This is general information, not investment advice. Your right allocation depends on your own situation — consider speaking with a qualified financial professional.
For decades, retirement investing came with a tidy rule of thumb: subtract your age from 100, and that's the share of your money to keep in stocks. A 65-year-old would hold 35% in equities and the rest in bonds. Today, many retirees hold far more stock than that — and the old rule has quietly been rewritten.
The old rule is fading
The "100 minus your age" guideline has been revised upward in much advisory practice — to 110 or even 120 minus your age — and the classic 60/40 portfolio (60% stocks for growth, 40% bonds for stability) is increasingly treated as a floor rather than a ceiling for people entering retirement. Target-date funds, the default in most workplace plans, bake this in: their "glide paths" — the preset schedule for reducing stock exposure as you near retirement — now tend to leave a substantial equity weight in place at the target date rather than shifting heavily into bonds, as Kiplinger notes.
Why the shift happened
Three forces drove it. First, longevity: someone reaching 65 today can expect, on average, roughly two more decades of life, and a portfolio that must last 25 to 30 years needs growth, not just preservation. Second, weak bond returns: for much of the 2010s, bond yields sat near historic lows, and even now retirees have learned that inflation can quietly erode the purchasing power of fixed income. Third, the rise of target-date funds, whose designers — at firms such as Vanguard and Fidelity — have concluded that retirees need ongoing equity exposure and built that into their default products.
The risk hiding in higher stock holdings
More stocks bring a specific danger that behaves differently in retirement than during your working years: sequence-of-returns risk.
While you're saving, a market crash is survivable — you keep buying shares cheaply and recover over time. Once you're withdrawing, the math flips. A steep drop in the first years of retirement forces you to sell more shares at depressed prices to cover living costs, and those shares are gone before any rebound can lift them. The same average return, experienced in a different order, produces very different outcomes: a bear market in year one or two of retirement is far more damaging than the identical decline in year 20. The cruel timing is that a retiree's heaviest exposure to this risk coincides with the moment they start drawing the portfolio down.
How advisers manage it
Financial planners have built frameworks to blunt that risk. Bucket strategies split savings by time horizon — a near-term bucket of one to three years of expenses in cash or short bonds, a medium bucket of bonds, and a long-term bucket of stocks — so that when markets fall, the retiree spends from cash instead of selling stocks at a loss. Research by the financial planner Michael Kitces has found that bucket approaches paired with disciplined rebalancing perform much like a straightforward total-return strategy — but the visible cash reserve can stop investors from panic-selling.
A related idea, the "bond tent," temporarily raises bond holdings in the high-risk years just before and after retirement, then lets equity exposure drift back up once that danger window passes.
The bottom line
There is no universal right answer. The appropriate stock level depends on your other income (Social Security, a pension), how flexible your spending is, your health and family longevity, and your stomach for watching a portfolio fall while the bills keep coming. What the evidence does suggest is that the old shortcuts were always simplifications, and that they fit poorly with retirements that now stretch decades. Holding more stocks may well be justified — but it demands a real plan for the sequence-of-returns window around your retirement date, not just faith in the long-run average. Fidelity and other providers publish frameworks, but a fee-only adviser can model the trade-offs against your own circumstances.
