Steve Yoder was sitting with his coffee one morning, running through his usual worries — health, the house, the kids, the state of the world — when he realized one was missing. Inflation. He’d feared running out of money his whole life, and he’d just paid $115.57 for a can of house paint without flinching. Should he be worried that he wasn’t worried? His planner said no. So did Karen, who’s put up with his money fears for 47 years. In this month’s Retirement Rookies column in the Journal’s Investing Monthly, the Yoders — both 69, retired since late 2022 — work out why, and it’s a better retirement lesson than most spreadsheets.
Start with the structure, because it’s doing the quiet work. Their planner, Michael, has them in two pots: short-term money, conservatively invested, that’s meant to cover them while inflation works its way back toward normal, and long-term money in stocks that’s been outrunning prices. Asked whether they’d still die with money in the bank, Michael said 100% — provided the spending pattern holds. That proviso is the whole column.
Because the spending pattern is where the Yoders are strange, in a good way. Steve’s mantra when something’s gotten expensive — “Well then don’t buy it, dummy” — got him through an O’Hare layover on free airplane coffee instead of a latte. The car went in 2020; bikes and city buses replaced it, and with it went insurance, maintenance and the drive to the mall. He’s flown 22 times so far this year, paying cash for two; the rest came off a frequent-flier balance he’d hoarded for decades like part of the portfolio. They eat out half as often, skip any restaurant that tacks on a 20% automatic gratuity, and he fixes the fridge, dishwasher and toaster himself.
Time is the currency
Karen’s half is the better essay. Her friends grumble about prices, so she went and priced the block herself: $7 for a coffee, $8.50 for a pastry, $7 for a notecard, $15 for a bowl of noodles. She came home with nothing and made the coffee, baked the pastry, drew the card. The trip home from Kansas moves from the weekend after Thanksgiving to the Wednesday, on a cheaper, prettier train. She takes the bus at the 50% senior discount; she isn’t in a hurry. And at the farmers market she asked a seller about the bruised fruit in the box on the ground — compost, he said — and took it home to become dried fruit, jam and an apricot pie, perhaps $50 of produce for free. Retirement, she writes, handed her an “inflation-fighting currency”: time.
Our read
This is Retirement (M10) and Cash Flow (M5), and it pairs with the Journal’s stress test of the 4% rule on R2: run a 30-year retirement at 6% inflation instead of 3% and the odds of finishing with money left fall to 14.6%. That’s the arithmetic of a retiree who can’t change anything. The Yoders are the counterexample — not because they own a clever hedge, but because almost every line of their budget bends. A car that isn’t there can’t get more expensive. A flight bought with miles doesn’t care about fares. They’ve converted fixed costs into optional ones — the cheapest inflation protection there is.
The structure under them is the one we’d draw for most retirees: a short-term bucket covering the next few years of spending so nobody sells stocks in a bad year, and a long-term equity bucket that’s allowed to do its job. What makes it work is the proviso in Michael’s 100%: the spending pattern has to hold, and it holds because the Yoders have time to shop, cook, fix and wait — and enjoy it. Not everyone wants to forage. But everyone can know which budget lines are fixed and which only feel fixed. Worth a look at yours before the next price shock rather than after — it’s easier to ride the bus when you’ve already learned the route.