounts creates severe cognitive overload. We partner with our clients to break the analysis paralysis , focusing on simple, reversible steps like consolidating ten scattered retirement accounts into one clean, easy-to-track IRA.

Another approach we advocate is to fight decision paralysis by implementing a twelve-month retirement trial run. Instead of letting clients make massive irreversible choices right away, like selling a home or moving across the country, we have them test their routine for a year, treating early lifestyle choices as a flexible hypothesis.

Retirement security is rarely about winning a mathematical game on a spreadsheet. It is about building real-world guardrails around your cash flow, your health, and your decision-making capacity. Your wealth is a beautiful tool designed to provide utility, freedom, and peace of mind. By proactively addressing all four dimensions of retirement risk, you ensure that your hard-earned nest egg safely fulfills its ultimate mission, supporting an active, joyful, and deeply purposeful next chapter of your life. You’ll find a link to Dr. Hayes’ article in the show notes and in our weekly newsletter. Now, let’s head over to Mission Control to answer your financial questions and get you retirement ready

Discovery Houston, 20 seconds to LOS. Tres Hothead. Nice to be in orbit.

Ask Mission Control

Welcome to Ask Mission Control. This week’s question comes from Rick. He asks, “I’m delaying Social Security until age seventy, but if I die before that, say at age sixty-eight, what sort of benefit does my surviving spouse get? It’s probably not the full age seventy delayed benefit, right?”

Rick , Your intuition is completely spot on. Your surviving spouse will not receive the full maximum age seventy delayed benefit because you did not live to age seventy to earn all of those credits.

However, and this is a massive however, that brings immense peace of mind. The progress you made is absolutely not wiped out. Your spouse does not get sent back to square one. Instead, the Social Security Administration freezes your benefit trajectory at the exact altitude you achieved in the month of your passing.

If you pass away at age sixty-eight, your surviving spouse inherits a benefit that includes every single month of delayed retirement credits you accumulated from your full retirement age up to age sixty-eight

Every single month you delay pressing the claim button, you’re adding more fuel to the engine, permanently increasing your baseline monthly payout. Social Security rewards your patience by adding a delayed retirement credit of two-thirds of 1% for every single month you wait.

That adds up to a guaranteed inflation-protected 8% increase for every full year you delay.

Now, while that sounds straightforward, Social Security is rarely a single variable equation.

To receive one hundred percent of the age sixty-eight accrued benefit, your surviving spouse must have reached their own survivor full retirement age. For instance, the survivor full retirement age tops out at age sixty-seven for anyone born in nineteen sixty-two or later.

If your spouse is at or past their survivor full retirement age when they step up to claim the survivor benefit, they will receive one hundred percent of the increased amount you built up to age sixty-eight. However, if they choose or they need to claim that survivor benefit earlier, and they can do so as early as age sixty, that benefit will face a permanent actuarial reduction.

Depending on how early they claim, the payout will slide down to anywhere between seventy-one and a half percent and ninety-nine percent of your age sixty-eight value.

Thanks again for the great question, Rick. If you’ve got a retirement question you’d like us to answer on the show, head over to retirementisntrocketscience.com and click ask a

question. Or even better, skip to the front of the line by calling Mission Control at 704-234-6550 and record your audio question. Now, let’s take a little 12 million light year trip out to the Cigar Galaxy to take a look at this beautiful mess

NASA: In Discovery Houston, we’ve got a good picture of Steve.

Retirement Big Picture

Dr. Chris Mullis, PhD, CFP®: Welcome to the Retirement Big Picture part of our show. This is where we look up and look out to expand our horizons and understand the universe just a little bit better. Today, we’re talking about a major cosmic headline that dropped from NASA just a few days ago. Scientists have pointed the premier James Webb Space Telescope at one of the most famous, dynamic, and frankly, chaotic neighborhoods in our local universe. The galaxy is Messier 82, or more affectionately known to astronomers as M82, the Cigar Galaxy. Why do we call it the Cigar Galaxy?

Well, that comes down to perspective. From our vantage point here on Earth, we happen to view this spiral galaxy perfectly edge-on. Because we’re looking at its profile rather than staring face down into its spiral arms, it looks like a long, glowing, narrow cigar cutting through the darkness of space. For our listeners out there who love a clear night and a good pair of binoculars, I’ve got some really good news.

M82 is located in the constellation Ursa Major, famously known as the Great Bear, right near the Big Dipper. Because this constellation is circumpolar for most of the United States, it stays above the horizon all year long. It’s also a beloved target for backyard stargazers.

With a modest telescope or even a strong pair of binoculars on a dark, crisp night, you can spot the faint, elongated glow of the Cigar Galaxy right alongside its neighbor, M81. But here’s where the story gets fascinating and where it starts to sound a little bit like the transitions we face in our fifties and sixties. M82 is what astronomers call a starburst galaxy.

