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I'm 63 With $1.5M. Can I Spend $10K a Month?
You’ve saved $1.5 million. Now comes the real test.
Can it produce $10,000 a month, or will that pace drain your portfolio?
Most retirees do not get a clear answer until it is too late.
The issue is not just how much you have. It is whether your portfolio was built to pay you, not just grow.
That difference can determine whether your money lasts decades or starts breaking down early.
Sequence of returns, taxes on withdrawals, healthcare costs, and whether the 4% rule still applies all play a role.
Fiduciary advisors created a breakdown showing what drives sustainable income and why the same $1.5M can produce very different outcomes.
If you have $1M or more invested, do not guess.
Est. 2026 · Vol. I · The Daily Grievance
Grump News
"The worst thing that happened to me today that you NEED to know about. And some other news stuff."
❖ The Gripe ❖
A Personal Affront, Reported Faithfully
It has been too hot to sleep for a week. Last night I lay there doing arithmetic about how many hours were left. So I went looking for help, and the experts have published eight tricks. Keep the sunlight out during the day. Move where you sleep. Use fans carefully. That is the science. Two researchers, a whole article, and the best of it is close your curtains and go lie down somewhere else. I have been doing that badly on my own for sixty years.
❖ The Damage Report ❖
Today's News, Ranked By How Much It Ruined My Mood
🔥 Most Enraging
The Pokemon Company is opening five pop-up card shops in Japan next week, and anyone of elementary school age or older has to submit to a facial recognition scan at the door. This is to stop scalpers. If you step out to use the restroom without telling a staff member first, you are not getting back in. The face data is kept for an unspecified amount of time. I bought baseball cards out of a bin and nobody ever needed to see my face.
😩 Most Exhausting
Staff at Hersheypark in Pennsylvania had to remove a fawn that came in through an employee entrance and settled down by a tree next to a busy walkway. They put a towel over its head and carried it out. The park later said the visit did not cause any interruptions to normal park operations, which is a sentence written by someone very tired. Larry has been going through the same back door for nine years and still waits outside it for permission.
😤 Unreasonably Annoying
A trial of eight hundred and thirty children under six found that a liquid brushed onto a tooth for a few seconds stops the decay in more than half of cases. No drill, no needle, no sedation. Twelve million dollars of government money to establish that you can paint a cavity into submission. The catch is the silver in it turns the tooth dark forever. I would have taken the dark tooth. I would have taken a dark mouth.
🤷 Somehow Also Happening
The FCC announced this week that new foreign-made humanoid robots, robot dogs, and solar inverters can no longer be imported, because a foreign government could be driving them or listening through them. Most of them come from China. There are exceptions if somebody decides a particular machine is harmless. Somewhere in a federal building this week, a grown adult had to write the words robot dog into a national security order. I hope they took a moment.
❖ And Some Other Stuff ❖
Briefly, And With Limited Enthusiasm
▸ A microwave and a fryer together make a less greasy french fry — Food scientists in Illinois ran fries through a hybrid of microwave heating and regular frying and got less oil soaked into them, because the microwave drives the water out from the inside and that pushes back against the oil coming in. Same crisp outside. Less grease. Funded by the Department of Agriculture. I have eaten the greasy version my whole life and I am not sure I want the correction this late.
▸ Songbirds evolved in rare bursts, not steadily — Researchers at Michigan measured a hundred and seventy thousand bones off fifteen thousand museum birds using a tool that does twelve bones in forty-five seconds, and found songbirds did not change gradually at all. They sat still for ages and then went through sudden explosions of change, the biggest one thirty-five million years ago when the planet cooled hard. Long nothing, brief upheaval, long nothing. I recognize the schedule.
▸ A man returned his grandfather's library books 116 years late — A man walked into the library in Llanrwst, Wales, and returned two books his grandfather borrowed in 1910. The grandfather served in both world wars and evidently never got round to it. The staff were thrilled and posed for a photograph with him. A hundred and sixteen years. There is a book on my nightstand from the spring that I am now going to look at differently.
Be miserable responsibly.
— The Grump · (and Larry)
The worst thing that happened today. And a few other things.