How often to adjust your investing strategy as you age

The Direct Answer: Investing strategies should be adjusted continually, albeit gradually, as an individual ages, with the most significant and structural changes occurring during the transition from the wealth-accumulation phase (typically the 20s through the 40s) to the wealth-distribution phase (the late 50s through the 60s). Modern financial research dictates maintaining a highly aggressive, equity-heavy portfolio for as long as possible, shifting to a highly defensive fixed-income posture in the five to ten years immediately preceding and following retirement, and then - counterintuitively - allowing the stock allocation to gradually rise again in later years to combat longevity and inflation risks.

The lifelong investing journey can be likened to driving a vehicle on a transcontinental road trip. When a driver first merges onto the highway in their twenties, the road stretches out for thousands of miles. The optimal strategy is to shift into the highest gear, press the accelerator, and ignore the minor bumps along the way. If the vehicle hits a pothole or experiences a sudden detour - analogous to a severe market crash - it hardly matters in the grand scheme; the driver has decades to recover lost time and resume speed.

However, as the vehicle approaches its destination - retirement - driving seventy-five miles per hour directly into a residential driveway is a recipe for disaster. The driver must apply the brakes, downshift, and navigate the final neighborhood streets with extreme caution. Yet, retirement is not the end of the trip; it is merely the beginning of a scenic route that might last another three decades. If the driver puts the car in park too soon and shuts off the engine, they will inevitably run out of momentum before finishing the ride.

For decades, the financial services industry provided overly simplistic advice regarding how to navigate this lifelong journey. Investors were instructed to blindly follow mathematical rules of thumb or to permanently abandon the stock market and retreat to cash the moment they received their final paycheck. Today, armed with a deeper understanding of market mechanics, sequence of returns risk, behavioral finance, and a rapidly shifting macroeconomic landscape characterized by higher interest rates, institutions like Vanguard, Morningstar, and Fidelity have entirely rewritten the playbook.

This comprehensive report breaks down the modern, evidence-based approach to adjusting asset allocations over a lifetime, dispels outdated financial myths, translates complex institutional strategies into an actionable roadmap for every decade of life, and analyzes the macroeconomic shifts defining the post-2023 financial era.

Dispelling Outdated Investing Myths

Before examining the optimal asset allocation for each distinct life stage, it is critical to unlearn several pervasive misconceptions that have historically derailed countless retirement plans. Modern institutional research has thoroughly debunked these legacy concepts.

The Fallacy of the "100 Minus Age" Rule

Historically, financial advisors relied on a rudimentary formula to determine asset allocation: subtract an individual's age from 100, and the resulting number represents the percentage of the portfolio that should be invested in stocks, with the remainder allocated to bonds. Under this rigid rule, a 40-year-old would hold 60% of their wealth in stocks, and a 70-year-old would hold a mere 30%.

This rule is definitively obsolete. It fundamentally fails to account for modern longevity and the compounding effects of inflation over extended periods. As life expectancies have steadily increased, retirees are routinely living into their late eighties and nineties, meaning their portfolios must survive and grow for thirty years or more after their working careers end ¹². If a 65-year-old restricts their stock allocation to just 35%, the portfolio will likely fail to generate the capital appreciation necessary to outpace decades of rising living costs. Recognizing this mathematical reality, some industry practitioners have attempted to modify the rule to "110 minus age" or even "120 minus age" to force a higher equity allocation ³. While marginally better, these formulas remain blunt instruments that completely ignore an individual's specific risk capacity, the size of their portfolio, and the broader macroeconomic environment.

The Myth of the Zero-Stock Retirement

A remarkably common fear among near-retirees is the notion that the stock market is akin to a casino, and once an individual stops receiving a reliable paycheck from an employer, they must move all their accumulated wealth off the table into "safe" assets like cash, certificates of deposit, and government bonds.

This is arguably the most dangerous misconception in modern personal finance. The reality is that retirement introduces a powerful, silent adversary: inflation. While cash and short-term bonds protect the nominal principal of a portfolio, they practically guarantee a catastrophic loss of purchasing power over a three-decade horizon. Even in an era of positive real yields, an exclusively fixed-income portfolio forces a retiree to rely entirely on yield generation and the steady depletion of principal, stripping away the compounding capital appreciation that only equities can provide.