It’s undergoing an absolute frenzy of star formation. In fact, it’s pumping out new stars ten times faster than our own Milky Way galaxy. Why is this happening? Well, scientists believe that a while back, M82 had a close encounter, a galactic merger or near collision with its neighboring galaxy. This massive gravitational event completely shook up the status quo.

It took all the quiet, drifting hydrogen gas and compressed it, igniting a wild, explosive era of stellar birth. When you look at your own financial life, right as you approach retirement, it can feel a bit like a starburst phase. You’ve spent thirty or forty years diligently saving, quietly building up your nest egg. But as you transition out of the accumulation phase and prepare to launch into retirement, everything starts happening at once.

You’ve got Social Security choices, Medicare decisions, tax management strategies, and estate planning. It can feel like a complex, high-energy ecosystem where you’re trying to figure out how all these moving parts fit together to ensure a smooth and sustainable financial orbit

For years, we’ve looked at M82 with wonderful instruments like the Hubble Space Telescope and the now retired Spitzer Space Telescope. Hubble gave us stunning, majestic views of the visible light, showing wildly glowing red plumes of gas blasting out the top and bottom of the galaxy.

But there was a problem: dust. M82 is incredibly thick with cosmic dust. It’s like trying to drive through a dense fog. Hubble’s visible light eyes, just like our own optical detectors, our eyes, just bounce right off that dust, keeping the inner workings of the galactic disk a closely guarded secret.

Enter the James Webb Space Telescope and its incredible near-infrared camera. The team of astronomers spent a total of sixty-five hours of observation time tracking M82 with Webb. Because Webb looks at the universe through infrared light, which has longer wavelengths that literally slide right past individual dust grains, it did something we’ve never been able to do before.

It pierced right through the thick smoke of the Cigar Galaxy. And what did it find? A treasure trove of data. Sixteen point five million individual stars were imaged. Luminous blue granules scattered through this galactic disk, giving scientists a detailed fossil record of how this galaxy grew. In that data trove is also a distorted, distended disk.

Webb revealed that the galaxy’s shape is asymmetrical and warped from an ancient merger, explaining the structural forces driving this madness. And finally, layered hourglass outflows. Webb mapped the extreme bipolar plumes of material being thrown out to space by the intense starburst activity.

When you marry the data from Hubble’s visible light and Webb’s infrared vision, you expand what you can see, and you can solve truly complex questions.

The same is true for retirement. You can’t look at your investments in a vacuum without looking at your taxes. You can’t look at your estate planning without considering your healthcare. It’s about marrying all those data sets together, your income, your investments, your lifestyle goals, and your legacy to build a comprehensive multi-dimensional plan.

M82’s intense rapid starburst phase is a short-lived event in astronomical terms. It will only last a few hundred million years before the galaxy settles down in a sustainable, quiet phase. Your transition into retirement is also a unique high-energy window. It’s the ignition of a new purpose, a time to launch your next great adventure and ensure your hard work translates into a beautiful, lasting legacy for the people and communities you cherish.

Don’t let this complexity make you feel like you’re navigating a mess. With the right tools, the right perspective, and the right advisor walking this journey side by side with you, you can look through the dust and see the brilliant future ahead. You’ll find the Webb and the Hubble Space Telescope combined image of the beautiful mess of M82, the Cigar Galaxy, in this week’s newsletter.

You can find that at retirementisntrocketscience.com.

Conclusion & Action Items

Dr. Chris Mullis, PhD, CFP®: Today, we focused on the four primary risks to your retirement security. Because retirement planning involves making a series of complex decisions over an uncertain timeline, managing these risks requires a dynamic, adaptable strategy. To move from theory to better outcomes, here are your next mission objectives.

Number one, consolidate and simplify your holdings. Map out all your scattered accounts, old 401Ks, and separate brokerage holdings. Work with a professional to consolidate them into a unified, streamlined portfolio to reduce cognitive clutter and eliminate long-term decision fatigue. Number two, establish a volatility buffer.

Review your short-term cash flow needs and structurally isolate three to five years of spending into stable liquid vehicles. This ensures your immediate lifestyle is entirely decoupled from the stock market and the economic cycle. And number three, draft a behavioral anchor.

Cooperatively build a formal investment policy statement. That’s an IPS. And do this with your advisor while the financial skies are beautiful and clear. Define your long-term rebalancing rules and income adjustment guardrails ahead of time, so you have an unemotional blueprint to follow when the next market storm hits.

I challenge you to take one idea from today’s show and put it into practice this week to make your retirement even better. Thank you so much for joining me. Remember, you’ve done the hard work of saving. Now let’s do the smart work of planning. Until next time, keep your eyes on the horizon and enjoy the adventure.

You are go for retirement.

Credits

Dr. Chris Mullis, PhD, CFP®: We thank the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for providing the radio communications between the space shuttle astronauts and the flight controllers.

Disclaimer

This show is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It is not specific tax, legal, or investment advice. Before considering acting on anything you hear in this show, first consult with your own tax, legal, or financial advisor