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A response to financial advisor Benjamin Brandt's video on the four shapes a retirement portfolio can take — and how the Keep calculates the number each intentional shape actually depends on.
Most retirement planning advice is aimed at one fear: running out of money. It's the right fear to plan around, but it isn't the only way a retirement plan can go wrong. Brandt puts it plainly: there are "two ways to fail — run out of money, or die with regrets." Dying rich isn't a success story if the money sat unused while you were healthy enough to enjoy it.
His broader point is that the fear of running out has to be genuinely resolved before real spending can happen — permission to enjoy the money doesn't show up until the anxiety about running dry is actually gone. That's a psychological problem as much as a math one, but the math is where the Keep can help: a clear, current answer to "am I above the line" removes a lot of the guesswork that fear feeds on.
To make the idea concrete, Brandt sketches what a retiree's net worth looks like over time and notices it tends to trace one of a few recognizable shapes. Two of those shapes happen by accident — net worth that keeps climbing through retirement, or a wealth curve that barely dips before the end. Both usually mean the same thing: more caution than the plan actually required. The other two shapes are chosen on purpose. One front-loads spending in the early, healthy years of retirement and lets the portfolio recover once guaranteed income kicks in. The other spends down deliberately to a fixed floor — largely guaranteed income and a paid-off home — and holds there for good.
It's a genuinely useful way to think about the shape you're aiming for. What it doesn't do — and isn't really trying to do — is tell you the number. Where does the floor sit? At what point does the portfolio have room to recover? That's a calculation, and it's exactly the calculation the Keep runs.
Spend aggressively from the portfolio in the early "go-go" years, while you're healthiest and most able to enjoy it. Once guaranteed income arrives and covers most of your living costs, the portfolio's job shrinks and it has room to grow again.
Draw the portfolio down deliberately until it reaches a level mostly covered by guaranteed income and essentials like a paid-off home — then hold there. Simple, sustainable, and doesn't depend on an inheritance ever arriving.
Both of these are good strategies. Both also raise the same question: good, but where exactly? Where's the floor? When does the recovery actually start? That's where the shape framework hands off to something more precise.
The recovery point in the front-load strategy is the moment guaranteed income arrives and the portfolio stops covering the full cost of living. The Keep Calculator already has a name for the years before that moment: the bridge period. Before Social Security or a pension begins, your portfolio covers the entire living cost. Once that income starts, the portfolio's net obligation drops — often sharply — and what was a steep drawdown becomes a much gentler one, sometimes a recovery. Running your numbers through the calculator shows you exactly where that turn happens, in your own dollars and your own claiming age, instead of as a general shape on a chart.
The floor in the second strategy is really just a landing goal set deliberately low — not zero, but not much above what guaranteed income and a paid-off home already provide. The Keep is built to size a portfolio against exactly that kind of goal.
This piece only covers the two intentional shapes and where the Keep fits into them. Brandt's video goes further — the "spending smile" pattern of retirement spending, the psychological cost of over-saving, and why removing the fear of running out of money is often the real work of financial planning. It's a thoughtful watch, and worth the full runtime: Benjamin Brandt's video on retirement net worth shapes.
Find the number behind your own shape.
Run your numbers in the Keep Calculator →This article is educational commentary on a third-party video and is not individualized financial, tax, or investment advice. The Keep Method and thekeepcalculator.com are not affiliated with Benjamin Brandt or Retirement Starts Today.