Modern institutional glide paths - the planned progression of an asset allocation over time - never drop their equity exposure to zero. Even the most conservative post-retirement portfolios managed by top-tier financial institutions typically maintain at least a 30% to 50% allocation to global stocks well into a retiree's later years to ensure the portfolio does not lose its real value ⁴⁵⁵.

The Accumulation Phase: Maximizing Growth Potential

To understand how a portfolio should evolve, one must first understand the interplay between two fundamental economic concepts: Financial Capital and Human Capital. Financial Capital is the tangible money held in investment accounts, savings, and real estate. Human Capital is the present value of an individual's future ability to work and earn wages.

When an individual is young, their financial capital is typically very low, but their human capital is immense; their decades of future earnings act like a massive, highly stable bond that generates steady cash flow ⁶. Because this human capital is so robust and reliable, the individual's financial capital can - and must - take on maximum risk to achieve growth. As the individual ages, their human capital depletes as they approach the end of their working years, and their financial capital must grow substantially to replace it.

The 20s and 30s: The Maximum Acceleration Phase

During the initial decades of an individual's career, the primary investment goal is maximum capital appreciation. The mathematical reality of this phase dictates an allocation of 90% to 100% in global equities.

In one's twenties and thirties, severe market volatility is actually the greatest ally a portfolio can have. Because the investor is decades away from needing to liquidate their holdings to fund living expenses, and because they are continually adding new capital to their investments through regular payroll contributions, market downturns present an opportunity. A recession allows the young investor to acquire shares of high-quality companies at a steep discount through the mechanics of dollar-cost averaging.

Institutional target-date models reflect this highly aggressive posture. Vanguard's Target Retirement 2065 and 2070 Funds, designed for individuals in their early to mid-twenties today, allocate approximately 90% of their assets to stocks, utilizing just a 10% bond allocation to temper the absolute worst market shocks and provide a small reserve for rebalancing ⁴⁷. Morningstar's Lifetime Allocation Indexes push this envelope even further, allocating up to 97% to equities for young investors in their moderate and aggressive risk tracks ⁵. At this early stage of life, the most severe risk an investor faces is not market volatility; it is the risk of playing it too safe, holding too much cash, and failing to harness the exponential, long-term power of compound growth.

The 40s: Maintaining Cruising Altitude

By the time an investor reaches their forties, they are likely entering their peak earning years. The portfolio balance has likely grown substantially larger than it was in their twenties, meaning a 20% market correction now represents a much larger absolute dollar figure. This can introduce new behavioral challenges, as seeing large nominal declines can be psychologically jarring.

However, the individual is still typically fifteen to twenty-five years away from traditional retirement age. Therefore, the strategic mandate remains heavily weighted toward equities, generally ranging from 80% to 90%. Institutional glide paths usually initiate their first, subtle downshifts during this decade. Vanguard, for instance, begins to gradually reduce stock exposure around age forty, slowly layering in a broader mix of fixed income to build a slightly more balanced foundation ⁴. Yet, the overarching objective remains unchanged: equities must continue to serve as the undisputed engine of wealth creation, as the time horizon remains sufficiently long to recover from standard economic recessions.

The Danger Zone: Sequence of Returns Risk and The Fragile Decade

The rules of wealth management fundamentally change as an investor enters their fifties. Time is no longer an infinite, regenerative resource. If a catastrophic global market crash occurs at age fifty-five, the investor may not have enough working years remaining to allow the portfolio to recover naturally before they must begin taking withdrawals to fund their lifestyle.

It is during this critical transition phase that investors must begin actively applying the brakes and preparing for a mathematical phenomenon that dictates the success or failure of almost all retirement plans: Sequence of Returns Risk.

Understanding Sequence of Returns Risk

Sequence of Returns Risk is the mathematical reality that the exact chronological order - or sequence - of investment returns matters significantly more than the average annualized return, particularly during the years immediately preceding and following the onset of retirement withdrawals ¹⁸⁹. While investors are taught to focus on long-term averages during their accumulation years, averages become dangerously misleading once distribution begins.

To understand why this sequence is so critical, consider a hypothetical scenario involving two retirees. Both individuals retire at age sixty-five with exactly one million dollars in their respective portfolios. Both plan to withdraw fifty thousand dollars in their first year of retirement, and both plan to adjust that withdrawal amount upward by 2.5% annually to maintain their purchasing power against inflation. Over the course of a twenty-year retirement, both portfolios experience the exact same set of annual market returns, which mathematically average out to an annualized gain of 7% ⁸⁹.

