Well, hello, and thank you for joining us for another edition of the Providence Financial Retirement Show. I’m your host, Anthony Saccaro. We are your retirement income source, and this is the place where retirees come for income, because in retirement, it’s all about the income. I’m really glad that you’re here today. And we’ve got a great show for you today because we’re going to talk about the fact that a new year doesn’t fix an old plan. And, of course, we’re going to take your listener questions along the way.

It’s that time of year again when the calendar flips and the year changes. And for many people, there’s an automatic sense that something meaningful has shifted simply because January has arrived. A new year often feels like a fresh start, almost as if the slate has become wiped clean and progress has been made just by turning the page, even though nothing in real life may have actually changed. When it comes to retirement planning, that feeling can be comforting, but it can also be misleading.

Think about how this works in everyday life. Most people have had some version of this experience at one point or another. You sign up for a gym or you renew a membership that you already had, and just doing that makes you feel better. You feel productive. You feel like you’ve taken action. But if your routine and your habits and your behavior don’t actually change, then nothing meaningful has really happened. The intention is there. The calendar is turned, but the outcome has stayed the same.

Financially, the new year works much the same way for a lot of people. You open your statements, you glance at your account balances, and because it’s January, there’s this quiet assumption that you’ve somehow moved forward just by arriving here. But if your portfolio today looks exactly the same as it did last year, the real question then becomes whether anything meaningful has actually become different at all. This is conversation that comes up frequently on the Providence Financial Retirement Show because many people confuse time passing with progress being made, even when the underlying strategy hasn’t been revisited in years.

Now, I’m not asking this question to be dramatic, and I’m certainly not suggesting that everyone needs to make changes. Patience is usually rewarded. Retirement, however, operates under a very different set of rules. It’s no longer about accumulation. It becomes about distribution and income and taxes and timing and managing risk, and none of those things automatically adjust just because the calendar changes.

Here’s another way to think about it. Imagine you’re driving across the country using a GPS route that you mapped out 10 years ago. The destination might still be the same, but traffic patterns have changed and construction zones have appeared. Speed limits are different and some of the roads don’t even exist anymore. If you never update the route, it’s not that you’re not being disciplined or you’re not being consistent, you’re simply relying on outdated information and hoping it still works. That’s often what’s happening when someone carries the same portfolio from year to year without ever stepping back to ask whether it still fits the stage of life that they’re actually in today.

This is where things start to get a little tricky because many retirees will say, quite honestly, that nothing feels wrong. The accounts haven’t collapsed. Income seems to be coming in from somewhere. And the balance has still looked respectable on paper. But feeling comfortable and being properly structured are not the same thing. Comfort in retirement can be deceptive because the risks that matter most tend to show up later in life, not immediately. This entire show is going to be built around one simple idea, and you’ll hear me come back to it more than once, and that is a new year doesn’t fix an old plan.

For some people, the answer to that question might be no, and that’s perfectly fine. But for many others, they’ve never actually stopped to ask whether their plan was intentionally designed for retirement or whether it’s simply what they’ve always done. Over the course of today’s show, we’re going to unpack that idea together. We’ll talk about what really changes when you move from saving money to living off of it and why income doesn’t automatically appear when you retire and why doing nothing in retirement is still a decision whether or not you realize it.

Thank you for tuning in to today’s Providence Financial retirement show. I’m your host, Anthony Saccaro. We’re spending our time together today talking about the fact that a new year doesn’t fix an old plan. One of the biggest misconceptions I see in retirement planning is the idea that if you’re not actively making changes, then somehow you’re staying neutral. And that mindset makes sense when you’re younger and you’re still accumulating. But once you’ve retired or you’re even close to retirement, doing nothing is really no longer a passive choice. It becomes an active decision whether or not you realize it.

And that brings me to our first listener question of the day that really captures how a lot of people feel. The question is this. “Anthony, this is David from Calabasas. I’ve been retired for a few years now and my accounts have done fine and honestly I’m feeling pretty comfortable. I’m not unhappy with anything I’m doing. So my question is this. If things don’t feel broken, why would I even consider making changes at this point?” And David, that’s a very fair question and I appreciate the time that you took to write in that question. And I appreciate you asking the question the way that you did because it sounds exactly like conversations that I have with people every week.

