The Go-Go, Slow-Go and No-Go Years of Retirement

Picture this: you’re planning “retirement” like it’s one big phase. Golf every day, travel the world, maybe some time with the grandkids. But here’s what I learned when I took my mom to Europe and watched a retired NBA player struggle through the tour. Retirement isn’t one phase—it’s three completely different stages. And if you don’t plan for all of them, you’re setting yourself up for some expensive surprises. I call them the Go-Go, Slow-Go and No-Go years of retirement. Each phase has different energy levels, different priorities, and most importantly, different financial needs.Your 65-year-old self will spend money very differently than your 85-year-old self.

The question is: are you planning for both?

Show Notes: The Go-Go, Slow-Go and No-Go Years of RetirementDownturn

Hey there! Welcome back to the Heart of Your Money. I’m Zena. Today I’m going to talk about something I think every retiree or soon-to-be retiree needs to hear. It is the reality that retirement isn’t just one big phase. There are so many versions of retirement.

In fact, I don’t even think I like the word retirement. What does it bring to mind? It feels like it’s turned-off Archie Bunker in the recliner, grumping around all day. I don’t know why I have that in my head right now, but I just know that the term retirement is so old school because there’s so many different versions of it.

You know, we have a freebie on our website and it’s called Reinspire. And that was me trying to come up with a word other than “your retirement workbook.” I was like, “Come on, there’s got to be something catchier.” And so I do like “reinspire,” but it is a mouthful. It sounds a little bit more fun, right? It’s about the next stage.

So today I’m going to break down three phases of retirement—slash reinspire. I’ve got it down to these three phases, and I didn’t coin them. Trust me, somebody else came up with them, but I loved it and I’ve kept it in the back of my head. So they’re called the “go-go years,” the “slow-go years,” and the “no-go years of retirement.” Sounds cute, but it’s a real framework that helps my brain understand. And I think you’ll understand—even just by me sharing those with you, you kind of get a sense. Once you hear it, you won’t look at your retirement plan the same way.

So if you’ve ever wondered “How much should I be spending in retirement? What should I be planning for and when?” or even “What if I want to live it up now but still be okay later?”—that’s a common one in our office—then keep listening. I’m going to break it down.

The Go-Go Years

Okay, so starting with the go-go years. This is the fun phase. You’re newly retired, you’re healthy, active, and doing all the things you dreamed about. You know, we have these conversations with you years before you retire—five years, four years—and then we get closer and counting down, and we really want to work on what does that picture look like for you. And a lot of times it’s doing some fun things that you now have time to continue doing.

That could be travel, golf—pickleball is a big one in our office that I was just chatting about. The travel one is big too because I know that we’re plugged in. We listen, even probably too much. We listen to the news and radio and all these shows, and travel’s getting harder, whether it’s flights… Right now we’ve got the trade wars and so crossing border issues. We know there’s all these things that we want to do, and we know that it’s going to get harder as we age. And so that’s a big one—getting these bucket list trips out of the way, wanting to enjoy them.

Maybe it’s also spoiling the grandkids a little bit and spending more time with them, especially if they might live in different areas. And so, oh, I’m thinking of this couple—bought the trailer and they hit the highway because they have three children all in different provinces, and luckily they’re all provinces that border each other, and they’re able to just do these road trips ongoing.

This is the time to say yes. This is the go-go years. But here’s the catch: it’s also when you’re likely to spend the most. You are no longer saving; you are drawing down, which is a whole other emotional can of worms on yourself. And it can feel scary. Now imagine if you don’t have a plan. I don’t even want—we’re just assuming that everyone listening and we’re helping you out is that you’re actually making plans. So this can be a scary time, and so you actually want to have a system and have this all mapped out.

So how do you make this work? I’ll give you a tip I use in my practice. Some people are “fill your own bucket” types. They’re disciplined. They track the year, mark savings each month for things like Christmas or vacations, and they’ve got the buckets—and I love the term buckets. And they actually know that they’re getting excess each month and they put it into their own buckets.

Others, they need a little bit of help. They want their advisor to do the heavy lifting. The way they’ve processed their budgeting and their cash flow all through their years has been where we’ve kind of automated for them. They want to continue doing that. They don’t want to learn a new system, and I wouldn’t suggest that to too many people.

So to plan the income flows, we make the buckets automatic and we manage the withdrawals in a tax-efficient way, meaning we make sure to plan out that we’ve got—whether it’s high-interest savings or cash, whatever it is—we know that this bucket is earmarked for those things that they want to do in the go-go years. We’ve planned for them. We have an idea, we want to stock it up so that there’s a guilt-free bucket to spend on those times.

I had a client who set up a separate travel account. We funded it every single month. When winter hit, the trip was already paid for. And it’s funny, it kind of feels like it’s free at that time, she was saying. And it’s like no guilt, no budgeting scramble—just freedom, feel-good, planned for.

So whatever way we structure it, whatever the system is, we hash it out, we make sure that we’ve got it planned for. There’s a system and the goal is the same: freedom with some boundaries.