Despite these identical parameters, their outcomes are drastically different due solely to the sequence of those returns. The first retiree experiences a severe bear market in the first three years of retirement, suffering back-to-back losses before transitioning into a massive bull market later in life. The second retiree experiences the exact same annual returns, but in reverse order - they enjoy the massive bull market in their first few years, and suffer the severe bear market at the very end of their life ⁸.

The first retiree is financially devastated. Because they suffered negative market returns while simultaneously withdrawing fifty thousand dollars a year, their portfolio suffered from "dollar-cost ravaging." They were forced to liquidate a massive number of shares at depressed, rock-bottom prices merely to meet their basic living expenses. Their principal was hollowed out so quickly that by the time the bull market finally arrived in the tenth year of their retirement, they had virtually no capital left to capture the upside growth. Their portfolio is entirely depleted before the end of the twenty-year horizon ⁸⁹.

Conversely, the second retiree enjoyed early, compounding growth that vastly outpaced their initial withdrawals, building a massive financial cushion. When the bear market finally struck late in their life, their portfolio base was so large that the percentage drops were immaterial to their standard of living. They pass away leaving a portfolio worth nearly two million dollars ⁸.

The Fragile Decade

This extreme divergence in outcomes illustrates the concept of the "Fragile Decade" - the five years immediately before retirement and the five to ten years immediately following retirement ¹⁸. During this highly vulnerable window, an investor's portfolio is typically at its absolute largest in nominal dollars, and they are transitioning from adding capital to draining capital. A market crash during the Fragile Decade causes permanent, irrevocable damage to the portfolio's longevity. Once an investor survives the Fragile Decade without suffering a major, unmitigated drawdown, the probability of their portfolio lasting for thirty years increases dramatically, regardless of subsequent market volatility.

Advanced Defensive Strategies for the Distribution Phase

Given the existential threat posed by Sequence of Returns Risk during the Fragile Decade, traditional financial advice has long advocated for a linear, downward-sloping glide path, where an investor simply buys more bonds every single year until they pass away. However, modern retirement researchers have developed sophisticated, alternative strategies that challenge this conventional wisdom and offer mathematically superior ways to protect wealth.

The "Bond Tent" Strategy

A "bond tent" is a highly effective, albeit counterintuitive, strategy designed specifically to insulate a portfolio from an early-retirement market crash without sacrificing late-stage growth ⁸⁹¹⁰.

Instead of following a linear, continuously declining path into extreme conservatism, the investor aggressively builds a "tent" of safety precisely at the moment of peak vulnerability. In the five to ten years prior to retirement, the investor deliberately and rapidly increases their allocation to bonds, Treasury bills, and cash reserves, intentionally spiking their fixed-income allocation to 50%, 60%, or even 70% of the total portfolio. This creates a massive, localized buffer ⁸⁹¹⁰¹¹.

Upon retiring and entering the Fragile Decade, the investor executes the second phase of the strategy. If the stock market experiences a severe downturn, the investor explicitly avoids selling any equities. Instead, they "live in the tent," funding their living expenses and required withdrawals entirely by systematically selling down their elevated bond and cash reserves. This mechanism completely prevents the investor from locking in equity losses at market bottoms ⁸⁹¹⁰.

As the investor spends down this heavy, artificial bond allocation over the first ten to fifteen years of retirement, a fascinating mathematical phenomenon occurs: because the fixed-income portion is being depleted while the equity portion is left untouched to recover and grow, the overall percentage of the portfolio held in stocks naturally begins to rise again. The investor is effectively "taking down the tent" ⁸¹⁰¹².

The Rising Equity Glide Path

The natural, mechanical result of deploying a bond tent strategy is what prominent retirement researchers Michael Kitces and Wade Pfau famously dubbed the "Rising Equity Glide Path."

Published in the Journal of Financial Planning, their extensive research demonstrated that the standard industry practice - forcing retirees to systematically reduce their stock exposure every single year throughout retirement - often leads to suboptimal outcomes and increases the risk of outliving one's money. Because modern retirees face decades of compounding inflation and extreme longevity risk, they actually require greater portfolio growth later in life to sustain their purchasing power ^8101214.

