Sequence of Returns Risk: The Retirement Threat Nobody Warned You About

Picture someone who has done everything right.

A well-funded investment portfolio built carefully over decades. Property assets generating rental income. A pension, perhaps, or a business that has provided strong returns. By any conventional measure, the financial picture is strong — diversified, substantial, and the product of genuine discipline and long-term thinking.

Now picture that same person in their second year of retirement, watching their portfolio shrink faster than they expected — not because their investments were poor, not because they spent recklessly, but because markets fell in the months after they stopped working and they had no choice but to sell assets at suppressed prices to fund their lifestyle.

The wealth they built over thirty years is doing exactly what it was designed to do. The problem is the timing. And the timing was never within their control.

This is sequence of returns risk. It is one of the most significant financial threats facing anyone approaching or entering retirement. And despite its importance, most people encounter it for the first time not in a financial planning conversation — but in their own retirement, when it is already too late to fully address it.