For People Who Want to Know- With Confidence- How Much They Can Spend in Retirement

Saving for retirement has a clear goal: accumulate enough. Spending in retirement is harder. The question isn’t just mathematical. It’s psychological. You go from a paycheck to drawing from savings you spent decades building, and even people who are financially secure can find that transition difficult.

The Best Third was built for people who want to understand their retirement income plan well enough to trust it- and trust it enough to actually spend.

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Smiling couple meeting with an advisor holding a clipboard, discussing retirement income planning at a table with a laptop.

Who Uses The Best Third​

Users include engineers, executives, physicians, scientists, software developers, attorneys, CFPs, CPAs, other financial professionals, and experienced individual investors. Most manage their own investments; others work with advisors but remain actively involved in the decisions. User portfolios span from 6 to 8 figures, with a median $3 million. Most users are at or near conventional retirement age or already retired, while many others are planning for early retirement.

What they share isn’t a job title or portfolio size. Some have done extensive research, built their own spreadsheets, or already implemented part of a strategy. What they all want is a retirement-income framework that is rigorous enough to trust and clear enough to follow.

What Brings People Here

The most common question is simple: How much can I safely spend- and actually believe the answer? For many people, spending feels harder than saving ever did. One retiree told us after implementing the methodology, “I’m sleeping better at night.” Another said the approach “seems to reduce a lot of stress.” Others arrive with more specific questions:
  • How much income should I protect from market risk?
  • How do I coordinate a TIPS ladder with Social Security, and which bonds should I actually buy?
  • How do I sequence withdrawals across from taxable, traditional, and Roth accounts?
  • How would my plan have held up through difficult markets, like the dot-com crash or 1929?
  • Am I being too cautious and leaving too much unspent?
Many are drawn to the simple paycheck-and-bonus framework: predictable, inflation-protected income for the amount they want to secure, plus variable income from the equity portfolio. The methodology is sophisticated; the framework it produces is straightforward and easy to understand and explain.
The Best Third Retirement

Powerful Enough for Analytical Investors - But You Don't Have to Be a Gearhead

Some users want to audit every assumption, export the data, and compare the results with other tools, their own models, or a plan created by an advisor. The platform supports that and is designed to be transparent enough to evaluate, not a black box that asks you to accept an answer you can’t inspect. The methodology is published in the Financial Analysts Journal and the math is fully documented.

But many others want something simpler: a credible answer to how much they can spend, grounded in something more defensible than a rule of thumb.

One user wrote that The Best Third provided “actionable steps that provide confidence and clarity.” Another said: “This is the first time in my 61 years that I’ve felt comfortable and confident in a spending plan. I have spent the past 20 years reading and researching retirement spending and this is the only one that rang true for me.”

The Best Third is designed to serve both: rigorous where it needs to be, but clear enough that you don’t need to master the math to use it.

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