The Third Moving Bullseye
Retirement planning is riddled with moving targets.
The first two we’ve already discussed: economics and demographics.
On the economic side, there is a fatal flaw in how your investments are forecasted into the future. Real world risks aren’t factored in, rather the ‘Flaw of Averages’ is used to give you unrealistic expectations of the future. The solution is Full-Spectrum ForecastingTM, which equips you with reliable scenarios, not false certainty.
On the demographic side, the blind spot is life expectancy. We use life expectancy figures but, by definition, half of us live longer than the average. Also, the averages themselves are stretching, and perhaps even accelerating. Retirees today should be prepared for 30, 40, even 50 years of retirement. Or longer, if we’re realistic.
The last moving bullseye is the strategic element of retirement – a dynamic cocktail of the choices, shocks, and risks that arise from how we live our lives. Unlike economic returns or demographic probabilities, these are factors over which you have more influence.
The reason they’re important is because they matter — profoundly — to how much of a nest egg you need and how long it will likely last.
1. Your Lifespan and ‘Healthspan’ Are Not Set In Stone
There’s a striking statistic often cited: as much as a quarter of our entire lifetime medical costs occur in the final twelve months of life. The tail end of life is expensive. But here’s the twist: the quality and length of that tail are not predetermined.
Genetics and luck play a role, yes. But lifestyle choices — notably exercise, nutrition, sleep, stress management — wield immense influence over your how long you live as well plus how long you live in good health (free from chronic disease, disability and decline, what noted medical doctor and author, Peter Attia, call your ‘healthspan’).
Physician-researchers like Peter Attia have shown that with deliberate interventions, many of us can avoid the slow, grinding decline that used to seem inevitable. Instead of “death by a thousand cuts,” we can aim for a high-quality life that ends with a sharp drop-off — living well until very near the end.
The implication for retirement planning is twofold:
First, improving your healthspan can compress those costly years of frailty, reducing the financial drag of late-life medical interventions.
Second, it increases the odds that you’ll live longer — which, ironically, means your money must last longer too.
Either way, your retirement finances are tightly bound to your daily health decisions.
2. Anticipate Expenditure Shocks and Boomerang Babies
The second behavioural risk isn’t about your own body, but the lives of those most important to you.
Too many retirees are surprised by the “boomerang” effect: adult children suddenly becoming dependents again. Sometimes it’s tragic — the premature death of your adult child, leaving no one but you to raise their children, your grandchildren. Sometimes it’s economic reversal, divorce, mental health collapse, or substance abuse.
Other times it’s less dramatic but still costly: helping a child through an expensive medical crisis, financing an early inheritance to get them on the property ladder, or turning the old family home into a “forever home” through a major renovation.
It’s not a question of affordability – you probably have the money to cope in the moment. But you have no line-of-sight on the long term implications of these disruptions. A single six-figure outlay is unwelcome but not impossible, but what if it knocks years off the longevity of your retirement portfolio and that hasn’t been accounted for in your planning?
The art and science here is not about predicting the unpredictable, but about rehearsing for it. Just as a ship carries lifeboats it hopes never to launch, your retirement plan needs room for the unexpected passenger or the sudden storm. Stress-testing against shocks — and setting clear principles for when and how you will step in — turns an emotional decision into a managed one. That way, generosity doesn’t quietly sink your long-term security, and you preserve not only your wealth but your peace of mind.
3. Prepare For The New Risks of Theft, Fraud, and Mishap
We insure our homes against fire, flood, and storm because the risk is obvious: one catastrophic event could wipe out what took a lifetime to build. But in the 21st century, some of the most destructive risks are harder to see. They arrive not with smoke or sirens, but with a click, a phone call, or an email.
Cybercrime, identity theft, ransomware, and online fraud now rank among the fastest-growing threats to personal wealth. A compromised password can give a criminal access to bank accounts. A convincing email can trick even a careful retiree into wiring funds offshore. A stolen identity can lead to debts run up in your name that take years — and hundreds of thousands of dollars — to unwind. These attacks don’t just threaten your money; they can drain your energy, destroy your confidence, and leave you feeling unsafe in your own digital home.
And unlike a house fire, where the insurer writes a cheque and helps you rebuild, there is often no simple restitution when you are the victim of fraud. Some costs may be covered, but much of the loss — financial and emotional — is yours to carry.
The solution isn’t paranoia, but a mindset: assume the risk is real, and build layered defences. Just as with your physical home, resilience comes from having the cyber-equivalent of a ‘bushfire emergency plan’.
It isn’t glamorous, and you won’t get congratulated for it. But this quiet discipline is every bit as essential to retirement security as an investment portfolio or an estate plan. Because the reality is this: wealth is not only eroded by markets or medical bills — it can be stolen in an instant, unless you treat preparedness as part of the plan.
4. Other Levers Within Your Reach
Finally, there are all the dynamic decisions you can consciously make to stack the odds more in your favour.
Retirement planning often gets reduced to blunt tactics: work a little longer, spend a little less, save a little more. Those levers are real, but pulling them in isolation — without a bigger context — is a recipe for frustration, even misery. The starting point isn’t the numbers; it’s the priorities.
Elton John captured it beautifully in his song, ‘Circle of Life’:
“There’s more to see than can ever be seen, and more to do than can ever be done.”
Think of it as a hierarchy of decisions, a kind of decision tree. At the top sits a simple but profound question: what’s important?
Because here’s the truth: life is finite, and each of us gets just 168 hours in a week. How you spend them defines your quality of life. If they’re consumed by low-priority, low-payoff activities, you’ll always feel time-poor. I reckon that if I had a nickel for every time I’d heard a new retiree say, exasperated: “I’m so busy now, how did I ever have the time for my job?!”, I’d have a pant-load of nickels.
But if you’re clear on your high-payoff activities and prioritise those ahead of tasks that can be delegated to others, you have the wind at your back. Walt Disney’s brother, Roy, once said, “When your values are clear, your decisions are easy.” That’s doubly true with money. Use this life principle to guide your decisions, particularly when it comes to retirement.
Once your “must-haves” are crystalised, the financial decisions become tactical — aligning resources to priorities, trimming what doesn’t matter, and buying back time through delegation. Yes, you may choose to defer retirement, spend more carefully, or monetise your skills & experience for a passive income— but these are steps on a ladder, not the ladder itself.
Without clarity at the top, they’re just random rung-grabs. With clarity, they become part of a coherent strategy that funds not just longevity, but a high-payoff life worth living.
Pulling It All Together
We don’t yet have a better word for it than “retirement,” but the old definition no longer fits. What lies ahead is not a brief wind-down but a whole new stage of life — longer, more dynamic, and more complex than any generation before has had to face.
Handled passively, this chapter can become a slow erosion of wealth, health, and purpose. But embraced deliberately, it can be the richest time of your life — decades with both the time and resources to live fully, contribute deeply, and pursue what matters most.
That is why retirement planning today must rise above yesterday’s assumptions. It now rests on three shifting bullseyes:
1. Economic — the markets you can’t control but must account for.
2. Demographic — the lifespan you can’t predict but must prepare for.
3. Strategic — the risks, shocks, and choices that shape how life actually unfolds.
Each bullseye on its own can destabilise even the strongest plan. Together, they demand something new: an approach and framework that embraces these facts with resilience, foresight, and a willingness to adapt.
This is the age of the Accidental Centenarian.
Don’t fear the gift of a longer, healthier life. Be ready for it. Build a plan that bends without breaking, that aligns your money with your must-haves, and that turns longevity from a risk into an opportunity.
The first step is for you to stress-test your future with the Retirement Resilience Forecaster