The short answer is this. Comfort and structure are not the same thing. Feeling comfortable usually means nothing bad has happened yet. Being properly structured means that your plan is designed to handle whatever could happen next. And those are two very different things when it comes to your retirement. When you’re working, stability often comes from your paycheck. When you retire, stability has to come from the design of your plan. And if that design hasn’t been revisited in many years, comfort can quietly turn into complacency without you ever realizing it.

This is something that I talk about often here on the Providence Financial Retirement Show because many retirees are unintentionally relying on yesterday’s success to protect them from tomorrow’s risks. Markets may have treated you well and your balances may still look healthy, but that doesn’t automatically mean that your plan aligns with the realities of retirement today. One of the biggest dangers of doing nothing is that portfolios don’t stay frozen in time. People never consciously decide how the retirement income was supposed to work. Instead, income just sort of happened. A withdrawal here, a distribution there, maybe Social Security layered in along the way, and as long as the money showed up, it kind of felt like the plan was working.

Retirement income, though, isn’t something that should be improvised. It should be designed. This is where the phrase we’re using throughout today’s show really applies, a new year doesn’t fix an old plan. Just because nothing feels broken right now doesn’t mean that your plan is prepared for the next market downturn or the next inflation spike or whatever unexpected expense comes up next. One way that I encourage people to think about this is by asking a simple question. If the market dropped tomorrow and stay down for a period of time, what would actually change in your day-to-day life? Would your income stay consistent? Or would you feel pressure to adjust your spending?

For everyone else that’s listening, I hope there’s something in that answer that causes you to pause and think about whether or not your own plan is something you’ve intentionally designed or something that you’ve simply carried forward because nothing has forced a change yet. In retirement, the cost of waiting is often invisible at first, and by the time it becomes visible, the options are usually more limited.

Thank you for continuing to stay tuned in to the Providence Financial Retirement Show. My name is Anthony Saccaro, and my goal in the Providence Financial Retirement Show is to help you have the peace of mind and confidence that you deserve in retirement. We’re spending our time together today talking about a new year doesn’t fix an old plan. And of course, we’re taking your listener questions along the way.

Earlier, I mentioned that a portfolio can grow for years and still be poorly designed for retirement. And that idea tends to catch people off guard because we’ve been trained for decades to believe that growth automatically equals success. The truth is that growth solves a lot of problems while you’re working, but retirement introduces different challenges altogether. And that’s where many people unknowingly get stuck. One of the most common issues I see in retirement planning has nothing to do with the markets or interest rates or even investment performance. It has to do with mindset. More specifically, it has to do with people carrying an accumulation mindset straight into a phase of life that requires a completely different way of thinking.

When you’re working and saving, growth is the goal. You measure your outcomes by your account balances, and you’re rewarded by staying invested and tuning out short-term noise and letting compounding work over time. And for most people, that approach makes sense and usually works. The problem, though, is that retirement quietly changes the rules, and many people never change how they think about their money once they stop working. This brings me right into our next listener question of the day, and it comes from Linda and Huntington Beach, and she wrote in this, “If my portfolio is still growing, and I’m not running out of money, isn’t that what really matters?”

Well, Linda’s question is honest, and it reflects how most people have been conditioned to think about success with money. Growth feels good. Bigger numbers feel safer. And during your working years, growth really does solve a lot of problems. Retirement, though, introduces a new variable that growth alone doesn’t address, and that variable is reliability. Think about it this way. Owning a successful restaurant isn’t just about how much food you can produce in the kitchen. It’s about whether you can consistently serve meals day in and day out without interruption. If the kitchen only works when everything goes perfectly, well, that’s not a business you’d feel comfortable relying on, no matter how impressive it looks on paper.

Retirement works the same way. A growing portfolio is great, but growth by itself doesn’t tell you how dependable your income is going to be. Another analogy that you might find helpful is this. Imagine filling up your gas tank. During accumulation, the goal is to get as much fuel in the tank as possible. In retirement, though, the focus shifts to how smoothly and predictably that fuel is delivered to the engine over time. A full tank doesn’t help much if the fuel line itself is unreliable. When someone says to me, my portfolio is still growing, so I must be fine. What they’re really saying is that they’re still thinking like a saver, not a spender.

