Two neighbors retire with identical savings and earn the identical average return over twenty years. One runs out of money. The other leaves an inheritance. The difference wasn't skill or spending. It was the order the returns arrived in.
While you're saving, order doesn't matter much. A bad year early or late nets out the same. Withdrawals change the math completely. Sell shares into a down market in year two of retirement and those shares are gone for good, so they never ride the recovery. The portfolio takes two hits at once, the market's and yours, and the damage compounds from a smaller base for decades. Planners call it sequence of returns risk. I call it the bad-luck tax, because that's what it feels like to the person it lands on.
You can't schedule your retirement for a bull market. You can build buffers so a rough first act doesn't write the whole story. A cash bucket holding a year or two of planned withdrawals lets you leave the portfolio alone during a downturn. Flexible spending, where travel and extras throttle back in bad years, does more than people expect. Income that doesn't ride the market at all, like Social Security, a pension, or an annuity covering the non-negotiable bills, shrinks the amount you're forced to sell at the wrong time. Some retirees use whole life cash value as that side reserve too, drawing on it in down years instead of selling shares.
Each buffer has a price. Cash drags in good years, annuities trade flexibility for certainty, and policy loans reduce a policy's cash value and death benefit until repaid. You're not eliminating risk, you're choosing which one to hold.
The wider view of turning savings into income is in turning a pile into a paycheck. If retirement is inside ten years for you, sequence risk belongs on your planning list now, not at the retirement party.