Timing is everything.

That applies to a lot of situations in life — including your prospects for not outliving your money when you retire.

You already know about the hazards of investment risk. When you put your money in the stock market over the long term, you’re bound to have some years when your portfolio ends in the red. And if you’ve been saving for decades, you’ve experienced a bear market or two, when stocks fall 20% from their highs and sometimes can take a year or more to recover.

Even though no one likes them, such down years can provide a lot of buying opportunities when you are investing for the long run. “The lower the market goes, the better the investment going forward,” said certified financial planner and financial adviser Mari Adam.

But declining markets can do a number on the sustainability of your savings when they occur in the early years of your retirement.

So if you plan to call it quits at work within a decade, or you’ve just retired, you may want to take steps to minimize what’s called sequence risk, which is the risk that the market falls, reducing the value of your portfolio, during the earliest years of your retirement.

A recent analysis from Morningstar found that negative stock market returns in the first five years of retirement are the most likely to increase your chance of outliving your money .

Here’s why: You’re withdrawing income from your portfolio to live on at the same time your investments are losing value. And that means you’ll need even stronger gains going forward “just to get back above water,” said Jeffrey Ptak, a chartered financial analyst who is managing director for Morningstar Research Services. “In effect, you’re locking in those losses and leaving yourself with less capital to benefit from subsequent recoveries.”

How to protect against sequence risk when you’re nearing retirement

You can’t control for the growing economic and geopolitical uncertainty that has been rocking markets of late — and trying to “time” the market is usually a fool’s errand. But the good news is there are a few things you can do to mitigate both sequence risk and investment risk for your portfolio as you approach retirement.

First, make sure your allocation is more balanced between stocks and bonds. While stocks are more volatile, you still need them for growth in your assets over the long term — since you may live in retirement for 20 to 30 years. And bonds typically offer ballast during stock market routs. If your retirement money is primarily invested in a target-date fund, it’s likely that your fund’s allocation will be adjusted to gradually reduce your exposure to equities as your retirement year approaches.

Second, plan to have access to at least a year’s worth of living expenses in cash-equivalent assets such as short-term bonds, CDs or money market funds. It’s money you can live on when you want to avoid having to sell off any part of your portfolio in a down market.

Third, figure out a sound withdrawal strategy that helps you meet your goals within your means. To do that, consider a number of interconnected variables.

For example, how much money will you need to supplement your fixed income sources like Social Security and pension benefits? What type of return can your chosen asset allocation realistically generate? And what changes can you make if there is a discrepancy between the withdrawal you need and the return your portfolio is generating?

How much flexibility can you have in altering your withdrawal amounts from year to year to be responsive to market returns? Can you afford to take out less in down years and more if your portfolio racks up big gains?

How much assurance do you need that you will not outlive your money — a 90% chance? An 85% chance? Morningstar’s 2024 State of Retirement Income goes into the pros and cons of a variety of withdrawal strategies that you might consider.

Also, it’s worth noting that in scenarios where you choose a very high probability that you will not outlive your money, you’ll be more constrained in the withdrawals you can take every year and be more likely to leave behind a large sum relative to where you started. That may be great if your plan is to leave money to heirs. But it’s not great if you’re less concerned with bequests and more concerned about living comfortably in retirement.

“(By) starting with a fairly low initial withdrawal and never revisiting it again, ‘succeeding’ often means not only not running out of money but also growing the portfolio substantially over the 30-year horizon,” said Christine Benz, Morningstar’s director of personal finance and retirement planning, and author of How to Retire: 20 Lessons for a Happy, Successful and Wealthy Retirement.

For example, she said, say you start retirement with a $1 million portfolio made up of 40% stocks and 60% bonds. If you select a very conservative 3.7% annual withdrawal rate, you are very likely to die with $1.33 million or more left over if you spend 30 years in retirement. If your portfolio is more heavily weighted in stocks, your ending balance would likely be even higher.

All this to say, there is no one right answer for everyone. There are a lot of levers you can set and adjust to protect your nest egg from being depleted prematurely while satisfying your needs and goals in retirement.

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