That’s understandable, but it can become a blind spot if it’s never challenged. And this is where the phrase that we’re using throughout today’s show comes back into play. A new year doesn’t fix an old plan. If your plan is still built primarily around growth, even though you’re now living off of that money, the calendar changing does not magically convert that growth into dependable income. And just to be clear, growth still matters. This isn’t an argument against growth. It’s just a reminder that growth no longer is the primary objective once you’re retired. The primary objective becomes to produce more income in a way that’s sustainable and predictable and emotionally manageable, especially during periods when markets are volatile.

So, Linda, I hope that helps answer your question and gives you a clearer picture of why growth alone doesn’t tell the whole story. And for the rest of you listening, I hope it encourages you to think about whether your plan is designed for the job your money is supposed to do now, not the job it was designed to do years ago. Retirement is not about winning a growth contest. It’s about creating confidence that your lifestyle can be supported no matter what happens to the market in any given year. And that distinction matters more than most people realize.

Thank you for tuning into today’s Providence Financial Retirement show where it truly is all about the income. I’m Anthony Saccaro and We’re talking about a new year doesn’t fix an old plan. One of the challenges with retirement planning is that the risk that matter most often are the ones you don’t clearly see when you’re looking at your statement. Statements do a great job of showing balances and performance and percentages, but they don’t show how those numbers behave once you start relying on them for income. And that’s where many retirees get caught off guard. Most people think of risk as something you only feel when markets are falling sharply. When the market is up, risk feels distant. When the market is down, risk suddenly feels urgent.

In retirement, risk works differently. It’s not just about whether markets go up or down, but about when they go up and down. It’s also about how long it lasts and what you’re forced to do financially while it’s happening. A helpful way to think about this is the difference between turbulence at cruising altitude versus turbulence during takeoff. Turbulence later in flight might be uncomfortable, but it’s really dangerous when you’re taking off. Turbulence early on feels very different, even if the plane ultimately ends up in the same place. Timing changes impact.

Retirement works much the same way. Market volatility during your working years is usually something you can ride through because you’re still earning income. On the other hand, market volatility early in retirement, when you’re pulling money out, that can have a much larger and much more lasting effect, even if long-term averages eventually look similar. That’s what’s known as sequence of returns risk. And while the term sounds technical, the idea itself is really simple. The order in which returns occur matters once the withdrawals begin. Two retirees can experience similar average returns over time and still end up in very different financial positions depending on when those losses showed up.

This is something that we talk about often on the Providence Financial Retirement Show because sequence of return risk doesn’t announce itself clearly. It doesn’t show up as a warning on your statement and it doesn’t feel urgent until it’s already doing damage. The other way to think about it is like draining water from a reservoir while rain is falling. If the rain comes early, the reservoir stays stable. If the rain comes later, the water levels have already dropped, and the outcome can be very different, even if the total amount of rain is the same. Timing matters. Many retirees assume that diversification alone solves this problem, and diversification is important, but it doesn’t automatically protect income when withdrawals are happening during market declines.

This isn’t about predicting the next market crash or trying to time anything. It’s about acknowledging that volatility is normal and building a plan that accounts for it rather than reacting after the fact. One of the most common things retirees say is this. I didn’t realize how different this would feel once I stopped working. That reaction makes sense because depending on a portfolio for income feels very different than depending on your paycheck for income. Statements don’t show stress tests. They don’t show how confident you’re going to feel if the market drops and stays down for a while, and they don’t show how steady your income is going to be under pressure.

Understanding risk in retirement means looking beyond the numbers and focusing on structure and timing and purpose because it’s not just about how much you have, but how your plan behaves when conditions aren’t ideal.

Thank you for joining us for today’s Providence financial retirement show. I’m your host, Anthony Saccaro. We’re in the middle of a good conversation. We’re talking about a new year doesn’t fix an old plan. One of the most important things retirees often overlook is that even if their portfolio hasn’t changed a lot, the environment around it almost certainly has, and that mismatch can create problems long before anything ever shows up on your statement. Think about how different today feels compared to 10 or 15 years ago. Interest rates have moved, inflation has reintroduced itself in everyday conversations, people are living longer and health care costs continue to rise and tax rules are constantly evolving. Markets just seem to be moving faster and reacting more emotionally than they used to.

