This article appears as part of Casey Weade's Weekend Reading for Retirees series. Every Friday, Casey highlights four hand-picked articles on trending retirement topics and delivers them straight to your email inbox. Get on the list here.

When it comes to the decumulation stage of retirement, your lifelong savings need protected from several unique risks, three of which include:

📌Longevity: To ensure you don’t outlive your money

📌Lifestyle: Being able to maintain your desired standard of living

📌Liquidity: Maintaining enough reserved money for unexpected occasions, or to fill in gaps during an unexpected market downturn

The issue: During the accumulation (or saving) phase of your financial life, these concerns aren’t necessarily top of mind, and aren’t typically taken into consideration as part of a risk tolerance questionnaire. While these assessments can play a role in asset allocation, they were not developed to handle the broader threats in retirement.

The alternative test: Past podcast guest, Wade Pfau, along with fellow researcher, Alex Murguía, developed a new way for retirees to select the best retirement income strategy for their unique situation: The Retirement Income Style Awareness® (RISA®) Profile. As described in the article, this decumulation approach is based on two retirement income beliefs: Probability-based versus safety first, and optionality versus commitment. Both are inherently dependent on your unique, financial circumstances, concerns and preferences for retirement income.

Keep in mind: Risk assessments can provide helpful information. At the same time, if you’re only receiving a risk tolerance questionnaire and limited-to-no alternatives for your income strategy in retirement, you could be massively missing out and misaligned.