Kitces and Pfau demonstrated through thousands of historical Monte Carlo simulations that an unconventional approach yields higher success rates. By starting retirement with a highly conservative allocation (to survive the severe sequence of returns risk inherent in the Fragile Decade) and then gradually increasing the equity exposure as the retiree ages (to capture late-stage capital appreciation), the probability that a portfolio would last thirty years improved significantly ⁸¹¹¹².

While traditional target-date funds typically drop equity exposure to roughly 50% at the date of retirement and continue a slow, linear decline down to 30% twenty years later, the rising equity strategy follows a remarkably different trajectory. The strategy advocates dropping equity allocations sharply to approximately 40% at the exact point of retirement - representing the peak of the protective bond tent. Then, over the subsequent twenty years, as the bond reserves are spent down, the equity allocation is allowed to naturally drift upward, eventually reaching 60% to 70% to combat late-stage inflation and longevity risks. By year fifteen of retirement, when the sequence of returns risk has largely dissipated, the retiree can safely afford to hold a much higher concentration of stocks than they did on the day they retired ⁸¹².

The Time-Segmentation "Bucket" Approach

For investors who find the complex, shifting mathematics of a rising equity glide path difficult to implement manually, Morningstar's Director of Personal Finance, Christine Benz, champions a highly practical and behaviorally sound application known as the "Bucket Strategy" ¹³¹⁴.

Instead of viewing a retirement portfolio as one giant, volatile pool of money, the investor mentally and structurally divides the assets into three distinct tranches based on specific time horizons and spending needs:

• Bucket 1 (The Immediate Horizon: Years 1-2): This bucket is strictly allocated to pure cash, high-yield savings accounts, money market funds, and ultra-short-term government paper. It is sized to hold exactly one to two years of anticipated living expenses. This bucket guarantees that immediate cash flow needs are met, completely insulating the retiree's daily lifestyle from what the stock market does on any given day ¹³¹⁵¹⁶.
• Bucket 2 (The Intermediate Horizon: Years 3-10): This bucket is allocated to high-quality, short-to-intermediate-term fixed income. Typical holdings include Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS), investment-grade corporate debt, and highly rated municipal bonds. This money generates a modest yield and acts as a secondary reserve that is stable enough to weather a multi-year bear market without catastrophic loss of principal ¹⁵¹⁶.
• Bucket 3 (The Long-Term Horizon: Years 10+): This bucket serves as the portfolio's growth engine. It holds diversified global equities, real estate investment trusts, and potentially riskier, high-yield bond assets. Because the retiree knows they will not need to touch the capital in this bucket for at least a decade, they possess the psychological fortitude to let it ride out extreme market volatility and compound over time ¹⁵¹⁶.

The Bucket Strategy is, ultimately, a behavioral framing mechanism for a bond tent. By ensuring that short-term and intermediate-term needs are strictly insulated in guaranteed cash and high-quality bonds, the strategy provides the psychological permission necessary for the retiree to remain heavily invested in stocks for their long-term longevity needs, preventing panic-selling during inevitable market corrections ¹³¹⁵.

The Macroeconomic Paradigm Shift: The "Sound Money" Era

Any comprehensive analysis of optimal asset allocation must acknowledge the tectonic shifts in the global macroeconomic landscape that began in 2022 and continue to define the current era.

For more than a decade following the 2008 Great Financial Crisis, global central banks pinned interest rates near zero. Traditional fixed-income assets yielded almost nothing after inflation, leading to the popular Wall Street acronym "TINA" (There Is No Alternative... to stocks). Investors were forced to take on immense equity risk simply to generate a functional yield ¹⁹.

This paradigm shattered in 2022 when a resurgence of rapid, global inflation forced the U.S. Federal Reserve and other central banks to aggressively hike interest rates. The speed of these rate hikes triggered a historic market shock: both stocks and bonds crashed simultaneously. The traditional "60/40" portfolio - comprising 60% stocks and 40% bonds - suffered one of its worst years on record, leading many financial commentators to prematurely declare the balanced portfolio dead ¹⁷²¹.

However, as the global economy progresses through the mid-2020s, the financial environment has stabilized into a profoundly different regime.

