Last week, I wrote about the problem with retirement spending: How much should you spend during retirement? If you spend too much, you run the risk of depleting your savings. But if you spend too little, you’re sacrificing the opportunity to make the most of your money, to “drink life to the lees”. One of the guiding principles in retirement planning is that there’s a “safe withdrawal rate”, a pace at which you can access your investments so that your nest egg will last for thirty years (or longer). For simplicity’s sake, a lot of folks talk about the “four-percent rule”: Generally speaking, it’s safe to withdraw 4% from your investment portfolio every year without risk of running out of money.