The Moving Target: Why "One More Year" Never Actually Arrives

I hit my number, according to my own planning tool, sometime in the last year or two. I haven't left. I want to be precise about why, because the honest version of this is more interesting than the story people usually tell about themselves.

One More Year Syndrome gets talked about like a character flaw — a discipline problem, the same weakness that kept people from saving in the first place now keeping them from stopping. I don't think that's right, or at least I don't think it's the whole of it. The people I've watched go through this, myself very much included, aren't undisciplined. They're reacting correctly to a real, structural fact: the number was never fixed. It moves. And a moving target is a legitimate reason to keep aiming, right up until it becomes an excuse to never fire.

Here's the mechanism, stated plainly: your FI number is spend divided by withdrawal rate, and both halves of that fraction are unstable. Spend creeps because life doesn't hold still. The withdrawal rate compresses because markets get more expensive relative to what they're likely to return going forward. Move either input and the number underneath your feet shifts, even though nothing about your actual life changed.

Run it concretely. Take someone spending $80,000 a year, using the traditional 4% rule — the Trinity Study's original safe-withdrawal-rate finding, which the piece on this site titled "The 4% Rule Was Built for Thirty Years and One Country. You Might Need Fifty" covers in full. That's a $2,000,000 number. Morningstar's December 2025 guidance for new 2026 retirees projected a 3.9% safe withdrawal rate for a 30-year horizon, down from the traditional 4%, reflecting market conditions and bond yields at that time. Same spend, same life, same person — the number is now $2,051,282. Nothing moved except the market's own math, and the target shifted over $51,000 higher.

Now let the spend side move too, the way it actually does for anyone with aging parents, kids not yet through college, or a healthcare picture that isn't locked in. Add $5,000 a year — not a lavish addition. Combine that modest spend increase with the 3.9% rate and the number is $2,179,487. That's an 8.97% increase in what you supposedly need, produced by a $5,000 lifestyle nudge and a single decimal point of withdrawal-rate compression. Nobody spent recklessly. Nobody changed their life. The target still moved by nearly $180,000.

That's the math. The psychology is what makes the math keep firing.

Identity attachment to work explains plenty of OMY cases, but not mine. I detached my sense of self from this job a long time ago and I'd hand it back tomorrow without a crisis about who I am afterward. My reason is closer to what I just described: the awareness that valuations look stretched by most measures right now, that the recalibration toward 3.9% reflects exactly that, and a real, specific concern about sequence-of-returns risk given where I'd be starting the withdrawal clock.

The honest question, the one I don't have a clean answer to, is whether that reasoning is actually sound risk management or whether it's OMYS speaking a CFA's vocabulary. Sequence risk is real. Compressed forward returns are real. But "the market looks expensive" has also been true, on and off, for most of the last decade, and people who waited for cheap valuations before pulling the trigger have in many cases waited themselves out of a decade of freedom they'd already earned. I can build a defensible case for staying two more years. I could probably build an equally defensible case for staying five. That's exactly the problem: a rationalization built out of real, correct facts will remain a rationalization as long as it doesn't run out of new facts to recruit that support that defensive worldview.

Meanwhile, there is a real-world clock running underneath all of this. My parents are getting older, on a different continent, and the number of good years left to actually be present with them isn't something any withdrawal rate calculation models. Two of my kids are still home. That window closes on its own schedule regardless of what the S&P did this month or what Morningstar revises its guidance to next December. The moving target problem isn't just that the number keeps drifting upward. The price of chasing it is denominated in a currency — time with specific people, at a specific age, in a specific season of their lives and mine — that doesn't get replenished, no matter how the portfolio performs. It's the one line item in this whole equation that only ever moves one direction, and it's the one we keep leaving off our spreadsheets.