ChooseFI · Monday, October 26, 2026
Gilbert recommends tracking an entire year of actual spending three years out from retirement instead of relying on general guidelines or macro estimates. He explains that tracking real expenses captures material one-off items like annual property taxes and insurance bills.
“As you're trying to project, what is my retirement life going to cost? Well, I don't really know what our current life costs. I can get a macro number, but I can't look my category. I can't think about how those categories are going to change. So we went 11 months. I tried to go a year, but it was laborious.”
“tracking a full year of actual spending is what we did. And then we said, okay, we have a good baseline now. How's this going to change when we retire?”