Preview:

Is 2025 a bad year to retire? With headlines swirling about market volatility, federal layoffs, and a possible recession, it’s a question many pre-retirees—especially pilots—are asking. If you were targeting this year for a retirement date, let’s find out if Ryan thinks pilots should still retire or put their plans on hold.

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More About This Episode:

Retirement readiness isn’t about trying to time the market. It’s about having a strategy that works whether the market is up or down. Your plan should include tools like cash reserves, income buckets, and proper diversification to handle volatility without panic, and we’ll explain how we help pilots achieve that goal.

Here’s what we cover in this episode:
💼 Retirement plans should include built-in protection for volatility
🔁 Diversification and risk alignment are critical pre-retirement steps
🧠 Don’t make emotional decisions—stick to the plan
📊 A good plan works whether the market is up, down, or sideways

0:00 – Intro

1:29 – Is it a bad year?

2:23 – Does a 60/40 portfolio still work?

4:20 – 4% rule

5:49 – Thinking long-term

8:03 – Managing a portfolio

9:26 – Control what you can


Resources:

Retire Pilots – https://retirepilots.com

Get your FREE Retirement Toolkit – https://bit.ly/3ZmZsaX

Pilot Tax – https://pilot-tax.com/

The Pilot’s Advisor Podcast is also on video. Watch & Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3EIEBW2

Connect with Pilot-Tax: https://pilot-tax.com/

Episode Transcription:

(Note, this is an automated transcription. Please forgive any errors.)

Walter Storholt: On today’s episode of the Pilot’s Advisor. You know, plenty of people have concerns about stock market volatility, especially right now. There’s a potential recession on the horizon. There’s fears that the economy is going to really stutter amidst federal layoffs and tariffs. Well, what if you’ve had 2025 marked on your calendar as the year you wanted to retire? Should that be blown up at this point? Is that a bad idea to retire in 2025, given what’s happened in the first part of the year? Well, we’re going to bring in Ryan Fleming, the pilot’s advisor, and ask him if pilots should retire this year or if they need to put their plans on hold. Let’s get to it. Coming up next, Walter Storholt back with you alongside Ryan Fleming, the pilot’s advisor.

You need to plan to retire regardless of whether the market is up or down

And Ryan, I mean, today’s premise is a pretty simple one. I was going to retire in 2025. Given the first few months of the year, I don’t know if I should anymore. Is it, is it a bad time to retire?

Ryan Fleming: Well, I think that you need to plan to retire and have everything set in place that regardless of whether it’s an up or down market, you. You have, uh, tools that you can turn on and still retire. I mean, m. Markets go up and down all the time almost every year. So does that mean it’s never going to be a good year to retire because the market’s down? But, uh, this is why we talk about sequence of returns, risk all the time, and how you combat that in retirement. So if you do retire, like 2025 and the market’s in a pullback, we don’t want that to blow up your whole retirement plan. So did you have a plan to account for that? And what’s the next steps?

Walter Storholt: So if you had a plan in place, it sounds like what you’re telling me is 2025 is not a bad time to retire. You. You could retire in 2025 if you planned for the ability to retire in a down year.

Ryan Fleming: Yeah, I mean, but you wanted to have planned for it. So the first thing is you don’t want to panic. Okay. Uh, this. Markets go up and down. Yes, your account values have gone down a little bit, but if you were in retirement and you were taking income right now, well, you should have some safe money assets. So if the markets pull back, you know, anywhere, 10, 15%, I can go over here on my cash reserves and get my income from there, because I don’t want to pull from my retirement assets. When they’re down. So that’s one thing, you know, being prepared for a down market when you retired. Well, what was the plan? Uh, you could short term money, get income somewhere else. Um, um, you know, another thing that people talk about is their, their risk, their risk tolerance as they get closer to retirement. Well, this is going to come up with what’s going on right now too. Um, I think the, the, the, what most people do is when they get to retirement, they do what’s called a 60, 40 model. Why don’t you tell me about a 60, 40 model?

Walter Storholt: Oh, is this the, uh, 60% stocks, 40% bonds.

Ryan Fleming: Yeah. And that’s what a lot of retirees do is they go to a 64 model. So it’s a lot, you know, we reduced the exposure a little bit of equities. 60% of our money still exposed to equities, 40% in fixed income now. So we’ve gotten a little bit, you know, we’ve reduced the risk that we’re taking on, but we still need most of that money exposed to the market because we need it to grow. If it doesn’t grow, we’re going to run out of money. So, um, you want to get your risk tolerance set prior to retirement and not with, you know what I see a lot of is somebody wants all the upside and none of the downside. So they’re like, oh, I’m aggressive, let’s go. And then as soon as there’s a market pullback, they’re like, I’m balanced. You know what I mean?

