You’re Not Too Late.
You’re Just Not as Early as You Think.
Not because they ran the numbers. Because they pictured someone else’s timeline. A 25-year-old with 40 years ahead of them. Whoever started at 22 that they keep hearing about. The version of “early” that gets held up as the only version that counts.
Here’s the thing nobody mentions in that comparison: the finish line has been moving too.
Retirement ages have been climbing almost everywhere for years, and the trend isn’t slowing down. The US now sets full retirement age at 67 for anyone born in 1960 or later. The UK is raising its State Pension age from 66 to 67 right now, between 2026 and 2028, with 68 already scheduled for the mid-2040s, and there’s live debate about pulling that forward further. Across the EU, the average retirement age is still climbing from the mid-60s toward a projected average approaching 67 by 2060. A growing list of countries, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Portugal among them, now link retirement age automatically to life expectancy, so it rises on its own as people live longer. Nordic countries already sit at or near the top of that range, with Denmark, Norway and Iceland at 67 today, and Denmark scheduled to keep climbing over the next decade.
None of that is a policy opinion. Pension age gets argued over by every party in every one of these countries, for different reasons, and that argument isn’t this newsletter’s business. It’s just demographic and actuarial fact. However old you feel, the number you’re actually working toward is later than it used to be. Which means the investing horizon you’re quietly comparing yourself against a 25-year-old on is longer than the “I missed it” panic assumes.
That’s the reframe. Here’s the part that keeps it honest.
A horizon that’s shorter than a 25-year-old’s is not the same as a horizon too short to matter. But it is shorter, and shorter horizons carry a specific, real risk that a 25-year-old mostly doesn’t have to think about yet: sequence-of-returns risk.
Here’s the mechanism, stripped all the way down. Imagine two people who each start drawing income from a same-size portfolio, with the exact same average return over the years that follow, just in a different order.
Person A hits a rough patch right at the start, just as the withdrawals begin. Only after several difficult years does a strong run finally show up.
Person B gets the strong run first. Years of solid growth build a real cushion before any rough patch appears.
Same average return. Same number of years. Wildly different outcome. Withdrawing money during a downturn locks in losses at exactly the wrong price, so a bad run right at the start of the withdrawal years does far more damage than the identical bad run showing up later, once a cushion has already been built. That’s sequence risk, in full. It’s the actual mathematical reason a shorter horizon deserves real respect, not a vague “it’s riskier because I’m older” feeling, but a specific, nameable mechanism with a specific shape.
Worth being precise about which years this actually applies to, since the two phases pull in opposite directions. Everything above describes the years you’re drawing income out of the portfolio. While you’re still adding money to it, a rough patch works the other way entirely. Regular contributions buy more at lower prices, and a long runway ahead gives that cheaper stock plenty of time to recover and compound. Early volatility only turns dangerous once you’ve stopped adding money and started taking it out. Before that point, it’s mostly just noise, occasionally even useful noise.
One more thing worth separating out, since this newsletter reads a little differently depending on where you live. In the US, a large share of retirement money sits in accounts you personally choose investments for and personally manage the drawdown of, 401(k)s, IRAs, and similar. The sequence risk described above is a risk you carry directly. In the EU, and especially in the Nordics, a large piece of retirement income works differently. A mandatory earnings-related contribution gets deducted automatically from every paycheck throughout your working life, pooled and invested collectively, and converted into a monthly benefit calculated actuarially, closer to insurance than to a personal investment account, priced to pay out from the day you retire until the day you die. That base layer doesn’t carry the same individual sequence-of-returns risk, since you’re not the one deciding when to sell. Where the math above becomes personally relevant for EU and Nordic readers is whatever supplementary private investing sits on top of that base, which is exactly the kind this newsletter is actually about.
There’s a second reason the timeline matters less than it feels like it should. Long-term compounding is lopsided by nature. Over a multi-decade investing timeline, the final stretch typically outgrows everything that came before it combined, simply because by then there’s more money in the account doing the compounding. That’s not a reason to skip the early years. The base you build early is what the later years compound on top of. But it does mean a shorter horizon isn’t starting from zero the way it feels like it is. Even a late start still gets to sit inside that same lopsided shape, just with fewer of the slow early years attached to it.
This is usually where “it’s not too late!” content quietly stops, because admitting real risk is bad for engagement. It’s also exactly why this newsletter exists in the form it does, instead of as one more airbrushed-optimism account. The honest version of “not too late” was never “don’t worry.” It’s this: here’s the risk, and here’s the general shape of how people manage it. Mostly by adjusting how much risk they’re carrying as the horizon actually shortens, rather than either freezing completely or investing like they’ve still got forty years left. That’s not a recommendation for what you should do with your money. It’s the pattern. What you do with it is yours to work out, ideally with someone who can see your actual numbers, not a newsletter.
So: not too late. Just not as early as the version of “early” you’ve been quietly measuring yourself against. The finish line moved. Act like it did.
If this is the argument you needed, stick around. There’s a slower, more numbers-forward version of this exact case coming in a future Late Ticker entry, for anyone who wants to sit with more of the math behind it.
Bearly managing. Bullishly investing anyway.