Ambassador Wealth Management Power Hour
Oct 8, 2026 · 54 min · 28 segments
In this episode, financial expert Esa Yokela discusses how early retirement impacts financial planning, the importance of sequence of return risk, and strategies for optimizing social security and tax…
Or should I say when retirement arrives early, as you teased at the beginning of the show.
So, Esa, may I ask you if retirement happened six months or two years earlier than someone expected? Yes.
Unexpected retirement doesn't automatically mean that years of your preparation are wasted.
It just means that assumptions need to be rerun and with a new starting date and a new timeline for it so that's all important and uh you know then there are other elements that come into play uh one that we've talked about many times on this show and and it is the sequence of return risk
uh which is um which is something that is not talked about very much or considered very much, unless you're talking to financial people who actually do retirement planning.
And it can mean that poor investment returns early in retirement can have an outsized effect on the withdrawals as they occur.
So it just diminishes and depletes your portfolio much faster than if you had good returns early on.
So
What happens when you retire is the the job description for the assets that you have changes.
When you were working and accumulating money, the sequence of returns actually could benefit you because, especially if there's a down market, you may look at it as, okay, well, the value of my account is down and I'm upset about it.
But at the same time, if you keep putting money in there, you're buying into your... your investments at a lower cost therefore you can actually benefit from it however it's a completely different story if you are taking money away from it at the same time that the value of your portfolio has has diminished then it has an outsized effect on the longevity of your account
Or should I say when retirement arrives early, as you teased at the beginning of the show.
So, Esa, may I ask you if retirement happened six months or two years earlier than someone expected? Yes.
Unexpected retirement doesn't automatically mean that years of your preparation are wasted.
It just means that assumptions need to be rerun and with a new starting date and a new timeline for it so that's all important and uh you know then there are other elements that come into play uh one that we've talked about many times on this show and and it is the sequence of return risk
uh which is um which is something that is not talked about very much or considered very much, unless you're talking to financial people who actually do retirement planning.
And it can mean that poor investment returns early in retirement can have an outsized effect on the withdrawals as they occur.
So it just diminishes and depletes your portfolio much faster than if you had good returns early on.
So
What happens when you retire is the the job description for the assets that you have changes.
When you were working and accumulating money, the sequence of returns actually could benefit you because, especially if there's a down market, you may look at it as, okay, well, the value of my account is down and I'm upset about it.
But at the same time, if you keep putting money in there, you're buying into your... your investments at a lower cost therefore you can actually benefit from it however it's a completely different story if you are taking money away from it at the same time that the value of your portfolio has has diminished then it has an outsized effect on the longevity of your account
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