Is it possible to outlive your savings?

You can be brilliant with markets and still feel weirdly uncertain about how long your money needs to work. Longevity is the variable that breaks the spreadsheet. If you are healthy in your early 60s and expect to live into your 90s, you are not being dramatic. You are being realistic. The average is only a starting point, and averages hide tails. Planning to 90-something is not pessimism about markets or optimism about medicine. It is simply giving your future self more runway.

Start with what you can anchor. Social Security is the closest thing most Americans have to a lifetime paycheck, and it is more tunable than people realize. The agency publishes a clear schedule for how claiming later raises your check, and the increase stops at 70. The rule of thumb is simple. Wait beyond your full retirement age and your benefit climbs each month, with those born in 1943 or later earning the full delayed credit that tops out by age 70. You can confirm your own timeline with the Social Security retirement age and delayed credit pages, then view personalized estimates in your online account. Those official pages also spell out the maximum checks for 2025 by claiming age, which gives you a reality check on what “lifetime paycheck” can look like for a high earner who delays.

Now acknowledge what you cannot anchor. Longevity is not just “male vs female” or a single national average. The Social Security life tables are population-wide snapshots that do not adjust for your education, income, health status, or whether you quit smoking in your thirties. They are useful, but they are not destiny. The better move is to pair a national table with a personalized longevity tool. The Actuaries Longevity Illustrator, built by the American Academy of Actuaries and the Society of Actuaries, lets you input basics like age, sex, and health to see probabilities for you and your spouse living to different ages. There is also an international version for Singapore, Hong Kong, and Canada, which is handy if you are splitting time or planning across borders. Use these tools to set a planning horizon that respects the right tail instead of ignoring it.

Once you set the horizon, think like a product manager. Your job is not to predict the future. Your job is to design a retirement system that works across many futures. Start with an income floor that covers the boring but essential stuff every single month. Social Security sits here by default. Add any pension or rental net-of-expenses cash flow. If that does not cover your core bills with a healthy buffer, consider building the floor with safe assets you control outright, such as short bonds or a ladder of inflation-protected securities. Some retirees also use an income annuity for part of the floor because it shifts longevity risk to the insurer. That choice is less about chasing yield and more about buying predictability. If you explore annuities, read the contract twice, and focus on plain vanilla lifetime payout designs. The moment you add riders you do not fully understand, you are likely paying for features you will not use. Treat an annuity as a utility bill in reverse. It should reliably fund utilities, groceries, basic transport, and baseline health costs without drama.

Next, separate your growth portfolio psychologically and operationally. This is the engine that fights inflation and funds non-essentials. Use a diversified, low-cost mix you can hold through ugly years. If your floor is strong enough that you do not have to sell equities during a bear market to keep the lights on, you have already solved half of sequence-of-returns risk. The point is not to hit a tournament-winning return. The point is to keep optionality alive for thirty years. The growth bucket can also be where you fund legacy gifts, big trips, home upgrades, or generosity that matters to you. That keeps joy in the plan without letting joy dictate the plan.

Build intentional flexibility into your withdrawals starting on day one. A fixed percentage forever is simple, but your life is not. A smarter pattern is to let your spending breathe with markets and milestones without turning every year into a negotiation. You can do that with guardrails. Set a target withdrawal that starts around a level that your floor plus portfolio can comfortably support. If markets surprise on the upside for a few years, give yourself a small raise within a pre-agreed cap. If markets slump, tighten temporarily by a preset amount and pause discretionary projects. You are not reacting emotionally. You are obeying rules that you wrote while calm. That single design choice keeps you from locking in losses at the worst time.

Delay tactics deserve a clear look because they stack in quiet ways. If you are a high probability 90-something, delaying Social Security until 70 is like installing a bigger engine in your floor. Those checks are inflation-adjusted and last as long as you do, which means they are a perfect hedge against living longer than expected. In 2025 the top line numbers are public, and they show exactly how much more a 70-year-old max earner receives compared with claiming at full retirement age or at 62. The agency also clarifies that benefits stop growing after 70, so there is no reward for waiting past that point. The risk of delay is obvious if your health is poor or your savings are thin, but for healthy couples it can be a powerful longevity play, especially when you coordinate survivor benefits. Run the official calculators, then look at your budget with and without the delay to see the trade.

Couple planning is where longevity math gets interesting. You are not planning for two independent timelines. You are planning for one shared lifestyle with a second-to-die horizon that may run well past either single life expectancy. That usually argues for building a slightly larger floor than a single person would choose, because survivor spending rarely drops by half. Housing, utilities, healthcare premiums, and car costs often remain stubborn. If the higher earner delays Social Security, the larger survivor benefit can support that later stage more predictably. A partial annuity can be sized to the survivor gap as well. The goal is not to maximize lifetime income. The goal is to avoid a precarious scenario for the surviving spouse in their late eighties and early nineties when portfolio risk feels heavier and decision energy is lower.

