You've Spent Years Building Wealth. Now You Need a Disciplined Strategy for Spending It.
You’ve saved. You’ve planned. But now you’re facing a question most retirement tools weren’t built to answer: How much can I actually spend without running out of money?
That question is harder than it sounds and getting it wrong is costly in both directions. Spend too little and you shortchange the retirement you worked for. Spend too much and you risk outliving your savings.
The Retirement Spending Question No Generic Calculator Can Answer.
At some point, every financially sophisticated person approaching retirement hits the same wall:
How much can I safely and confidently spend each year- without running out of money, overtaxing my accounts, or leaving my lifestyle to a rule of thumb?
Retirement income planning is not the same as retirement saving. Saving tools are built for accumulation. Spending is a fundamentally different problem- one that involves Social Security timing, tax-efficient withdrawal sequencing, inflation risk, sequence-of-returns risk, and legacy goals, all at once.
Most retirement income calculators don’t account for any of that. The Best Third does.
A Smarter Alternative to the 4% Rule- Built on Peer-Reviewed Research
The 4% rule was designed as a rule of thumb, not a retirement withdrawal strategy. It ignores your tax situation, your Social Security timing, what accounts you draw from, and what markets actually do year to year.
The Best Third was built by Stefan Sharkansky, PhD- a statistician and retirement income researcher- as a rigorous, evidence-based alternative. The methodology is published in the Financial Analysts Journal, not a blog post or a sales deck. It’s transparent, explainable, and grounded in actual historical market outcomes rather than Monte Carlo simulations alone.
If you’ve ever questioned whether there’s a more defensible way to plan retirement income, this was built for you.
How The Best Third's Retirement Income Planning Framework Works
The platform separates retirement spending into two categories- not for simplicity’s sake, but because it’s the structurally correct way to approach the problem.
Free to Use. Built for Investors Who Do Their Own Thinking.
More than 2,500 households have created retirement income plans with The Best Third, with a median portfolio of $3 million. Many are engineers, physicians, scientists, software developers, executives, CFPs, CPAs, and other experienced investors who want to understand — not simply accept — the reasoning behind their retirement spending strategy. The platform is currently free in Plan Mode. No sales call. No advisor required. No black box.
In the media
The Best Third’s retirement income research and methodology have been featured in:
The Same Rigor You Applied to Saving, Now Applied to Spending.
The Best Third is a free retirement income planning tool for people who want to understand their retirement spending strategy — not just accept it.
Built on peer-reviewed research. Transparent assumptions. No sales process.
Testimonials