Preview:

In this episode, Ryan delivers a “pilot report,” offering a timely look at today’s economic turbulence. From global conflict and rising interest rates to inflation pressure and a shifting housing market, Ryan explains how these forces are shaping your financial flight path, and what adjustments you might need to stay on course. Ryan also shares practical, down-to-earth financial advice, especially geared toward young adults, recent grads, or anyone feeling a bit behind.

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More About This Episode:

Learn why consistent monthly investing, dollar-cost averaging, and building liquid savings matter more than stock-picking hype. Through real-life examples and candid conversations, we’re going to highlight power of discipline, time, and compounding interest. Want to build serious momentum? Tune in to learn how small, steady contributions can create a big impact over time.

Here’s what we cover in this episode:

📉 How high interest rates are freezing upgrades and first-time buyers

💵 Start small: $50 a month + compound interest can work magic

🔁 Why consistent investing beats stock-picking and market timing

⚠️ What new grads often get wrong and how to avoid it

0:00 – Intro

1:05 – Tariffs quiet, but Iran–Israel heats up

2:39 – Real Estate: What’s really going on?

5:52 – Dollar-cost averaging every month

9:19 – Helping adults build smarter financial habits

13:27 – The magic of compound interest

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.)

Ryan Fleming 

Is it possible that the 4% rule could get a makeover? The 4% rule gets talked about like gospel and retirement planning, but let’s be honest, it’s always been more of a rough guess than a golden rule. Now its original creator is revising it to not be 4% but 4.7% so does that mean your retirement paycheck just got a raise, or is it just another headline out there that over simplifies a very complex problem we’re going to find out today on the show.

Walter Storholt 

Welcome back to the pilots advisor Walter Storholt, alongside the pilots advisor himself, Ryan Fleming and helping people plan for retirement, especially pilots, of course, out there, specializing in all of the different retirement plans, employer sponsored programs and plans and opportunities out there for you guys, and helping you as a pilot himself, get to your retirement goals. And Ryan, this is a great topic today. I almost, I’m not going to say fell out of my chair. That’s maybe being a little bit dramatic when dramatic when I saw this headline. But we’ve heard about the 4% rule for all these years, and its creator is now like, Oh, hold on, it’s the 4.7% rule now. So he’s come out and written a new thing and said, this is, this is the deal. So kind of caught my eye, because it’s some this, likely, this foundational rule in retirement planning that we’ve always kind of dissected Absolutely.

Ryan Fleming 

And I talk about the 4% rule all the time because it’s a good wag. I mean, obviously it’s much, much more complicated than that, but the basics of the 4% rule, and actually, I’ll go into it and talk about a little bit. It was originally proposed by William bengan Back in the 1990s and it was a suggestion that retirees could safely withdraw 4% annually, and that was adjusted for inflation, from a balanced portfolio. They’re talking in the article about a 5050, split. I’ve always seen more of a 6040, split, but basically states that you could withdraw that percentage off your portfolio for over 30 years without running out of money. And it’s based on a lot of US market data, and it was always called the safe withdrawal rate. And of course, it looks at, you know, Monte Carlo simulation and worst case scenarios. Now, the funny part about what I thought this article was interesting is I’ve been seen on the academic side of investing at many of the colleges, you know, for financial planning, where they felt like the 4% rule might be too much, you know that that number should be lower. And in this article, he’s talking about it going from 4% to 4.7 so it’s gonna

Walter Storholt 

be that was the all joke, right? We would say, Oh, the 4% rule. Or, more appropriately, these days, the 3% rule or the 2%

Ryan Fleming 

rule, well, and you take taxes and inflation. I mean, those are two massive parts of retirement planning that we’ve seen the last couple of years has had a lot of crazy swings. So like I said before, the 4% rule is just a wag. It’s a big picture number to see if you’re somewhere near a safe withdrawal rate, but the details matter, and that’s why it’s something that we’re constantly reanalyzing every single year when somebody’s in retirement.

Walter Storholt 

Something that jumped out to me about this change to the 4.7% rule is he gave some reasons for why, and he says there’s more asset classes he’s changed it from a 5050, split to a 5545 stock, Bond split. And that’s why he’s saying you could start your withdrawals at 4.7 and feel pretty good. But he threw caveats in there. He’s like, This assumes diversified portfolios, regular rebalancing, long retirement time frames. So there’s some caveats that go into making this 4.7 deal work. It’s not just as simple as here’s how much money I have. I’ll take 4.7 and I’ll be fine.

Ryan Fleming 

Yeah, it’s not a one size fits all, and it’s looking at today’s data, but we see how quickly data changes. Could you imagine having a 5050, or even a 5545 portfolio right now where we’re almost half your money is in fixed income, and we see what’s going on in the news today with treasuries. I mean, I’ve had a lot of advisors out there that are saying bonds are dead, like they’re going to go away. Wow, which is, which is scary to think about. But when we start looking at, you know, our national debt, and we start losing a little bit of the confidence we’ve had in government treasuries. Well, where do you go? And I think that a lot more people are starting to hedge in other ways. And even though it’s a huge compliance issue, still, crypto is going to be a thing of the future.

Walter Storholt 

Really interesting to look at some of this stuff, Ryan and one last little point on the article. And then I want to get into maybe some reactions from this article that people can kind of focus on. They had a concern when he’s kind of promoting this new 4.7% rule that people’s initial reaction is going to be that it’s a green light to spend more. I can withdraw 4.7% instead of four. Hey, I got more to spend.

