Volatility Investing: What It Means for Women Approaching Retirement

The question changes as retirement gets closer. For thirty years, it was, “How much can this grow?” Approaching the end of a career, it becomes, “How much of this can I count on?”

Those two questions have very different answers. Growth is a portfolio question. Reliability is a structural question, and building that structure starts with covering your essential expenses through income that arrives whether markets are up or down.

Once your baseline is funded, a market decline might change your account balance, but it doesn’t change whether the bills get paid. The rest of the portfolio can then be invested for growth, legacy, and lifestyle, which is a very different job from acting as your paycheck.

I’m Michael Ginsberg, JD, CFP®, founder of Ginsberg Financial Strategies in Walnut Creek. I built this practice after watching careful savers stay fully exposed to market conditions at the exact point in life when that exposure costs the most.

This guide is written for the client I work with most often: a woman who has done everything right, built a portfolio she is proud of, and wants it managed properly without turning financial oversight into a second job.

What Does “Volatility Investing” Mean

The phrase covers two different things, which is partly why it causes so much confusion.

In its most common industry usage, volatility investing means treating volatility itself as something to trade. FINRA describes these as volatility-linked exchange-traded products tied to the VIX index, including inverse and leveraged versions, and notes that they generally are not designed to be held long term. Their value can move sharply over very short periods.

A separate approach, usually called low-volatility or minimum-volatility investing, builds an equity portfolio around stocks that have historically shown smaller price swings. This is a security-selection strategy aimed at achieving market-like returns with shallower drawdowns.

Our work starts in a different place. Before making any decisions about market exposure, we build the income that covers your essential expenses. The rest of this guide explains why that specific order matters most in the years immediately surrounding your retirement date.

Why This Question Lands Differently for Women

Retirement planning isn’t one-size-fits-all, and standard advice often falls short for women due to three distinct, measurable realities:

• The money needs to last longer. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a woman reaching age 65 in 2024 can expect 20.8 additional years of life, compared with 18.4 years for a man of the same age. That 2.4-year average gap makes planning to age 95 a practical baseline, and a longer horizon gives an early setback more years to compound against you.
• The contribution years often look different. Career pauses for caregiving, a later peak earning window, or years in lower-paid roles all shape what the portfolio looks like at 62. The result is frequently a portfolio that has to work harder per dollar.
• You may be managing it alone later. Because of differences in life expectancy, many married women eventually manage the household portfolio on their own. A strategy you cannot explain clearly to yourself is one you abandon during a difficult market, and in difficult markets, abandoning it costs the most.

Our guide to retirement planning for women covers the broader picture around these three factors.

Why the Order of Your Returns Matters More Than the Average

A 30% market decline at age 45 is uncomfortable, but largely survivable. You have two decades of salary contributions still arriving and plenty of time for the account to rebuild. That same 30% decline at age 66 lands on a portfolio that has stopped receiving contributions and has started funding your daily life.

That difference has a name: sequence of returns risk. The order in which your annual returns arrive matters just as much as your average return across the whole period. Two portfolios can post identical averages over 30 years and finish in completely different places depending on when the down years happen.

The mechanism is straightforward. When you withdraw funds during a decline, you have to sell more shares to raise the same amount of cash. Those shares are gone permanently, meaning the account has to rebuild from a smaller base even after prices recover. Our article on sequence of returns risk works through this arithmetic in detail.

This is the exact risk that a well-built retirement structure is designed to address.

When a market downturn occurs, it plays a central role in your long-term financial outcomes.

Two Things Are True at Once

Market declines have historically been followed by recoveries. That is the foundational argument for staying invested, and it is a sound one.

A recovery only benefits the capital that is still in the account when it arrives. Selling positions during a decline converts a paper loss into a permanent one, and money moved to the sidelines frequently misses the earliest and fastest part of a rebound.

