We’re people like you who created a solution for people like us.
The Best Third got started when Irene asked her husband Stefan how much they could safely withdraw from their savings each year when they retire. Stefan is a PhD statistician who specializes in finance. He discovered that most of the conventional advice on retirement spending, like the “4% Rule”, will neither protect you from running out of money, nor provide enough for you to enjoy the best quality of life that you can really afford. He found some authoritative research papers with sound approaches, but more work was needed to turn the theory into a practical solution. So he wrote a paper which describes a practical and validated implementation of the best retirement spending strategy. That paper has been published in the Financial Analysts Journal, a leading peer-reviewed journal for finance professionals.
Stefan and Irene live in Lafayette, Colorado and have two grown children. They use this solution themselves to plan their future retirement spending. They are excited enough about it that they are sharing it with the world to help others like them plan and manage their retirement finances — and make the most of the best third of their lives.
About Stefan:
Stefan Sharkansky, PhD, is a statistician, entrepreneur, and retirement income researcher dedicated to helping retirees make more informed spending decisions. As the founder of The Best Third, Stefan has developed a research-driven framework, published in the peer-reviewed Financial Analysts Journal, that improves on traditional retirement withdrawal strategies and empowers retirees to spend with greater confidence while reducing the risk of both portfolio depletion and unnecessary underspending.
The approach, known as Annually Recalculated Virtual Annuity (ARVA), pairs Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) with low-cost stock index funds. ARVA enables retirees to create flexible, sustainable spending plans that balance income stability with market upside.
Prior to founding The Best Third, Stefan was a pioneer in direct indexing for individual investors and developed Personal Fund, a platform that provides mutual fund and ETF cost analysis for financial advisors.
Stefan holds a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, a Master of Science in Computer Science from Stanford University, and both a Master of Science and PhD in Statistics (specializing in financial econometrics) from the University of Washington. His research has been discussed at Morningstar, ThinkAdvisor, Kitces.com, and on numerous podcasts, and the paper has become one of the ten most-read FAJ articles of all time.
About Irene:
Irene Song is co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of The Best Third, where she oversees operations, legal, and compliance. Her background spans law, compliance, corporate governance, and executive leadership in major institutions.
Prior to joining The Best Third, Irene advised corporate clients at McCutchen, Doyle, Brown and Enersen in San Francisco and K&L Gates in Seattle, where her practice ranged from working with founders to incorporate their start-ups and obtain financing, to working on M&A transactions for large public companies. She later transitioned to in-house legal and compliance leadership, serving as a compliance attorney at Cascade Investments, which manages Bill Gates’ personal portfolio and the assets of the Gates Foundation.
Irene’s career also includes senior corporate governance roles at PACCAR, Illinois Tool Works (ITW) and Travelers, where she focused on governance, legal, finance, treasury and transactional matters.
Irene earned an A.B. in Politics from Princeton University and a J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. Her legal background, combined with extensive experience in compliance, corporate governance, and operations, provides a strong foundation for her leadership at The Best Third.