So help me, let's say, what's the next steps I should be doing? Help me out.

Yeah, so a great practice is to do a trial retirement.

I call it a faux-tirement.

If you have a couple of weeks off from work, we have a sabbatical program where I work where we get six weeks off.

those are wonderful times to not necessarily do the vacation, but at least spend a week, if you can, in your home base.

Take stock of what do these days feel like? What does that lack of structure feel like? And if it's too short a time period, you probably have vacation stuff on your mind, that might not be the best test case.

Ideally, you would have a couple of weeks where you're thinking about what am I doing for relaxation, but also what's giving me purpose and a sense of mattering if I'm not working? What are those things that bring me that sense of I'm still contributing here and I still matter to the world? That is a secret to happy retirement.

I know it's an issue, but that's as far as I know.

Can you explain that?

Yes.

So the standard deductions do march upward to keep a pace with inflation, so for the 2025 tax year, if you're a single filer, it's 15,750 is your standard deduction.

It's double that if you're a married couple filing jointly.

So that's a pretty high bar, but the game changer for 2025, starting in 2025 as a result of that OBRA tax legislation that passed through Congress at midyear, and it elevated what had been a $10,000 cap on the s- amount of state and local taxes that you could deduct from 10,000 all the way up to $40,000.

So for people who live in those high-tax states or live in a municipality that has high property tax bills, you might wanna take a look at whether itemization might be within reach for you this year because you can deduct more of those state and local taxes.

One key caveat here, though, is that for higher income folks, for people earning over $500,000, that cap begins to phase out.

So does it make sense for everyone to maximize that tax-free interest?

Is there an overall takeaway from your analyses of these risks?

Yeah, I think the sequence of return risk is one that's top of mind for me when I think about people just embarking on retirement.

And the key point there is that it's helpful to have a couple of things in your toolkit to help address the risk of bad market returns showing up early in your retirement.

So one is being able to rein in your spending if you possibly can.

So if we have really calamitous returns, Market losses, your portfolio loses a lot of value if you can spend less during those periods.

That's certainly a best practice for retirement spending.

And the other point I would make is build yourself a runway of safer assets that you could spend through if you needed to so you wouldn't have to touch your depreciated equity assets.

But can you talk a bit about a couple that you think that demonstrate the pros and cons?