Yet many retirement portfolios are still built on assumptions that were formed in a very different environment. And this is something that I talk about a lot on the Providence Financial Retirement Show because people tend to anchor what worked for them in the past and assumed it will keep working simply because it always has. The challenge is that retirement planning isn’t static. It’s dynamic and it has to adapt as conditions change. Think about it this way. Imagine buying a home near the coast decades ago when the climate was mild than storms were rare. The house might have been perfectly designed for that environment at the time, but if the weather patterns have changed and storms become more frequent and intense, the house doesn’t magically become stronger just because it’s still standing. If the structure isn’t updated, eventually the environment exposes those weaknesses.

Retirement portfolios, they work the same way. A strategy that perform well during a long bull market and low interest rates and modest inflation might behave very differently in a world where volatility and inflation and policy uncertainty are more and more uncommon. This is where a lot of people get tripped up. They’ll say things like this. My portfolio made it through the last downturn or I’ve already lived through market cycles. Well, that may be true, but the question isn’t what you survived. The question is whether their portfolio is still designed for what’s ahead. And that brings us back to what we’ve been talking about. A new year doesn’t fix an old plan.

The calendar changing doesn’t update assumptions. It doesn’t rebalance risks automatically and it doesn’t adjust income strategies to reflect a new reality. Another way to think about this is like wearing the same prescription glasses year after year. Your vision changes gradually, oftentimes so slowly that you don’t even often notice it happening. You can still see, but not as clearly as you used to. Over time, eye strain sets in and headaches become more common and things just don’t feel quite right. It’s not that the glasses broke. They just stop being the right fit for you at that time. That’s exactly what happens when a retirement plan isn’t reviewed through the lens of a changing environment. Nothing feels broken, but things feel harder than they should.

One of the biggest shifts retirees struggle with is the relationship between income and interest rates. For years, income was hard to come by without taking on more risk. That shaped how portfolios were built. When the environment changes, income opportunities change too. But many people never revisit that structure to take advantage of that shift or protect against new risk. The danger isn’t change itself. The danger is assuming nothing needs to change just because nothing has gone wrong yet. Retirement planning is not about predicting the future perfectly. It’s just about acknowledging that the future won’t look exactly like the past and building flexibility into your plan so that you can adapt without forcing painful decisions later.

If your portfolio hasn’t been evaluated in the context of today’s environment, then it’s worth asking whether it’s still solving the right problems. Is it designed for income stability? Is it resilient of volatility? Is it flexible enough to adjust as conditions evolve? And believe it or not, when you invest for income, like we talk about here on the Providence Financial Retirement Show, you solve many of those problems and you answer many of those questions.

Thank you for continuing to join us for today’s Providence Financial Retirement Show. The goal of our show is to help you have the confidence and clarity so that you can have the stress-free and peaceful retirement that you deserve. We’re spending our time today talking about the fact that a new year doesn’t fix an old plan. One of the assumptions that many people carry into retirement is that income will somehow take care of itself once they stop working. After all, you’ve spent decades saving and investing in building assets, so it kind of feels reasonable to believe that when the time comes, the money will simply start showing up as needed. The reality, though, is that income doesn’t automatically appear just because you retired.

This is something that comes up frequently here on the Providence Financial Retirement Show because the difference between owning assets and producing income is much bigger than most people think, especially once paychecks stop and that portfolio becomes the primary source of your cash flow. That brings me to our next listener question that captures this mindset very well. Susan from Laguna Nigel wrote in this, “I hear you talk a lot about income planning, but I’ve always just taken withdrawals from my account when I need them, and I’ve just adjusted as I’ve gone along the way. So far it’s worked, why wouldn’t that be good enough going forward?”

And Susan, thank you for your question, and it’s a very honest question, and it reflects what a lot of retirees are already doing. They didn’t sit down and design an income plan, they simply started taking money out when work ended, and as long as the withdrawals felt manageable, everything seemed fine. The challenge is that taking withdrawals and having an income plan are not the same thing. Withdrawals are reactive. Income planning is intentional. When income is improvised, you’re constantly responding to what the markets are doing and how your balance is looking, how you feel at that moment. When income is designed, you’ve already decided where the money will come from, regardless of the market. Now compare that to having a planned route and a steady pace. The destination may be the same, but the experience is far less stressful.

