Set up a line of dominoes and tip the first one, and the rest fall on their own. Nobody has to push each one individually. Retirement plans can work the same way, for better or worse. One decision leans against the next, which leans against the next. When everything is standing upright, the arrangement looks solid. But if one piece near the front gets knocked over at the wrong moment, the rest can go down with it, not because they were weak, but because they were never really independent to begin with.

How One Bad Year Knocks Over the Next Decision

Here is a common pattern. Someone plans to retire at a certain age, assuming their savings will keep growing at a reasonable pace right up until, and through, retirement. Then a bad year hits, maybe right around the time they were planning to stop working. Suddenly the retirement date itself is in question. Do they delay a year or two to let things recover? Do they retire anyway and adjust spending? Do they change how much they were planning to leave behind for family? One piece of bad timing and several downstream decisions are suddenly back on the table, all at once.

This is not a story about any one bad decision. It is a story about how many retirement plans are built with each choice quietly depending on the one before it holding steady.

The Fragility of Uninterrupted Growth Assumptions

A lot of retirement math, even math done with good intentions, assumes a fairly smooth upward line. Contributions grow, markets recover, income needs stay level. Real life rarely moves in a smooth line. Markets have rough years. Health changes. Family needs shift. A plan that only works if every year behaves like an average year is a plan with no shock absorbers built in.

We are not suggesting anyone can predict which year will be the rough one. Nobody can, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The point is different: a plan that depends on nothing ever going wrong is fragile by design, whether or not anything ever does go wrong. A more resilient plan assumes some years will disappoint, and asks what happens to the rest of the dominoes when that occurs.

A Hypothetical Chain Reaction

Picture a hypothetical household planning to retire at 65, expecting their savings to cover essential monthly expenses along with a comfortable cushion for travel and gifts to grandchildren. If a downturn arrives the year before retirement and the balance is meaningfully lower than projected, several things can happen at once. The retirement date may slip. The travel budget may shrink. The plan for gifts to grandchildren may get quietly shelved. None of these were separate decisions originally. They were all resting on the same assumption, and when that assumption wobbled, they all wobbled together. This is a simplified, hypothetical illustration, not a projection or a specific recommendation.

Stopping the Chain: Covering Essentials First

One way we think about breaking this chain reaction is to separate the dominoes that absolutely must stay standing from the ones that can afford to wobble. Essential living expenses, the ones that do not pause for a bad market year, are the front of the line. If those are positioned so they do not depend on the ups and downs of any given year, then a rough patch does not automatically knock over the retirement date, the travel plans, and the legacy goals all at once. The nonessential pieces still absorb some risk, but they are not the first domino anymore, and a wobble there does not have to take down the whole row.

Building In the Gaps

The goal is not to eliminate every risk. It is to notice where the dominoes are standing too close together, so that one piece of bad timing does not have to take out the rest of the plan. That usually means asking, well before retirement day arrives, which parts of the plan are essential and which are flexible, and making sure the essential ones are not the pieces most exposed to a single bad year.

Dave Stanley is a retirement, insurance, and income specialist and host of the Safe Money and Income radio show, broadcast from Grandville, Michigan. If you would like to talk through how this idea applies to your own situation, we offer a 15-minute conversation at no cost. Call (616) 719-1979.

Written with AI assistance from Dave Stanley’s radio commentary and reviewed by Integrity Financial Service, LLC. This article is general education, not individualized advice.