Posting some notes I sent to a Signal group of investing oriented folks from my old employer:

Year one of retirement (last day was 8 January 2025), all is well, spend plan is working, I don't miss work *at all*. For those interested in a quick snapshot of macro graphs that, to me, are a good value take on how richly priced markets are, check out multpl.com: Multpl - Market, financial, and economic data - I particularly like the Shiller PE ratio (2nd graph). In years where it is high, the returns of the market for the next few years is generally lower. I'm not calling a recession, but this is like a beefy bungee cord fixed to both sides of a pickup. You can stand at the bed and pull up on it...and pull some more...but each additional inch you try to pull it higher is harder to achieve, and it wants to revert to the mean.

I'm not adjusting anything else, but if the markets get a bit more richly valued relative to earnings, might change allocation down some out of S&P and up a bit into either international or fixed instruments. I tweaked that some a quarter ago when the Shiller PE hit 40 (a historically very lofty value, where it remains today), a bit out of equities.

My spend rate was planned to be 3.25% (actually less, but we don't include my military pension - and a few other lesser things like it - as I can croak tomorrow and we declined the bad deal of the pension insurance), which has a likely survivability horizon of 50+ years. As the year was pretty good - the S&P was up about 18% and about 50-60% of my assets are still in some flavor of S&P index - the kitty grew by a lot more than what was drawn down.

I didn't do the full year calculation of what we spent, but it was probably +/- 5% of what we spent on average in the previous 5 years I had been tracking it.

This was the first year in a while I didn't beat the S&P. But...I don't care. Goals are very different going from the "accumulate" to the "distribute" phase, and there were several reasonably sized defensive/longevity of portfolio changes made this year. 100% of what I sold to fund retirement was good ol' Apple, which made sense as it was a high flying winner and by far the largest individual security in the port - as high as 18%, I think, back in 2024 when I checked and was preparing to retire. I don't expect to beat an index; that's not the goal any more (though I liked pursuing that). I'm not putting money into investments. I do miss that; the good thing is that my kid has had a Roth for a couple years so I get to talk about these things still with a young person who saw the potential of compounding even before getting a driver's license.

Life's good. This year, so were the markets. If they are not in '26 - and I'm back to Shiller and lofty valuations - so what? I did ladder five years of expected spending into fixed instruments, and will sleep fine if the markets take a dive which singes me like I was in the .com collapse or the CDO collapse or the pandemic, etc.