Retirement income works the same way. Structure doesn’t eliminate uncertainty, but it dramatically reduces stress. This is where people often say, but Anthony, I’ve been doing this for years and it’s worked, and that may be true so far. The problem is that “so far” isn’t a strategy. It’s just an observation about the past. That brings us back to what we’ve been talking about throughout today’s show. A new year doesn’t fix an old plan. Just because withdrawals have worked up to this point doesn’t mean they were designed to work through market downturns or a period of higher inflation or unexpected expenses.

One of the biggest shifts retirees experience happens when markets decline and income isn’t clearly defined. Every withdrawal starts to feel heavier. Every decision starts to feel more permanent. And instead of enjoying retirement, people often find themselves wondering whether they’re taking too much risk and reacting too late or putting their future at risk. The emotional pressure is often the result of a lack of structure, not a lack of money. Susan, I hope that helps clarify why simply taking withdrawals as needed isn’t always enough, even if it’s worked so far.

Thank you for staying tuned in. I’m Anthony Saccaro and you’re listening to the Providence Financial Retirement Show, we’re talking about a new year doesn’t fix an old plan. One of the most revealing questions you can ask in retirement isn’t how much money you have or how well your portfolio has performed. It’s a much simpler question and at the same time, a much more uncomfortable one. And that question is this, if something went wrong, what would break first? Most people have never really given any thought about that. They assume that if a problem shows up, they’ll just deal with it when it happened. The issue is that in retirement, the timing of when you’re forced to react often matters more than the problem itself.

This is something that I talk about here on the Providence Financial Retirement Show a lot because stress rarely shows up all at once. It shows up in small ways at first, and then those cracks are easy to ignore if you’re not intentionally looking for them. Think about it this way. Imagine a bridge that looks perfectly fine from a distance. Cars are driving across it every day, traffic gets flowing, and everything appears great. But under the surface, one support is weaker than the others. The bridge doesn’t collapse immediately. Instead, weight gets redistributed, pressure builds slowly, and the problem grows quietly until one day something finally gives. Retirement plans work exactly the same way.

When markets are calm and income feels manageable, it’s easy to assume everything is solid. But stress has a way of revealing weaknesses that weren’t obvious before. A market downturn or a period of higher inflation or even in unexpected health care expense or change in tax rules, any one of those can apply pressure to a plan that wasn’t designed with flexibility in mind. The question isn’t whether challenges are going to show up. The question is how your plan is going to respond to them when they do. For some people, the first thing that breaks is their confidence. They start second-guessing decisions they felt good about just months earlier. For others, it’s income. Withdrawals become uncomfortable. Spending feels restrictive. And every decision carries more emotional weight than the last. In some cases, it might be taxes where decisions made many years ago suddenly limit flexibility where it’s needed the most.

What makes this especially difficult is that your statements don’t show you any of this in advance. They don’t show you how you’re going to feel when volatility lasts longer than expected. They don’t show you how confident you’ll be if your income has to be adjusted. And they don’t show you how much stress a lack of clarity can introduce into your daily life. And this brings us back to what we’ve been talking about throughout today’s show. A new year does not fix an old plan. If a plan hasn’t been tested mentally or structurally, the calendar changing doesn’t suddenly make it more resilient.

One of the most helpful exercises that you can do is a simple stress test, not on a spreadsheet, but in real life. Ask yourself a few honest questions. If the market dropped and stayed down for a long period of time, what would change for you? Would your income stay the same? Or would you feel pressure to adjust spending? Would you feel confident sticking with your plan as it currently is? Or would you feel the urge to react? If those answers aren’t clear, that uncertainty is often the first thing that breaks.

And just to make sure that we’re clear, this isn’t about living in fear or assuming the worst. It’s about recognizing that retirement planning isn’t just about maximizing outcomes when things go right. It’s about minimizing regret when things go wrong. Plans that are designed intentionally tend to absorb stress instead of amplifying it. Plans that evolved accidentally, they tend to transfer stress directly to you. That distinction matters more than most people realize because retirement should be a phase of life where decisions feel lighter, not heavier. Confidence doesn’t come from hoping nothing goes wrong. It comes from knowing that if something does go wrong, your plan was built to handle it.

