The lessons we can learn from the game of Poker
No sensible poker player plays every stage of a long game the same way. Early on, with a full stack and cheap blinds, he can afford to see flops, take chances, and pay for information. Later, as the field thins and the price of playing rises, he tightens up and chooses his spots with care. The player who uses one fixed style from first hand to last is not being consistent. He is ignoring the shape of the game in front of him. Retirement spending has a shape too, and it is not the shape most plans assume.
Most retirement plans are drawn as a straight line: figure out what you spend in a year, multiply by thirty, and aim at the total. It is tidy arithmetic, and it describes almost nobody’s actual life. Real retirements come in waves. Spending runs high in some seasons, ebbs in others, and rises again near the end for entirely different reasons. Plan for the flat line and you will misjudge all three seasons — skimping in the years built for living, and risking a shortfall in the years built for care.
The first wave is the one planners often call the go-go years, and if you are newly retired you will recognize them. The health is good, the time is finally your own, and the list of things you postponed for decades is long: the trips, the projects, the boat or the garden, the visits to grandchildren, the class you always meant to take. Spending in these years often runs as high as it did while you were working, sometimes higher. That is not irresponsibility, and it should not be treated with guilt. It is the harvest season of a working life, and it is shorter than it feels. The trips counted in the last chapter — the visits, the journeys, the reunions — are a finite number, and they live almost entirely in this wave.
Then comes the second wave, the slow-go years. The appetite for airports fades. Evenings at home, familiar places, and a smaller circle satisfy in a way that would have puzzled your younger self. The big projects are finished, and spending settles — often well below the level the flat-line plan predicted. Many retirees are pleasantly surprised in this season to discover they need less than they feared. This ebb is not a problem to be solved. It is the tide going out on schedule.
The third wave, the no-go years, reverses the tide. Spending rises again, but its character changes completely. The money now goes to support rather than adventure: help at home, services you once handled yourself, medical costs that insurance does not cover, and, for many, some form of care. These costs can arrive gradually or all at once, and they are the hardest in retirement to predict. A plan that spent the slow-go years’ natural savings as they appeared may reach this wave with less reserve than it needs. A plan that recognized the waves lets the quiet years build the fund the final years will draw on.
Understanding the waves changes the decisions you make today. It argues for funding the go-go years fully and without apology — moving the dreamed-of trip from “someday” into a year when you can actually enjoy it, rather than saving it for a self who may no longer want to go. It argues for patience in the slow-go years, treating their lower spending as provision for what follows instead of found money. And it argues for honesty about the last wave: naming the likely costs of help and care early, while you can still arrange your affairs and spare your children from improvising under pressure.
None of this requires a complicated model. It requires only that you stop picturing your retirement as thirty identical years and start picturing it as seasons, each with its own purposes and price. The flat line is a fiction invented by spreadsheets. The waves are what your neighbors are actually living.
Here is the takeaway. This week, take one page and draw your own curve in three columns: go-go, slow-go, no-go. In the first, write the experiences you most want while your health is strong — and put a date on one of them before the week is out. In the second, note what your quieter life will probably cost, and let it be less without anxiety. In the third, write honestly what help and care might require, and check that somewhere in your count there is a reserve with that season’s name on it. A player who knows the shape of the game spends his chips in the rounds where they matter. Your go-go chips are on the table now. Play them while the wave is up.