Both facts point to the same conclusion: The goal is to build a plan you can hold through a full market cycle without needing to make a speculative call about what happens next. Holding firm through a decline is far easier when your grocery bill doesn’t depend on the outcome.

Income First, Then Growth

This is where our approach differs from conventional retirement advice.

Much of traditional planning manages market risk by adjusting your spending: Take less in down years. Sequence your account distributions carefully. All of that asks one portfolio to serve as both your growth engine and your paycheck, meaning every market year forces a decision between the two.

The Lifetime Wealth Blueprint℠ starts somewhere else. We build your core income first, using sources that pay on their own schedule and do not depend on what the market did last quarter. Social Security is part of that foundation, and the rest is structured to work right alongside it. We call the result a Personal Pension-Like Paycheck, because it behaves the way a pension does: a predictable amount arriving on a predictable date.

Once that baseline covers your essentials, the invested portion of your portfolio gets a different assignment. It funds growth, legacy goals, and the discretionary side of your lifestyle. It stays broadly diversified across asset classes and regions, and it can be managed for the long horizon it actually has, because it is no longer the thing standing between you and next month’s living expenses.

Our guaranteed retirement income guide covers the income side in depth, and our case study on strategic portfolio management in a volatile market shows both halves working together.

Five Questions to Ask Before You Delegate Your Portfolio

If you are hiring a professional so you do not have to manage this yourself, these five questions will tell you most of what you need to know about their process:

1. How does my income get covered if the market has a bad three years? Look for a specific, structural answer. Vague reassurance about long-term averages does not fund a mortgage payment.
2. What are the total, all-in costs? This includes advisory fees, underlying fund expenses, and trading costs. Ask for the combined number, not just the headline fee.
3. How does the portfolio strategy connect to my monthly income plan? An answer that covers only investments, with nothing about income stability, is only half a plan.
4. What conditions would make this approach underperform? Every approach has them. An advisor who cannot name theirs has not thought carefully enough about yours.
5. Can you explain the whole thing in one paragraph? An approach you cannot easily restate to yourself is one you will struggle to hold onto during a rough stretch.

Our guide on the cost of DIY retirement planning covers the trade-offs of handling these decisions on your own.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Covering My Essentials With Reliable Income Cost Me Growth?

It can, and that is the honest trade-off. Dollars allocated to dependable income are dollars not exposed to market growth. What you receive in exchange is a baseline that holds regardless of conditions, and a growth portfolio you can leave alone through a downturn because nothing you need day-to-day depends on it. Whether that trade makes sense depends on how much of your monthly spending the portfolio has to support.

I Am Five Years Away From Retirement. Is It Too Early to Address This?

Five years out is close to ideal. The years immediately before and after your retirement date carry the highest sequence of returns risk, and structural changes are easier to make while you are still earning. Our five years from retirement allocation guide covers that transition specifically.

What if I Prefer to Buy, Hold, and Ride Out Downturns?

That is a legitimate approach when two conditions hold true: Your core living expenses are covered by income sources outside the portfolio, and you can watch a 40% decline without changing course. The first condition is what makes the second one realistic. Most investors overestimate their tolerance for a large decline until they are actually living off the account.

Does This Replace Traditional Diversification?

No. Broad diversification across asset classes and regions stays foundational to the invested portion of the portfolio. Building an income floor works alongside diversification; it does not substitute for it.

Let’s Talk About Where You Stand

If you are within a few years of stepping away from your career and want to confirm that your portfolio is properly structured for the transition, we can help you build a plan that holds up regardless of what the market does next.

Schedule a conversation with our Walnut Creek office to review where things stand.

Protect what you have and create lifetime income.

This material is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute investment, tax, or legal advice, or a recommendation of any security or strategy. Investing involves risk, including possible loss of principal. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Diversification and asset allocation do not ensure a profit or protect against loss. No strategy can guarantee a profit or eliminate the risk of loss. Any strategy’s suitability depends on your individual circumstances. Please consult a qualified professional regarding your specific situation.