Most retirement conversations treat the day you stop working as the finish line. In practice, it’s closer to a starting gate. What follows isn’t one uniform stretch of time but a sequence of phases, each with its own spending patterns, planning priorities, and emotional weight. A useful shorthand for that sequence: the Pre-Go years, the Go-Go years, the Slow-Go years, and the No-Go years.
The value of the framework isn’t the labels. It’s that it forces a more honest question than “do I have enough?” — namely, enough for which part of retirement? The version of you who retires at 63 and books three international trips has a very different relationship with money than the version of you at 82. Planning as though those two people spend the same way is one of the more common ways a retirement plan drifts from reality.
The Pre-Go Years: When Retirement First Becomes Real
Ask when you should start planning for retirement and you’ll usually hear “five to ten years out.” That’s a reasonable rule, and starting roughly a decade ahead is a good target. But Dana Anspach, founder and CEO of Sensible Money, describes the Pre-Go years less as a countdown and more as a mindset shift — the point at which retirement stops being an abstraction and becomes something you’re actually considering.
That moment tends to be triggered by an event rather than a birthday. Children finish college. The mortgage gets paid off. A milestone age arrives, or the workplace changes in a way that makes you reassess. For one person that lands at 54; for another it doesn’t happen until much later. The date matters less than what you do once the thought takes hold.
What you do, ideally, is plan on two tracks at once. The financial track is familiar territory: savings, income sources, taxes, and figuring out when you can actually retire. The second track is emotional, and it gets far less attention. Retirement brings a real shift in identity, daily structure, and purpose. Savings alone don’t smooth that out. Some people taper — cutting hours gradually over a few years. Others take a hard stop, going from full-time work to full-time retirement overnight. Without preparation, that abrupt version can be genuinely difficult, which is why navigating the transition to retirement deserves as much thought as the numbers do.
Plan for a Retirement Date You Didn’t Choose
The Pre-Go phase is also where you build in room for the retirement that arrives on someone else’s schedule. Layoffs happen. So do health events and family responsibilities that require full attention. Surveys of workers and retirees have long shown a gap between the age people expect to retire and the age they actually stop working — many plan around 65 and finish closer to 62.
The practical response is flexibility. Structuring your portfolio and savings strategy so it can absorb an earlier-than-expected exit is different from assuming everything goes according to plan. It’s also where understanding and addressing your retirement risks belongs: longevity, market volatility, inflation, healthcare costs, and one-off life events. Insurance coverage deserves a review here too, specifically whether it actually covers the large-scale risks — property damage, medical emergencies — rather than the small ones.
No strategy eliminates risk. But building risk management into the plan up front improves how well the plan bends instead of breaks.
The Go-Go Years: Active, Expensive, and More Complicated Than Advertised
The Go-Go years are the early retirement stage — newly retired, generally healthy, and eager to use the time. This is when the long-deferred plans finally start: more time with family, hobbies that got squeezed out by work, travel that’s been on a list for a decade.
That’s the version in the brochure. The reality is more varied. Some people take to retirement immediately. Others find they miss the structure, purpose, or social connection that a career supplied, and are surprised by how much they miss it. And for some, the Go-Go years begin earlier than planned and under circumstances they didn’t pick. What if I retire three years ahead of schedule? What if I’m not emotionally ready to stop? These come up often enough in planning conversations that they’re worth thinking through before they’re urgent.
Spending in the Go-Go Years Gets Lumpy
Retirees are frequently surprised that their spending stops looking like a tidy annual number. Researchers sometimes describe it as “lumpy,” and the pattern is easy to recognize once you see it:
- Buying a new car or a recreational vehicle
- Renovating a home, or moving to a new one
- Funding travel, or family events like weddings and reunions
None of these are unreasonable. The problem is that they don’t show up in a budget built on average monthly expenses, and they’re large enough to matter. Unanticipated lumpy costs can meaningfully affect a retirement income plan, which is why it’s worth building an explicit buffer for one-time and outsized expenses instead of hoping they average out. They tend not to.
The Shift From Earning to Drawing Down
There’s an emotional transition here that’s easy to underestimate. For decades you may have been defined by your career and your role as a provider. Moving into a phase where you’re no longer earning — and are instead pulling from savings you spent thirty years building — can feel deeply unsettling, even when the math is fine.
Some retirees ease the shift by working part-time, consulting, or volunteering. Others fill the space with travel or new pursuits. There’s no single right answer, but there is a wrong approach: leaving it to sort itself out. Making intentional choices about meaning and connection tends to work better than waiting to see what fills the gap.
Don’t Be Afraid to Spend — When the Plan Supports It
One of the more common behaviors among new retirees is reluctance to spend, even when the plan clearly shows the spending is sustainable. The hesitation makes sense. Decades of saving discipline don’t reverse on command.
But if the plan has been genuinely stress-tested — meaning it’s been run against poor market sequences, higher inflation, and a longer-than-expected lifespan, not just a single optimistic projection — then holding back may cost you the years when your health and energy are at their peak. Stress-testing a retirement income plan is what converts “I think we’re fine” into something you can act on with confidence.
It helps to know that many retirees find their spending tapers on its own in their mid-to-late 70s. Travel becomes less appealing, routines settle, and day-to-day costs often decline. That pattern is one reason spending more during the Go-Go years can be reasonable rather than reckless — the later phases frequently cost less. The tradeoff is real, though, and worth naming: front-loading spending leaves a thinner cushion if health costs arrive early, markets underperform in your first retirement decade, or you live well past your planning assumptions. The point isn’t to spend freely. It’s to spend deliberately, against a plan that has been tested for those scenarios. Related reading: what it means to “die with zero” approaches the same tension from the opposite direction.
Planning Ahead for the Slow-Go and No-Go Years
Even in the middle of the active years, the later phases deserve attention. The Slow-Go and No-Go years bring shifts that are far easier to plan for in advance than to improvise through, including:
- Long-term living arrangements
- Clarifying your wishes with family
- Potential healthcare and caregiving needs
The reason to address these while you’re in the Go-Go phase is straightforward: decisions made while your physical and cognitive capabilities are strong are your decisions. Decisions deferred long enough eventually get made by someone else, under time pressure, with incomplete information about what you wanted. Working through the cost of healthcare in retirement and whether long-term care insurance fits your situation is uncomfortable in your 60s and considerably harder in your 80s.
Income planning shifts in these later phases too. Social Security planning in the Slow-Go phase raises different questions than it does at 62, when the decision is mostly about claiming timing.
Putting the Phases to Work
The phases framework earns its keep by replacing a single question with better ones. Instead of “how much do I need,” you get: What does the Pre-Go work look like, and have I started the emotional half of it? What’s my realistic Go-Go spending, including the lumpy items? Have I decided what the later phases look like, while deciding is still fully mine to do?
Every timeline is different, and the phases don’t arrive on schedule or in equal lengths. Some people spend fifteen years in the Go-Go phase; others get five. What holds across situations is that anticipating the shift beats reacting to it. Recognizing your own spending patterns and priorities early gives you more control through each stage of retirement — and a plan flexible enough to handle the parts that don’t go as expected.
This article is educational and is not individualized investment, tax, or legal advice. Sensible Money, LLC is a registered investment advisor. Your situation is specific to you; consider discussing it with a qualified professional before acting.
