The Plan With Give in It
My family and I spent an afternoon at the Corning Museum of Glass this summer, and I came home still turning one exhibit over in my head.
There's a display where a sheet of glass bends under pressure that would shatter an ordinary pane instantly. Not just resists cracking — I watched it flex, visibly, the way a diving board flexes, and then spring back into shape. Everyone else in my family had already wandered on to the next case. I was still standing there, watching it happen a second time, because for my whole life, glass has meant exactly one thing to me: fragile, unforgiving, fine one moment and broken the next. This piece didn't play by that rule.
The trick, as the museum explains it, isn't that the glass is thicker or somehow tougher in the way we'd expect toughness to work. It's almost the opposite. The glass is made thin, then chemically strengthened, so that when pressure is applied, it has somewhere to put that pressure. It flexes instead of concentrating the stress at one point until something gives.
The more I turned it over, the less it looked like a museum curiosity and the more it looked like a description of what a good retirement plan needs to do.
The one-number problem
Most of us picture retirement spending as a single figure. "I need six thousand a month." "We can live on seventy thousand a year." It's tidy and easy to plan around, and it feels responsible. In a lot of ways it is — a real number, arrived at honestly, beats no number at all. But underneath that number, though, is usually a more practical question not addressed: if a downturn in the market meant spending less to make the money last, where would the cut actually come from?
The problem with a single number is that it has no give built into it. If your portfolio has a rough stretch, the whole number is what's at risk, because nothing inside it has been sorted into what matters more and what matters less. Every dollar is treated as equally essential, which quietly makes every dollar a source of worry. That's why a modest market pullback can feel disproportionately alarming — it's not just threatening some spending, it's threatening all of it, because the plan was never built to tell the difference. That's not really a reflection of how fragile your finances are. It's a reflection of how the plan was constructed — solid all the way through, with nowhere for the pressure to go. Ordinary glass. Fine until it isn't.
Building in the flex
Good planning was never about finding the perfect investment — that's something you can only know after the fact. It's about deciding, while you're calm, what actually matters to you, so the plan has somewhere to bend when it needs to. The fix isn't complicated, though it does take that honest conversation with yourself, ideally on a calm day rather than a stressful one.
Take your spending and sort it into two piles. The must-haves: shelter, groceries, insurance, the basics that keep daily life running regardless of what markets are doing. And the flexible spending: travel, gifts for grandkids, the club membership, the things that make retirement feel like retirement but aren't load-bearing.
Once that split exists, your plan has somewhere to put pressure without the whole thing cracking. A weak stretch in the markets doesn't threaten your groceries. It might mean the big trip gets postponed a year, or the budget for it gets trimmed — or, as one client put it, only half joking, that his wife flies economy instead of business class that year. That is a very different feeling than "everything is at risk," even when the dollar amount involved is small. The relief doesn't come from the money — it comes from already knowing, before you needed to, exactly what would give first. That's the part I keep coming back to from that museum floor: the flex was built in long before anyone applied pressure to test it.
Three ways to put this into practice
Write the two lists down — on paper, in a spreadsheet, wherever you'll actually see them again. If you have a partner, do it together. A general sense of what matters more isn't the same as having it named and visible; that's what makes the split usable when you need it, instead of something you're reconstructing from memory under pressure.
Keep a small buffer set aside for leaner stretches. A cash reserve, a lower-risk portfolio earmarked for this purpose, whatever fits your situation. Its whole job is to soften the transition into a leaner budget, so flexibility doesn't feel like a sudden shock but more like a plan doing exactly what it was built to do. Even a modest cushion changes the emotional experience of a rough year considerably, because it buys you time to adjust rather than forcing an immediate decision.
Revisit the split every year. What counts as essential shifts over the course of a retirement. Health-related costs tend to harden into the must-have column over time, while some of the nice-to-haves soften as priorities and energy change. The two piles aren't fixed forever. They're a living part of the plan, worth a few minutes of attention annually rather than something you set once and forget.
It's also worth remembering that most of us are more capable of adapting than we give ourselves credit for — plenty of households discovered, through the stretch of the pandemic, that a leaner version of daily life was more livable than expected going in. That's not to romanticize hard times; it's simply a reminder that flexibility, when it's needed, tends to be more manageable in practice than the fear of it is in advance.
The takeaway
That's what the glass was actually showing me — not toughness, but the shape of something built to move. A retirement plan can hold that same shape: solid where it needs to be, with room to give somewhere else, so a hard year bends the plan instead of breaking it.
If you haven't sorted your own spending into must-haves and flexible extras, that's a good use of twenty quiet minutes this week. It's a simple exercise, but the households that do it tend to carry a lot less anxiety through the years when markets misbehave. And if you'd like company while you do it, that's exactly the kind of conversation I enjoy having.
Warmly,
Vincent
The comments contained herein are a general discussion of certain issues intended as general information only and should not be relied upon as tax or legal advice. Please obtain independent professional advice, in the context of your particular circumstances. This newsletter was written, designed and produced by Vincent Lam, CFP®, Financial Planner with Intentional Retirement Planning and Investia Financial Services Inc., and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Investia Financial Services Inc.
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