Walter Storholt: Yeah.

Ryan Fleming: You know? Yeah. I don’t like, I don’t like it when the market’s down right now. But that doesn’t mean you can just totally change your, your risk profile in the middle of it because that actually would be one of the worst things you could do.

Walter Storholt: That’s what all comes down to diversification. Right. And trying to make sure that you’re properly diversified for these events for these kinds of years. But it is a little, I, uh, mean, it sounds to me like it’s a little hard to do that in the year that it’s happening. Like this is something you need to hopefully do in advance.

Ryan Fleming: Well, 100%. Because if you’re not retired right now and the market has had the pullback that’s happened, it’s nothing but a buying opportunity. You’re buying stuff while it’s lower. Um, so if you’re not in retirement, this is just a great opportunity to get stuff for cheap. Um, but if you are in retirement, once again, you should have had that plan set up already so that you know where that money’s coming from already in, um, the down market, I think, let’s say you didn’t have a plan. I think it’s always, sometimes looking at the overall big picture helps a little bit. The market’s only been down for about three months. Okay. And we talk about in retirement that there’s something called a 4% safe withdrawal rate. Walter, do you know about the 4% safe withdrawal rate?

Walter Storholt: Yeah. The idea that you could withdraw 4% from your portfolio throughout retirement and that would be a safe amount to withdraw to, not run out of money.

Ryan Fleming: Yeah. And they talk about it over a 30 year period with markets going up and down, and it’s actually a pretty conservative number. Well, if you take that 4% safe withdrawal rate and you actually said, okay, so I’m going to draw 4% of my portfolio in one given year and then you re, you, uh, divide that by 12. It’s only 0.33 of 1% that you’re taking from your portfolio each month.

Walter Storholt: M. Okay.

Ryan Fleming: So if you think

00:05:00

Ryan Fleming: about it that way and say you had to pull income for just the last three months, that is such a tiny, tiny portion of your portfolio. You’re not destroying your whole portfolio just because the markets pull back for a couple of months. I mean, it happens every single year, I think, where you really get yourself in trouble. If we had a year or two where the market’s consistently down and that’s where you could really hurt your overall portfolio by, by pulling, you know, if you still stayed within the 4%, you’re actually right where you needed to be. But, um, if you are consistently reducing, um, your assets in the down market, it could blow up your whole financial plan.

Walter Storholt: Gotcha. So that’s, that’s where people get these concerns maybe kind of coming out in the short term, what we’re going through feels so dramatic, so severe, and those emotions start getting in the way. But if we’re thinking long term, it’s, it’s less rare that we’re going to have those extended dramatic pull downs. Uh, that’s going to, you know, really lead to you wanting to panic about retiring in a, you know, corrected or down market of some sort.

Ryan Fleming: Well, and I find that the more times that you look at long term, like when you focus on the long term, it makes it a lot easier to see the details of what’s going on in the short term. Um, if I was retiring, let’s say I was retiring sometime later in 2020, 5. I’d actually be happy that this was happening right now because I’m sure the market will probably recover by then. By the end of this year, I bet you the market will be up. We’ll be in positive territory. And guess what? You weren’t pulling any, any income during this down portion. I mean, the numbers are the market’s up three out of every four years. So we know we’re going to have a down market at some point. I think what most investors fail to remember is even years where we had fantastic gains like last year, we had 27, 28% in some of our portfolios. We still had a 10% pullback in 2020, 2024 at certain portions of time.

Walter Storholt: Mhm.

Ryan Fleming: But people, during the year, at some point, people forget about that.

Ryan’s retirement toolkit is tailor made for pilots like you

Walter Storholt: Attention aviators. When you’ve spent years in the cockpit complexities of flight, isn’t it time you navigated your retirement with the same precision? Introducing retirepilots.com right at your touchdown zone on our homepage, there’s a beacon flashing. Get my free toolkit. Click that and you’ll be cleared for a direct route to Ryan’s retirement toolkit tailor made for pilots like you. Inside, you’ll find two of his important works, the Pilot’s Advisor and Pilots Retire early. Between these two books, you can decipher the nine critical decisions when retiring before 65 and discover the seven lessons to help pilots land safely in retirement. But that’s not all. This toolkit is packed with altitude high value, including extras to get your retirement plans off the Runway and light the afterburners on your 401k.

Sometimes we think of these decisions as all or nones

Vector on over to retirepilots.com and to grab your toolkit and let’s embark on this journey together. It’s interesting that you mentioned that and I’m just, you know, kind of thinking back to your point 33 example, uh, of what you’re pulling out. Sometimes we think of these decisions as all or nones. Right? Like, well, if I sold my entire portfolio, I would be down 15% right now or whatever the number might be. But that’s not a realistic scenario. You’re not going to take somebody’s entire portfolio and sell it at a loss like that with, with any sort of proper planning going on.