So if you’re listening and you’re thinking, “Yes, I’m in this phase, I’m in the go-go. I want to make the most of it,” good! I’ve shared this story before because I’m glad that you already have this idea of “Yes, these are the times I want to do it.”

Because I’ve shared this story about when my mom and I were in Europe and we came back, and it was—I was soaking it in. It was almost like watching a story from outside and I was the outsider watching it. Because we were traveling, we did a couple different things, but we were traveling with this group and almost everybody was older. And it dawned on me and I was soaking it in, and when I came back I was on a mission and I shared: we can’t wait for these things.

I watched mobility issues with this group and it was incredible. Retired NBA star—he had amazing stories and chatting with him. Super tall guy, but he could barely walk. He was in his late seventies. He was a retired orthopedic surgeon as well, and he could barely walk and they were doing the tour and it was their bucket list. And we got talking and he said, “Yeah, I wish I’d done this about five years earlier.”

And that’s when the light bulb started to happen. And I was watching my mom and we had to take breaks. We witnessed the physical toll on long days and sightseeing. I saw older people, younger people than my mom’s age, but they all had a struggle of some kind. We need to do some things sooner than later.

And that’s when I had that light bulb moment: “Wow, why are we waiting to do this?” And there’s some guilt. Why did I wait so long with my mom to do this? Because if it would’ve been five or ten years earlier, we would’ve seen more. We would’ve maybe enjoyed it a little bit more and it just would’ve been less stressful.

I think we need to do some things sooner than later because the go-go years won’t last forever. Now that’s not meant to scare you. It’s meant to empower you to use this time while also planning ahead for what’s coming next. So it’s also not about being haphazard and just going on spending sprees and spending it all now saying, “You only live once.” YOLO—I think that’s a term I’ve heard my kids use. YOLO—you don’t live forever. I think that’s what it stands for. So we have to have some purpose in planning.

But those are the go-go years, and we need to realize that we’re going to be active, we’re going to have things that we want to do, and those are the years we should be doing them.

The Slow-Go Years

Next we shift into the slow-go years. This is usually, if I were to put ages around them, I know it’s really hard because everybody’s different—but usually the slow-go years, they slow down and maybe that’s in your mid-seventies, could be early eighties. For some, it’s going to be different for everyone.

But you’re getting a sense here that it is the slowing down. You’re still independent, but things start to creep up, right? Like, you know, travel is less, more time at home. Maybe you’re hiring someone to do a little bit of the chores or errands—snow removal, mowing your lawn. I can’t speak right now. Mowing your yard, whatever it is.

Spending changes too. So what you spend your money on will change during the slow-go years. I think discretionary costs like travel and entertainment usually go down. Traveling might be a little bit more local. It might not be those big international trips—for some it might be way less.

Other expenses might go up like that home maintenance piece or prescriptions, or maybe hiring help for running around. Or you’re like me—you already spend money on these things, but you want to make sure they continue. The point is these expenses might come up. This is when your cash flow plan should adjust with your lifestyle.

You might not need the same amount every month that you did during the go-go years. And if you’re not already reviewing withdrawals annually with your advisor, this is the time to start. This is where we monitor and see if we need to adjust income. I like to always ask when we meet, we catch up, “Okay, so how’s cash flow? Is there enough coming in as there is going out?” And that’s when you’ll learn. And I’ve learned different things.

I’ve learned that, “Hey, there is, but it feels more tight just because of inflation and things cost more.” Or usually in the slow-go—and I’ll talk about the no-go years of retirement here in a minute—but this is when it’s like, “Ah, yeah, my savings are just adding up. I’m really not spending and my sweet spot of that emergency savings bucket in our savings account is actually going up all the time.” So this is where we check in and monitor.

One smart move I see is people repurposing those old fun money buckets. And so when I talked about the go-go years and you’ve got these buckets—maybe it’s vacation or spending extra money doing all the activities that you want to do, whatever it is, and they cost more—this is where you can repurpose those buckets and use the cash. The vacation fund, I’m just throwing out there, becomes the home help fund.

Meaning, you know what? Rather than us sanding and painting our own fence and deck like we used to all the years, I’m going to actually pay someone to do that. I’m waiting for my dad—Dad, if you’re listening, please stop climbing the scaffolding and painting the outside of your own house. We got funds. This is the time to relinquish some of those things and use your money.

Here’s another one: the holiday shopping budget sometimes shrinks and that money supports new things like those home renovations making life easier. Maybe it’s about—I’m thinking of one in our office—relocating the laundry from the basement to the main floor. Well, that’s going to cost a little bit of money for plumbing and a little bit of the renos, but it was so worth it. And they just used money that they had been saving up, not on purpose, but their savings was going up because they weren’t doing as many things anymore.

Now in the slow-go, gifting smaller. So here’s another thing in our office right now: gifting smaller but frequent gifts with that extra money in the slow-go years. And then of course in no-go years of retirement, there’s some planning there of gifting if there’s enough. But I don’t want to say too much—is there ever too much money? But if there’s ever more than needed assets, there’s gifting.

