Definition
Solo drawdown is self-managed drawdown of savings to a chosen planning age, with no remaining value past the planning age, used as the baseline against which pooled and insured lifetime income arrangements are evaluated.
Why it matters
Solo drawdown is the arrangement most people default into — managing their own savings to a planning age, without pooling or insurance. Without an explicit baseline of what self-management produces, there is no way to see what pooling or insurance is adding or taking away.
How it works
Solo drawdown treats retirement savings as a finite asset drawn down on a schedule that exhausts it at a chosen planning age. The arrangement has four structural properties: no mortality pooling, no risk transfer, full capital access during the drawdown period, and no income continuation past the planning age. Capital remaining at death passes to the estate as bequest. Optional costs include advisory or platform fees the individual chooses to incur.
In practice
When you manage retirement savings yourself, the planning age is the decision that drives everything else. Planning to 90 is a different claim than planning to 100, and the difference is measurable — in dollars of income, in capital required, in exposure to living past your own estimate. Advisors often frame the decision as “what's a safe withdrawal rate?” but the more fundamental choice is the planning age itself, and a good conversation surfaces it explicitly rather than embedding it in an assumption you never see. When you evaluate a lifetime income product, the comparison that matters is how the product performs against what you could do for yourself at a planning age you are willing to stake.
In the Longevity Standard Framework
Solo drawdown is one of the four core terms of the Longevity Standard framework. It serves as the baseline in the cost-of-income framework and as the floor in the realized value calculation, where realized value is measured as the market-based uplift over solo drawdown divided by the theoretical uplift over solo drawdown. Solo drawdown is also the arrangement that ergodicity economics most directly critiques, because it forces a single-path outcome on an individual whose longevity cannot be known in advance.
Related terms
- Cost of income
- Frictionless pool
- Realized value
- Planning horizon risk
- Self-annuitization
- Systematic withdrawal
- Safe withdrawal rate
- Decumulation
- Risk sharing