What often surprises people is that this kind of clarity doesn’t come from predicting the future or running endless scenarios. It comes from understanding how your plan is supposed to behave under stress and knowing ahead of time where the pressure points are. When that understanding is missing, uncertainty fills the gap. And uncertainty is usually what causes people to make decisions that they later regret. This is why asking what would break first isn’t a negative exercise. It’s actually a constructive one. It forces you to look at past balances and performance and focus instead on resilience and flexibility and peace of mind.

And if answering that question feels uncomfortable or unclear, that discomfort is useful information because it tells you exactly where attention is needed before that stress ever shows up. And oftentimes, that stress, it shows up after it’s too late. And usually it’s a result of making mistakes today that you don’t even know you’re making.

I’m Anthony Saccaro. If you just joined us, you’re listening to the Providence Financial Retirement Show. We’ve had a good conversation up to this point. It’s the new year and we’re talking about the fact that a new year doesn’t fix an old plan. And of course, we’ve taken your listener questions along the way. And we’ve had some really good ones. As we head towards a wrap and our conversation today, I want to bring everything we’ve talked about back to one practical idea because while we’ve covered risk and mindset and structure and environment, there’s a common thread that ties all of it together and that’s income. More specifically, it’s the difference between owning a portfolio and living off the income that this portfolio produces.

Throughout the show, we’ve talked about why doing nothing is still a decision and why growth alone doesn’t equal security. We’ve also talked about why some of the biggest risks don’t show up on your statements and why the world around your portfolio keeps changing even if your portfolio hasn’t. What often gets overlooked, though, is that many of those problems become far more manageable when your retirement is built around income rather than constant withdrawals. This is something that I emphasize a lot here on the Providence Financial Retirement Show, because when income is clear and reliable, a lot of the stress that you’re feeling starts to fade into the background.

Living off your interest and dividends in a portfolio changes the experience of your retirement in a very real way. Instead of constantly deciding what to sell and when to sell it and how market conditions might affect your decision, income becomes something that shows up more predictably. And when income is predictable, your decisions tend to feel lighter. When you’re not forced to sell assets just to create cash flow, market volatility takes on a different role. Sequence of return risk, like we talked about earlier, it becomes less impactful when income doesn’t depend on selling your assets at the wrong time. Emotional decision making becomes less common because spending isn’t tied directly to market swings. Your confidence is even going to improve because you know where your money is coming from and why it’s coming from those places.

That doesn’t mean income planning eliminates risk entirely. Nothing does. But it does change the nature of risk. Instead of worrying about whether you’re taking too much risk and reacting too late, the focus shifts on maintaining a sustainable income stream that’s going to support your lifestyle no matter what the markets decide to do. And this is where what we’ve been talking about all show really starts to come full circle. A new year doesn’t fix an old plan. If your plan still relies primarily on selling assets for income, the calendar changing doesn’t magically make that approach easier or more reliable. But when income is intentionally designed into the portfolio, the passage of time tends to work in your favor instead of against you.

Another important point is this. Income first planning isn’t about chasing yield or taking unnecessary risk. It’s about balance. It’s about understanding how different pieces of your portfolio work together to produce cash flow while still allowing for growth and flexibility and long-term sustainability. It is about being able to enjoy your retirement without forcing constant decisions and constant adjustments and constant angst and worry. Retirement should feel like a transition into a more intentional phase of life, not a period where every market moves feel personal. And for many of you, living off the income that your portfolio produces is what’s going to make that possible.

So as you head into the new year, instead of asking how your portfolio performed last year, consider asking yourself how it’s designed to support you this year. Is income clear? Is it reliable? And does it allow you to live the way you want without having to second guess every decision? When your income is intentional and clear, your confidence is going to follow. And you know that my number one goal here on the Providence Financial Retirement Show is to help you have confidence in your retirement so that you’re living the stress-free and peaceful retirement that you deserve. You’re going to enjoy learning what you need to know so that you can have the confidence and clarity that you deserve in your retirement. I’m Anthony Saccaro. Thank you for joining us today for our Providence Financial Retirement Show. Have a great week, everyone. God bless.

This transcript is provided for educational and informational purposes only and reflects a general discussion from a live radio broadcast. It is not intended as personalized financial, tax, or legal advice. Individual circumstances vary, and listeners should consult a qualified professional before making decisions.