There’s a specific kind of person who shows up at the EconoMe Conference. These are the people that read tons of blog posts and finance articles. They’ve also listened to hundreds of podcast episodes. You can bet these people have optimized their savings rate to levels that make their coworkers totally uncomfortable. These rockstars have built a portfolio that, by every reasonable measure, should be more than enough. And then they sit across from there laptop screen looking at $1.5 million in their Vanguard account and ask, with genuine fear in their eyes: “Is it enough?”
Well, that’s the problem Aubrey Williams came to Cincinnati to solve.
I was in the room at the 2026 EconoMe Conference when Aubrey took the stage. EconoMe is the only large-scale conference specifically designed for the FIRE (Financial Independence/Retire Early) movement, so the crowd was sharp. These are not people who need to be convinced that index funds beat actively managed accounts. They’ve run the math. They know the math. And yet, something is still broken in their brain for a lot of them when it comes to actually crossing the finish line and spending their money with confidence.
Aubrey is the founder of Open Path Financial. Eight years before that stage appearance, he was $90,000 in debt, going through a divorce, and the only help he could find were these financial advisors who wanted to charge crazy high fees while doing nothing meaningful to improve his financial situation. So, he built his own systems, got out of debt, and reached financial independence at the age of 45! Aubrey holds a Master’s degree from MIT and an MBA, and describes his mission as being the financial advisor he desperately needed but couldn’t find. Awesomeness!
His talk was called “Everyone Adjusts,” and he broke down these three interconnected problems that keep even the most disciplined savers on earth from actually enjoying the freedom they worked so wickedly-hard to build.
Problem One: Your Tools Are Lying to You (Sort Of)
How many of you have run a Monte Carlo simulation or probability of success calculation on your retirement plan? Well, if you’re in the FI community, the answer is of course “yes.” You’ve probably ran it multiple times….today! Lol Here’s the thing Aubrey wanted us to understand. When that tool spits out a result that says something like “90% probability of success,” your brain immediately translates that as a 10% chance of financial ruin. A 10% chance of running out of money. Or a 10% chance of ending up broke. That is not what it actually means!
What it actually means is that across thousands of simulated scenarios spanning years and years, there was a 10% chance you’d need to MAKE AN ADJUSTMENT. That’s it. An adjustment. Not some catastrophe. Not an absolute failure. It means simply to make a tweak.
Aubrey said we should probably rename it. Stop calling it “probability of success.” Let’s call it “probability of adjustment.” Because a 10% chance of making a small adjustment to your spending is a very, very different thing than a 10% chance of being homeless living under a bridge and eating cat food. Lol. This reframe alone is an absolute game changer!
He also did push back hard on the assumption that your spending is flat in retirement. The 4% rule, which comes from William Bengen’s 1993 research and the widely referenced Trinity Study, assumes that your spending is relatively constant and indexed for inflation. As Aubrey put it, we know this isn’t how it really happens.
Your real life is up and down. We may have kids who go to college and then actually graduate (eventually). It has parents you might help care for. It may have a mortgage that gets paid off. It even has Social Security coming in at some point. It also has the possibility of travel, or conferences or meetings with others in this community and people that I have seen year after year coming to this conference myself!
When you model your real spending and your real income, instead of using the flat-line assumption baked into the typical standard tools, the picture changes dramatically. Aubrey showed an example from a 1969 retirement cohort, which is historically the worst-case scenario and the one that established the 4% rule. Running a plan with real variable income and spending against that cohort showed withdrawal rates of 5%, 7.5%, even 10% or more! All of these withdrawal rates were within a highly successful plan! The point being of this was to show that if you were a person that waited until you had enough so your retirement withdrawal rate was 4%, that specific person would have worked nearly FIVE EXTRA YEARS for no f’n reason at all.
Okay, then Aubrey dropped the real kicker. What if you a only had a 50% probability of success, or what we say now, “probability of adjustment”, and it was perfectly workable and reasonable if you’re willing to make adjustments? And this is just crazy! The data shows when you compare a 95% probability plan to a 50% probability plan, the median spending is nearly identical.! The maximum spending is nearly identical. The ONLY meaningful difference is how much money is left over when you die. WTF! The person targeting 95% just leaves behind a massive pile of unused wealth. The person targeting 50% was able to spend more, and live more, and was also totally okay.