But in this time, this is where I’m seeing in our office: smaller but frequent gifts. So the latest one has been two grandchildren, and in the one case it was paying tuition for two grandkids, two different ages, but both—one just starting university, the other one in their, I think it was second or third year nursing. Anyway, grandkids were getting $5,000 each to pay tuition.

And then in the other one, it’s because there’s excess cash. It was about helping for down payment on houses for a couple of grandkids and earmarking. Because they get—it’s so funny. Some of the conversation, and I totally get it because I’ve shared this with my kids, is that what’s fair is fair.

And I remember that as a kid when the kids were a little—fair is fair. And so if you’re going to give to one grandkid, knowing that you want to kind of earmark the same amount at a time for the next one. And for this one it was about home purchase—$10,000 each towards their down payment that they’d already saved.

And it didn’t hurt them financially, the grandparents, at all. They had, in fact, their sweet spot—that emergency cash savings—just kept growing so much that we needed to shave off and do something with it, and they didn’t have a need for it. They had everything they wanted and needed. And so now it was time to give those small, tiny gifts that made them feel so good to help.

So this is the phase where simplifying makes a big difference, and just kind of repurposing those money buckets that maybe you’re going to use for different things.

Now in the slow-go years, how do you know? So I thought about this when I was putting this together for us to talk about. How do you know when you’ve entered the slow-go years? Is it just like all of a sudden the sign flashes up: “Okay, you’re in the slow-go now”? Honestly, I don’t know if we’ll know. It’s a time that we look back and we might notice, but it doesn’t really matter because as that happens, it’ll just be a natural transition that we can help lead through.

And that’s why we plan for all three phases up front, so you’re not caught off guard when life gradually shifts. We’ve got some flexibility, but you know, we’ve mapped it out and knowing as things transition, we got it covered. We’re good.

The No-Go Years of Retirement

Finally we reach the no-go years. So I had put an age 80 and then question mark on my notes here for us to talk about. And I’m like, I don’t know what age that is. The no-go years—for some it’s 85, for some it’s 90, for some it’s a little bit earlier. And I think we’re not—I’m not going to put a number to it—but the no-go years are quieter.

You might need help around the house or enjoy the retirement living offerings. I call it the all-inclusive—I call one here in town the “all-inclusive love boat” because I remember it was new. I went in a few years back and it was just—it had this grand fireplace and someone had a little dog, a little tiny white dog, and it had this bejeweled collar on it. And I was like, “I feel like I’m walking into like this yacht club of some kind.” And in fact it wasn’t, but it was a very, very nice and comfortable.

So that’s the place that you might be in the no-go years. If you’re lucky and that’s what you want, you might still be in your home. But this is a time when you might need a little tiny extra help, or you might not want to do those things anymore.

The stage isn’t about money—it’s about dignity, comfort, legacy. Those are the three things that come to mind for me, mostly about comfort and ease. Here’s the thing though: expenses don’t disappear. But we want to simplify them, and that’s what I love about the idea of the retirement living—the all-inclusive and the meals and everything. And the only thing you have to pay for maybe is a cell phone and cable. Everything else is covered.

The expenses though, they’re not going to disappear. They may not drop significantly because if you want to have that comfort and dignity, you might have to pay for it. But what you spend money on will be different. That’s why the work we do in these early years really, really matters—in talking about it and planning for it. We’ve got it—it’s fluid. I know it’s going to change, but we’ve at least planned for it.

Your go-go planning isn’t just for vacations—it’s the time to set the stage for your future self. Now, in these no-go years, it’s about building the stability. So you can see it’s like this one big rippling effect that everything leads to the next piece. And we just want to make sure we’re thinking about all of them, and that’s why we need to plan.

This is when your income should continue to come from simple, stable sources. So thinking the CPP, OAS, your structured RIF withdrawal plan—RIF being after your RSPs, you’ve turned on the tap—whatever buckets they are, they’re stable. And if you’ve delayed CPP, OAS until 70, you’re now reaping those full benefits. Those monthly payments are higher, they’re inflation protected, they’re predictable, they’re part of the plan, which means more breathing room in this phase of life.
One Thoughtful Plan for Three Phases

So income might not decrease in these stages—go-go, slow-go, no-go. They might all need the same amount. And of course, in planning for as things cost more, you give yourself that little bit of inflation raise in there. We plan for that, but the use of the money will be different. The cash flow structure—that’s going to be different.

Okay, so go-go, slow-go, no-go years—three stages, three different cash flow needs, and one thoughtful plan.

Here’s what I want you to take away: retirement isn’t a one-size-fits-all budget. Your spending, your energy, your priorities—they all shift. They change, and your money should shift with them.

If you’re not sure what phase you’re in or how to plan for the next one, reach out. That’s what I’m here for. You don’t have to fill every bucket on your own. We got you.

Thanks for listening. Till next time, take care.