The Resurrection of the 60/40 Portfolio

Today, major institutions including Vanguard, Morningstar, and BlackRock herald the arrival of a new "era of sound money" ^18192021. While inflation has largely cooled from its post-pandemic peaks, central bank policy rates and long-term bond yields have settled at levels substantially higher than anything seen during the 2010s.

This structural shift means that real yields - the actual return generated by bonds after accounting for inflation - are firmly positive ^19202122. Because bonds now offer meaningful, credible income, they have fully resumed their historical role as the ultimate portfolio ballast and income generator ¹⁹. In their 2025 Long-Term Capital Market Assumptions, Vanguard forecasts that U.S. aggregate bonds will return between 3.8% and 5.0% annualized over the next decade ²³²⁴. Conversely, because U.S. stock valuations remain highly stretched by historical metrics, Vanguard anticipates that U.S. equities will return a muted 2.8% to 5.3% annualized over the same ten-year period ²³²⁴.

This narrowing gap between the expected returns of stocks and bonds drastically improves the risk-adjusted appeal of fixed income. Conservative asset allocations, particularly the traditional 60/40 balanced portfolio, are uniquely attractive in this environment ²³. Goldman Sachs Research anticipates the 60/40 portfolio will generate solid 4% to 5% real returns moving forward, offering a vastly improved risk-reward balance compared to the previous decade ²¹. Individuals entering retirement in the current era are uniquely positioned to build highly lucrative bond tents using elevated yields that were unavailable to retirees just five years prior.

Global Supply-Side Forces and the Transformation of Markets

The institutional outlook for the late 2020s is heavily influenced by deep structural changes in the global economy. In its 2025 "Beyond the Landing" economic outlook, Vanguard points out that the resilience of the U.S. economy - which managed to grow robustly despite high interest rates - was driven primarily by positive supply-side factors, specifically a surge in available labor and a massive increase in worker productivity ¹⁸²⁰²⁵.

Similarly, BlackRock's 2025 Global Outlook emphasizes that the current environment is not a standard business cycle, but rather a period of profound transformation driven by "mega forces" such as the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence and the massive capital expenditures required to build out AI infrastructure ³⁰²⁶³². These mega forces are driving productivity and corporate earnings, particularly in U.S. growth equities, making them highly attractive despite high valuations ³²²⁷.

However, these positive forces are balanced by emerging inflationary risks. Both Vanguard and BlackRock warn that shifting global trade policies, the aggressive implementation of tariffs, stricter immigration policies, and the restructuring of global supply chains act as stagflationary pressures - threatening to drag down economic growth while simultaneously pushing prices higher ^1820222526. Vanguard anticipates that these offsetting policy risks will keep core inflation "sticky," hovering above 2.5% for the foreseeable future, which will in turn force the Federal Reserve to maintain a higher neutral interest rate, likely settling around 3.5% to 4.0% ²⁰²⁸²⁹.

Institutional Glide Path Adjustments for the Modern Era

Financial institutions are not ignoring these macroeconomic realities; they are actively re-engineering their lifelong allocation models to protect investors from this new paradigm of stickier inflation and increased longevity.

Fidelity Investments, a dominant player in workplace retirement plans, recently announced a major structural update to its target-date fund glide paths, with the transition occurring between late 2025 and early 2027 ²³⁰. Based on deep capital market research, Fidelity identified two overwhelming, intersecting risks for modern investors: the erosion of purchasing power via persistent inflation, and the risk of portfolio depletion due to longer lifespans ².

To combat these dual threats, Fidelity is making two vital, permanent adjustments to its strategic allocation strategies: 1. Increasing Exposure to Inflation-Sensitive Assets: Recognizing that inflation may remain persistently higher in the coming decade due to global trade fragmentation and massive sovereign debt deficits, Fidelity is actively increasing its target-date allocations to Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS). Furthermore, the firm is formally adding Commodities as a dedicated asset class within the strategic asset allocation for investors who are near or in retirement, providing a direct hedge against rising consumer prices ². 2. Increasing Long-Term Equity Exposure: Explicitly acknowledging that retirees are living longer and relying more heavily on defined contribution assets to support decades of spending, Fidelity is actually reducing fixed-income exposure and increasing equity exposure for both early-career accumulators and investors who are actively in retirement ².

This move by Fidelity underscores a critical evolution in institutional thought: the consensus is shifting heavily toward holding more growth-oriented assets deeper into retirement than previous generations ever dared, simply because the math of a thirty-year retirement demands it.