“It’s not about whether you’ll be okay. You’ll be okay. It’s about how much money you have left when you die, and how much life you’re willing to leave on the table.” – Aubrey Williams
Problem Two: Your Brain Is Running 250,000-Year-Old Firmware
Okay, so if the math says you’re fine, why doesn’t it feel that way? Because your brain is not a f’n math machine! It’s actually a survival machine that hasn’t received any software update since we were on the African Savanna. Aubrey talked about the endowment effect, one of the most well-documented findings in behavioral economics. In these studies, when people are given an object and then asked how much they’d sell it for, people consistently demand about twice what someone else would pay for the EXACT same item! It’s completely irrational from a financial perspective. But from an evolutionary standpoint, it makes perfect sense. Fighting hard to defend your shit! Protecting your territory, your food, your shelter? That was literally the difference between living and dying for hundreds of thousands of years.
Now we need to apply that to your brokerage account! When you’ve worked so f’n hard and spent years watching that number grow and you finally have to switch from accumulation to decumulation, that old survival wiring fires hard. Your brain does not know the difference between spending down your Vanguard account and watching your food supply disappear before winter. That anxiety feels the same!
Our brains are magnificent at protecting us from running out. But they completely ignore the opposite risk of dying with a surplus you never used. Nobody lies awake terrified of leaving too much money to their estate lol! But that risk can be just as real. The fear is not rational. It’s actually evolutionary. Don’t feel bad, You’re not flawed for feeling this way. Your brain was built for a completely different world. Buy understanding why the fear exists is the first step toward not letting it make your retirement decisions for you.
Problem Three: You Have a Great Accumulation Plan and No Decumulation Plan
The FI community, as a whole, is often phenomenal at the accumulation side of things, right? Savings rates, asset allocation, FI numbers, target dates, withdrawal math. Most of us the love this stuff. Many of us built spreadsheets about our spreadsheets haha!
But Aubrey pointed out that a lot of people in the FI community arrive at the edge of retirement planning and say they’ll figure out the withdrawal strategy when they get there. Or, maybe that’s when they think they’ll hire a financial advisor.
What?! There are people in this FI community can run laps around the average financial advisor on the accumulation stuff. So why would the decumulation side suddenly be so challenging?!
The real issue here is that most people don’t have a clear answer to the specific and practical question. At what portfolio value would you make a spending adjustment? And then, if or when you hit that number, how much would you reduce your spending? And then on the flip side, at what number would your portfolio have to climb for you to confidently give yourself a raise and spend more in retirement? Let’s read on to find out!
The Fix: Risk-Based Guardrails
The solution is something called risk-based guardrails. This Is a framework built on the same historical analysis William Bengen that is designed for the reality of how life actually works in retirement.
The basic concept involves selecting an initial spending level, then setting an upper guardrail and a lower guardrail. When your portfolio rises to the upper guardrail, you get to give yourself a raise! When it drops to the lower guardrail, you make a predetermined spending reduction that we have predetermined.
The key word there is “predetermined.” You actually calculate and decide these numbers before the market does a f’n thing! You run the analysis in advance. You stress-test it against the worst historical periods like the Great Depression, the stagflation of the 1970s, the dot-com crash, 2008, COVID, 2022. You watch, month by month in a simulation, what it would have looked like to go through each of those times with your real holdings with your real spending and your real income.
Aubrey then illustrated this with two people. One has no guardrails. When the market drops and her $1.8 million portfolio started sliding, she has no f’n idea what to do! She’s checking her probability of success every day, watching it drop, and spiraling! The other person on the other hand had set her guardrails in advance. She knows exactly what number triggers a review and exactly what adjustment she’d make. So when the market drops, she goes for a walk. She reads a book. She lives her life and that is the whole point.
In The End
If I had to pull out the single theme running through everything Aubrey said on that Cincinnati stage, it’s that so many have mastered the art of getting to the finish line but then refusing to cross it.
Your brain fights you with evolutionary wiring that was never designed to understand multi-decade financial security. And we never really are taught a decumulation plan.
There is one underlying story and the solution to all three of the problems is the same. By understanding what the tools are actually telling you, name your brain’s fear for what it is, and build a plan that answers the hard questions before the hard moments arrive.
I really like how Aubrey said that this community has accomplished something most people never even attempt. You saved with extraordinary discipline. You invested with patience and wisdom. You built a life where work is optional. You don’t need the market to do one more thing. You don’t need a higher number. You need permission. So here it is, you have what you need. Go live your life!
Horns up friends! \m/ \m/
Aubrey’s knowledge and perspective has been valuable for the FIRE community. Thanks for the write up recapping and championing all this!
Great overview! Aubrey’s talk was a highlight and full of realizations.
Exceptional article and summary…really a game changer. Yes, the guardrails adjustment approach pre-determined gives one such clarity and peace of mind. Thanks for writing this for us losers who did not get into Econome…some day.
Haha! But you’re going next year?!