Wisdom for Life

I listened to a podcast recently that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

Scott DeRue, CEO of Ironman and former CEO of Equinox, was talking about climbing Everest and some of the other largest peaks in the world. There's a saying in mountaineering that gets repeated so often it's almost cliché:

"Reaching the summit is optional. Getting down is mandatory."

DeRue put a sharper point on it. He described looking around at fellow climbers celebrating at the top and thinking: we're not done. We still have to get home to our families.

Getting to the summit, he said, is actually the easier half. The descent is where the real danger lives — where fatigue, weather, and depleted judgment combine to make the smallest misstep catastrophic.

Most mountaineering accidents don't happen on the way up. They happen on the way down.

I couldn't help but think about how closely that mirrors the work we do with our clients.

For many of you, the climb was the accumulation years — saving diligently, investing wisely, and letting compound growth do its quiet work over decades. It took real effort, but it was also the more forgiving phase: time and consistency smooth out a lot of mistakes along the way. And for those of you who've reached retirement, or are getting close, it can feel like reaching the summit.

There's a natural instinct to think: we made it.

But as we talk about often, retirement isn't the finish line. It's the halfway point.

What comes next — decumulation — is the descent. And just like on the mountain, it's the more technical, less forgiving half. The margin for error shrinks. A withdrawal strategy that's slightly off, a sequence-of-returns risk that hits at the wrong moment, a tax decision made without a plan — these are the equivalent of a stumble at 26,000 feet. They don't announce themselves loudly, but they can undo sixty or seventy years of disciplined work.

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Why the Descent Is Harder Than It Looks

Climbers will tell you the ascent rewards effort and endurance. Put in the work, and you make steady, visible progress. The descent rewards something different: precision, judgment, and the discipline to stick to a plan even when the summit high has worn off and exhaustion has set in.

Decumulation works the same way. The skills that got you to retirement — saving consistently, staying invested, riding out volatility — aren't quite the same skills that carry you safely through it. Spending down a portfolio well takes a different kind of expertise, and it's exactly what we spend our time on with you:

• Sequencing withdrawals across your taxable, tax-deferred, and tax-free accounts in the right order

• Managing sequence-of-returns risk — the danger of large withdrawals coinciding with a down market early in retirement

• Coordinating Social Security timing with your other income sources to maximize lifetime value

• Navigating tax brackets year to year, including Roth conversion windows and required minimum distributions

• Adjusting spending in response to markets, without derailing your long-term security

None of this is instinctive, and that's okay — it's not supposed to be. It's technical. And unlike the accumulation years, where a mistake this year can often be corrected next year, mistakes made early in retirement compound in the wrong direction, permanently reducing what's left to work with for every year that follows.

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Why We Stay With You for the Whole Descent

A guide's job isn't finished when the client reaches the top of the mountain. Arguably, that's when it matters most. It's the same reason our work with you doesn't stop once you reach retirement. Getting here was a milestone worth celebrating, but the real work is what comes after — helping you navigate the descent so the decades you spent climbing actually translate into the retirement you planned for.

That's the whole idea behind how we work with you: building a distribution strategy before you need one, stress-testing it against market and life changes, and staying engaged with you every step of the way down. To date, we've had the privilege of helping 115+ client households navigate that descent successfully, reaching their own finish line without running out of money. That's not a coincidence. It's what happens when the descent gets the same care and attention as the climb.

Because the goal was never just to reach the top. It's to get home safely, and we're glad to be making that climb down with you.

As always, if you'd like to talk through where your own plan stands, we're here whenever you're ready.

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Enjoy your weekend,

Daniel Westergaard