That sounds strange, but it's one of the most important distinctions in retirement planning.

While you're accumulating money, you have something incredibly valuable on your side:

Time.

The market falls. You keep working. You keep contributing. You wait for the recovery.

Retirement changes the equation.

Now you're taking money out.

And when you take income from an account while it's down, you're not simply experiencing a temporary decline.

You're selling part of the account that would otherwise be there for the recovery.

Those dollars don't get to come back.

That's why an average return can tell a perfectly true story about an investment — and still tell you very little about whether that investment can reliably produce your retirement paycheck.

The question changes when the paycheck stops.

Instead of only asking:

“What return might my money earn?”

We also need to ask:

“Where will next month's income come from if the market is down?”

Because groceries don't wait for the market to recover.

Neither does the mortgage.

Neither does your electric bill.

Neither does your life.

And that leads directly into the Retire NOW idea:

Money you need to live on has a different job than money you can afford to leave invested.