Taxes matter, but do not let the tax tail wag your longevity dog. Withdrawals that reduce future required minimum distributions can help smooth your lifetime tax bill. Roth conversions in down markets can shift future income into a more flexible bucket. Qualified charitable distributions can reduce taxable income later while funding causes you care about. The through line is simple. Lower volatility in your net after-tax income makes it easier to defend your floor and keep your guardrails steady. If you are juggling multiple tax regimes because you live part-time abroad or plan to move later in life, sketch those regimes on one page with their thresholds, credits, and treaty interactions. You are trying to see the cliffs in advance so you do not fall off one when a birthday or a residency change flips a switch.

Healthcare is not a side note in a 30-year plan. Treat premiums, deductibles, and expected out-of-pocket costs as part of your floor. The plan design you choose affects your cash flow rhythm, and cash flow rhythm affects how much you have to yank from the portfolio during bad markets. If your prescriptions are volatile or you expect procedures with unpredictable timing, a plan with steadier out-of-pocket patterns can be worth a slightly higher premium because it protects the withdrawal rules you rely on. Long-term care is the wild card. If you choose to insure it, only insure a risk you cannot absorb. If you choose to self-insure, name the bucket and wall it off mentally so that spending from it does not feel like defeat when the time comes.

Make inflation a character in your story, not an off-screen villain. A strong floor should have pieces that move with prices. Social Security does that automatically. TIPS or I-bonds do it within a defined envelope. Real estate that throws off rent can participate partly, although costs rise too. Your growth bucket is the long-term inflation fighter, but do not assign it the entire job. If three out of five elements in your plan respect inflation directly, the other two can do what they do best without carrying the full burden.

Sequence risk is worth a final pass because it is the quiet way plans fail. The bad version looks like this. You retire into a weak market, sell shares to fund spending, lock in losses, and then keep selling because you have no floor and no rule that tells you to pause discretionary projects. The better version looks like this. You retire into a weak market, you keep the lights on with your floor, you trim your variable spend by a preset amount, you avoid forced sales, and you let the growth bucket recover on its own timeline. The math difference over a decade can be startling, but the behavior difference starts with a simple design choice you make now.

Use technology like a co-pilot. Your “my Social Security” account is not just a place to look up a number. It is a dashboard that lets you test claiming ages against real earnings history, see what survivor benefits look like, and catch errors while you still have time to fix them. The official benefit calculators let you compare early, full, and age-70 scenarios and model continued work. Pair those with a longevity tool so your claiming strategy reflects the probability that one of you will be collecting checks into the late 90s. If you like the planner’s view, export those numbers into whatever budgeting app you already trust so that your floor and guardrails are visible next to your monthly spending. The fewer times you need to context switch, the fewer chances there are to forget why the plan made sense.

A quick reality check on “maximums” also keeps your expectations grounded. The maximum Social Security benefit headlines are not promises to everyone. They assume a worker who hit the taxable wage cap for most of a 35-year career and then claimed at a specific age. The agency posts those values each year and also shows what the maximum looks like at full retirement age and at 62. If you are not a max earner, do not anchor your plan to a number that was never aimed at you. Anchor to your own earnings record and your own delay choice. That is the only way your floor becomes a floor you can stand on.

When you zoom out, retirement longevity planning is not about getting every guess right. It is about building a system that is generous where it matters and conservative where it must be. Plan to 92 or 94 even if you might not get there because the cost of being wrong in that direction is leaving a cushion behind. The cost of being wrong in the other direction is running too lean at the exact stage of life when you most need stability. You can always choose generosity later through gifts or legacy if your tail risk does not show up. You cannot always choose to rebuild your floor at 88 if the math is already against you.

If you want one simple cadence for the next decade, use this. Once a year, update your longevity assumptions with a tool that respects your health. Refresh your Social Security estimates inside your account. Compare your floor to your core bills with a modest buffer for the unglamorous surprises that always happen. Re-affirm your guardrails for the coming year so everyone in the household knows the rules before markets try to convince you to invent new ones on the fly. Then go live your life. The plan is not there to give you something to obsess over. It exists so you can stop obsessing and start repeating the parts of your life that make the whole journey worth it.

The vibe here is practical and optimistic. Retirement is not a finish line or a countdown clock. It is a product you are building for yourself and the person you love, with a long warranty and a decent user manual. The product has a battery you cannot replace, so you build the rest of it to sip power instead of chug it. You tune the software once a year. You keep the critical files backed up. You do not need a perfect forecast. You need a design that does not break when the forecast is wrong. That is how you drive into your 90s feeling ready, not rattled, and that is the real win in retirement longevity planning.