Ryan Fleming 

Yeah, this should definitely not be looked at as a blanket permissions. Lift so many things matter. You know, returns matter, inflation matters, your personal goals, sequence of returns, risk, what did the first couple years of your retirement look like when you started drawing income? So once again, you’re going to make a very, very personalized decision on what that withdrawal rate should be, and reanalyzed every single year based off of market conditions. So this is just a theoretical improvement, not a guarantee. It’s still based off of historical back testing, but definitely not future certainty, because we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, and if I did, I certainly wouldn’t be here talking to you. Walter,

Walter Storholt 

yeah, that’s right. You’d, you’d be doing your thing out on a yacht somewhere in the world and not telling anybody about your secret sauce, right? We’re just taking a nap, or taking a nap because you got nothing to worry about. Yeah, I love it, all right. Well, let’s give some some more kick quick key takeaways for folks here, so kind of a rapid fire thing. Thoughts that might be on the minds of viewers and listeners as they go through today’s

Ryan Fleming 

episode. I’ll do the best I can. Let’s go rapid fire. If they hear

Walter Storholt 

today’s episode and they think, okay, so does this mean I should adjust? I need to make a tweak to my strategy based on this headline, based on this new information. How do you advise folks on that?

Ryan Fleming 

Well, I would never rush to change your plan based off of one opinion, one article or one study. Be the first thing. A higher withdrawal rate may sound good, but it also raises your risk. Let’s talk about the Go Go years versus the no go years. But it’s always a good a good time to revisit your plan, you know, analyze where we’re currently at and make adjustments accordingly, but definitely not off of one article or one opinion.

Walter Storholt 

Definitely don’t rewrite the entire thing at this absolutely not. Okay. Does this mean the original 4% was wrong?

Ryan Fleming 

No, absolutely not. I mean, I think it was always a good starting point, but not like a personalized strategy. Everybody’s situation is a little bit different. I mean, there’s many people that don’t even need to pull don’t even need to pull 4% out, or they might have a pension, so there’s a lot that goes into it. And I think when you’re looking at these big overall rules of thumb, you got to filter in and look at the details of your own situation. They’re designed to just be a big wag number. So when we’re talking about retirement distribution, or how much income I need to replace, just to give us an overall picture. And I think it, you know, much as the markets evolve, it’s a reminder that financial planning is continuing to evolve with the markets. And as the world changes, there’s better tools, better ideas, better products out there, and I think it’s going to keep changing with AI and automation and and electronic trading.

Walter Storholt 

Attention aviators, 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 afterburners on your 401k vector, on over to retirepilots.com to grab your toolkit, and let’s embark on this journey together. There’s a lot of factors that go into building a retirement plan, obviously, and so if this withdrawal rate, this 4% or 4.7% rule, isn’t the most important thing. What are some of the other really big factors that we need to focus on even more importantly, or maybe first, before we dive into this whole withdrawal conversation?

Ryan Fleming 

So your plan should always allow for adjustments. Don’t ever lock in a fixed number, because we have to adjust. What’s going on in the world when you talk about retirement, you know, when did you retire? Like that? Retirement Planning, the market sequence, taxes, longevity, the flexibility, all of those carry some weight. And once again, that comes back to your personal situation. Consider strategies like dynamic withdrawals, guardrails, one of the most important ones. I see that I think it’s a little bit easier for investors that are going into retirement. Is the bucket strategy, where we actually separate your portfolio, your assets, in buckets. Here’s my income for the first three years, here’s three to five years, and maybe five to 10. So we have different risk tolerances and investment strategies for those types. Horizons,

Walter Storholt 

all important stuff. Ryan, last question I can think might be on somebody’s mind right now is, all right, I’m getting the message loud and clear. The 4% rule, or the 4.7% rule, isn’t for me. I need to find out my personal safe withdrawal rate. So that’s the place to start. But the big question, how do I go do that?

Ryan Fleming 

Well, I think it really depends on your goals. It depends on how your portfolio looks, entering retirement, your health, your family’s history, how long does your family normally live, and your tolerance for risk? There’s no universal answer, and I’d like to have a link at the bottom of this show where it talks about safe money and how your safe withdrawal rate might be able to go from 4% all the way up to 9% if you have a plan in place prior to retirement. And we’ve talked about that before on the show, but that’s my retirement jet engine. And this is basically is a plan where, regardless of market conditions, you have a safe place to pull income in those down markets. So rather than pulling in a down market from this portfolio, you set up a platform to where you can pull from somewhere else and never pull from that down portfolio when the market’s down. So check that out. I suggest anyone that’s listening to this and doesn’t know what the retirement is going to look like, to order the toolkit, reach out to us. We can look at your personal situation and help you out.

Walter Storholt 

We’ll link to all those things in the description of today’s show you can order that retirement toolkit. Find out where you are right now, learn some great resources about retirement planning, and best of all, get a free portfolio analysis as part of ordering that toolkit, where you’ll actually get a one on one visit with Ryan and get to meet with the pilots advisor and walk through your plan and talk about the differences that can be made working with him and using his platforms and services versus the doing it on your own, and how you’re currently projected into the future, and see what that difference looks like. And I know that’s extremely helpful to have that in place. Ryan,

Ryan Fleming 

absolutely and always have a plan. Don’t just jump in. Yep, don’t

Walter Storholt 

forget these rules of thumb. They just start the conversation. But an in depth conversation with a professional always is going to move the needle more for you. So don’t hesitate to reach out and take action if you are ready to dive deeper into proper financial planning. Again, all that contact information to reach Ryan is linked right below the video. If you’re watching on YouTube, hit that thumbs up button and subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes. And to our audio listeners, you can also check out the description of the show for contact information and links that we’ve discussed in the program until next time. Ryan, thank you so much. We appreciate

Ryan Fleming 

1. Thank you. Walter as always and fly safe.

Speaker 1 

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.