Asset Allocation Across the Decades: A Comparative View

To synthesize how these theoretical frameworks and macroeconomic shifts translate into actual portfolio construction, one can compare how major institutions configure their asset allocations based on an investor's age and proximity to retirement.

The table below illustrates standard industry benchmarks based on 2024 - 2025 institutional data. The Vanguard models represent standard, commercially available Target Retirement Funds utilizing a traditional glide path. The Morningstar data reflects the allocations of their Lifetime Allocation Moderate Index series. Finally, the "Rising Equity" model illustrates the academic Bond Tent approach pioneered by Kitces and Pfau, demonstrating how an actively managed sequence-of-returns defense differs from commercial defaults.

Data reflects approximate strategic allocations for 2024 - 2025 implementations. Allocations blend U.S. and International equities, alongside domestic, global, and inflation-protected fixed income.

Frequently Asked Questions

If central banks cut interest rates, should investors abandon bonds?

No. The mechanics of the bond market dictate that while falling interest rates do lower the yield generated by newly issued bonds, they actively and immediately increase the principal price of existing bonds held in a portfolio. Bonds act as a critical shock absorber during economic transitions. As BlackRock notes in its 2025 outlook, navigating an environment without a stable macroeconomic anchor requires active risk management; maintaining allocations to short-term credit and highly diversified fixed income remains vital to offset the inherent volatility of equity markets, even in a rate-cutting cycle ²⁶²⁷.

Are target-date funds truly a "set it and forget it" solution?

For the vast majority of retail investors, target-date funds represent an excellent, hands-off solution. These funds utilize massive institutional scale to automatically handle complex daily rebalancing and execute gradual glide-path adjustments over decades ³¹³². However, as demonstrated by the comparative table above, standard commercial target-date funds utilize a traditional, continuously declining equity glide path. If an investor wishes to implement advanced, highly protective strategies - such as building a deliberate bond tent, utilizing the time-segmented bucket approach, or executing a rising equity glide path late in life - they will need to manually construct their portfolio using individual index funds or utilize a professional financial advisor to decouple their strategy from a rigid, predetermined fund mandate.

How does sticky inflation alter the fundamental rules of asset allocation?

Inflation acts as a silent tax that erodes the purchasing power of capital over time, making ultra-conservative, cash-heavy portfolios incredibly risky over long retirement horizons. If the cost of basic living expenses doubles over a twenty-year period, a portfolio must generate sufficient compounding returns simply to maintain a static standard of living. This mathematical reality is exactly why modern institutional allocations are heavily incorporating specialized assets. As both Vanguard and Fidelity highlight in their recent methodology updates, introducing TIPS, commodities, real estate investment trusts (REITs), and maintaining broad exposure to global equities provides the essential, high-octane growth required to combat a structurally rising cost of living ²⁴⁵.

The Bottom Line

The era of relying on static, oversimplified formulas like the "100 minus age" rule to dictate financial futures is definitively over. A successful lifelong investing strategy must be a dynamic, living mechanism that continuously adapts to the changing mathematics of human capital, longevity, and macroeconomic reality.

During the accumulation phases of the twenties, thirties, and forties, an investor's human capital is their greatest asset. It is imperative to harness the exponential power of compound interest by maintaining a heavily concentrated, aggressive position in diversified global equities. Market crashes are not enemies during this phase; they are mathematical opportunities to acquire future wealth at a discount.

As an investor enters their fifties and the reality of retirement approaches, the strategic script flips entirely. The portfolio enters the "Fragile Decade," where Sequence of Returns Risk emerges as the single greatest threat to financial survival. It is during this narrow window that defensive fortifications must be constructed - whether through the mechanical implementation of a "bond tent" or the behavioral framing of a dedicated cash "bucket" - to ensure that stocks never have to be liquidated at distressed prices to fund basic living expenses.

Finally, once an investor has safely navigated the fragile, volatile early years of retirement, they must recognize that they are playing a profoundly long game. With modern medicine pushing life expectancies higher, and an era of "sound money" redefining the global macroeconomic landscape, hiding exclusively in cash is a mathematical liability. By allowing equity exposure to remain robust, or even implementing strategies that allow it to naturally rise in the later years of life, investors ensure that their portfolios possess the necessary fuel to combat inflation and outlast them.