Retirement Redzone, The Last Mile

Ten straight up weeks, then a sharp pullback — and if you’re two to five years on either side of retirement, the fear is real. This is the Retirement Red Zone: the last mile into and out of your retirement date, and the most fragile window in your entire financial life.This week on Money On Tap, Ben Brayshaw and Dan Michelon turn last week’s market-history conversation into a practical playbook for anyone near retirement: how to avoid the paralysis that wrecked so many retirements in 2008–2009, and what to actually do right now.What you’ll learn:

• Why a 35-year-old and a 65-year-old should do the opposite thing in a pullback
• The accumulation-to-distribution switch most people don’t know exists
• What history says: after 40 sharp selloffs since 1980, markets were higher 75% of the time a year later
• Sequence-of-returns risk — why the first five years decide everything
• Building a 1–3 year retirement runway with ~4% cash and T-bills
• Rebalancing a 60/40 that drifted to 75/25
• Diversifying away from a top-10 that’s now 40% of the S&P (8 of them tech)
• Buffered ETFs — a 20% buffer with a 12–15% cap, explained
• Foundational income, annuities, and the tax-aware withdrawal piece most firms skip

Plus Money In The News:

• Consumer prices rose 4.2% annually in May — the highest in three years (CNBC, Jeff Cox)
• Elon Musk poised to become the first trillionaire — and just how much a trillion dollars really is
• A top JP Morgan strategist’s four ways to prep your portfolio for “considerable danger” (David Kelly)

Mentioned on air: Our short sequence-of-returns risk video — watch it at brayshawfinancial.com.Read the companion blog: brayshawfinancial.com/blog
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• If the S&P 500 is up 10%, why isn't my portfolio?
  Because the S&P 500 is cap-weighted: seven stocks absorb about a third of every dollar, and the top 10 holdings make up 35–55% of most S&P funds. In 2026 those mega-caps lagged — the Mag Seven are collectively negative — while sectors like energy (+28.1%) and technology (+26.8%) led. If your ETFs overlap in the same top names, you own the laggards several times over. The fix starts with knowing what you actually own.