Ryan Fleming: Well, of course not. And even on top of that, I would, you know, you haven’t reduced the amount of, of, you know, stocks that you have. You haven’t lost anything yet. It’s just the value of those positions have decreased in the short term. So, you know, it’s always interesting. It’s like, oh, my God, I lost $500,000. Well, did you, you know, did you or is it just, you know, for a short period of time, reduced right now for how much Each one of those, when you all add them up, you know, what’s, what’s that magic number? Yeah. Um, but, but sadly, that’s, that’s what causes people to make those emotional decisions. And, and if they do make an emotional decision when the market’s out, what do they normally do? They normally lock in those losses and sell without even a plan of where to put it or where are they going next. So now they’re sitting on the sidelines. And of course, when the market turns, it takes off pretty fast. And most of those individuals that do that are sitting on the sidelines as the market takes off and recovers.

Walter Storholt: I know one last great point we can share with people. This is something that goes beyond, I think, the financial realm, but trying to navigate anything in life is to make sure that you assess what actually affects you. There’s gonna be a lot of stuff that’s out of your control or that doesn’t actually have an impact on you based on where you are in your life. And so try not to let some of the things that are not actually gonna affect you in the long scheme or the long run. Cause, um, you consternation today.

Ryan Fleming: Well, everybody’s situation is different and, and you got to focus on that and your situation, whether you have a pension

00:10:00

Ryan Fleming: or don’t have a pension. You know, I get asked all the time, like, how much money do I need to retire? And, you know, pilots have a very, you know, similar path in the sense, you know, if you tell me what airplane they flew, you know, they all make about the same amount of money because it’s the same pay per hour, but they have drastically different lifestyles. And, and, uh, what I call the n. The monthly nut to crack, like how much money you need just to live off, you know, live off of each month. Drastically different. And so that number truly is, uh, very different for every individual based off of how much expenses they have and how good they were at saving over the years.

Walter Storholt: Yeah, all great points.

Well, a lot of people wonder, where do I start? Where do I begin with my financial plan or maybe. Yeah, I’m thinking about retiring in 2025, but I haven’t really done that plan. I haven’t put those numbers down. And so now I really don’t know where to begin. Well, it’s never too late to start planning, um, you know, certainly there’s things that could have been done years ago to better prepare you for today. But let’s take that lesson going forward and plan properly today, especially if you’re starting to get a little closer to retirement. Maybe it’s not in 2025 for you, but maybe this has been a wake up call with the market downturn and saying, hmm, maybe I need a better plan so that if the market’s down the year, I want to go retire. I can not panic and I cannot go through the stress that maybe others are, are going through right now. And sometimes it just helps having somebody speak that voice of reason to you during this upheaval and, ah, volatility that we experience. So if that’s you and you’re looking for a great starting point, go to retirepilots.com, order Ryan’s toolkit for free. It’s a retirement toolkit that walks you through the initial steps of the process, the important things that you need to know about retirement, especially for pilots and those in the industry. Um, this is what it’s all about. So go to retirepilots.com, we’ve got a link directly to the toolkit in the description of today’s show as well. But that’s the place where everybody begins before they start working with Ryan and the team. So check that out. If you have any questions about retirement planning, that’s your place to start. Ryan, thanks for the help today. Enjoyed the conversation. We’ll see you next time.

Ryan Fleming: Thanks, Walter. As always, everyone fly safe. We’ll talk to you next time. M Information is for illustrative purposes only and does not constitute tax, investment or legal advice. Always consult with a qualified investment, legal or tax professional before taking any action.

Ryan’s retirement toolkit is tailor made for pilots like you

When you’ve spent years in the cockpit managing the complexities of flight, isn’t it time you navigated your retirement with the same precision? Introducing retirepilots.com right at your touchdown zone on our homepage, there’s a beacon flashing. Get my free toolkit. Click that and you’ll be cleared for a direct route to Ryan’s retirement toolkit tailor made for pilots like you. Inside, you’ll find two of his important works, the Pilot’s Advisor and Pilots Retire early. Between these two books, you can decipher the nine critical decisions when retiring before 65 and discover the seven lessons to help pilots land safely in retirement. But that’s not all. This toolkit is packed with altitude high value, including extras to get your retirement plans off the Runway and light the aftermath burners on your 401k. Vector on over to retirepilots.com to grab your toolkit and let’s embark on this journey together.

Molly Stillman: Information is for illustrative purposes only and does not constitute tax, investment or legal advice. Always consult with a qualified investment, legal or tax professional before taking any action.