The Variable Nobody Models

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September covered six corporate functions and how each one hides its own expertise. October is about what happens after, starting with the part people actually lie awake over.

Here is the thing I keep running into. The retirement projections I have worked through with people treat income as fixed and the savings rate as the only thing you control. You can adjust the contribution, the retirement age, and the assumed return. That is the whole instrument panel.

None of them ask about the variable most available to an experienced professional, which is earning something additional alongside the career you already have. I have yet to find one that lets you model a defined stretch of additional earned income, and I would be glad to be pointed at one.

Ian O. is an Operations Director with twenty-three years behind him. He did the thing few people do before starting: he ran the number first, and he got a specific answer rather than a feeling.

$4,200 a month. That was the distance between a comfortable retirement and a pressured one. Not a vague worry about not having enough. A figure, with a decimal point implied.

Not financial advice. Example only. Your results will vary.

Getting a number changes what kind of problem you have.

Run standard retirement math and the gap looks like a savings problem, because savings is the only lever the model offers. A savings problem at fifty-two is brutal arithmetic. You are being asked to find the money out of a salary that is already committed, over a number of years that is no longer large.

Put income on the other side and the same gap becomes a different question. Not "how much more can I save from what I already earn," but "what would I need to earn separately, and for how long."

Those two questions have very different answers, and only one of them is usually reachable.

Four things the standard projection cannot model. A savings-only model can make a gap look different from one that also includes a defined period of additional income.

1. Income is not fixed. The model treats your earning capacity as a constant set by your employer. For someone with twenty years of specific expertise, it is closer to a variable you have not adjusted yet.

2. Additional income works on the gap now rather than later. It does not need thirty years of compounding to matter, because it is not being invested to become something in the future. It affects your cash flow now rather than decades from now. Set aside what you owe on it, which is a real and separate planning question, and what remains still behaves differently from a contribution that has to grow for decades first.

3. It does not have to be permanent. Closing a gap over a defined stretch is a different commitment from building a business you run forever. The projections I have used make that distinction hard to express.

4. It reduces the pressure on every other number. The withdrawal rate, the retirement date, the market assumption. All of them loosen once the plan is not depending on savings alone.

Run it twice. That is the whole exercise.

First pass, the standard version: current savings, current contributions, assumed return, target retirement date. Write down the gap.

Second pass, the same inputs, with one addition: a monthly figure from work you do outside your job, for a defined number of years rather than forever.

Then the question worth sitting with: what monthly figure makes the second version work, and is that figure smaller or larger than you assumed before you wrote it down?

Among the people I have worked with directly, the answer has more often been smaller. Not small. Smaller than the number they were carrying around.

Not financial advice. Example only. Your results will vary.

Ian's first project was a process audit for a logistics company that had scaled faster than its systems. It was worth $3,100. Against a $4,200 monthly gap, a single $3,100 project does not close anything, and it would be dishonest to present it as though it did.

What mattered was the second project, which started before the first one finished.

That is the part the arithmetic misses when you look at a first project in isolation. The first one is not income. It is evidence that the sentence works, and evidence is what makes the second conversation possible.

Within fourteen months the gap was closed. He was still in his role the whole time, and he had not built a website, announced anything, or left anything.

His own summary afterward: "I kept waiting for it to feel complicated. It never did. The hard part was writing the sentence. After that, the rest of it just followed."

Not financial advice. Example only. Your results will vary.

Twenty minutes, and you run the calculation twice. Once the standard way, once with a monthly income figure added for a defined stretch of years.

Do not decide anything. Do not pick a business. Just find out whether the second number is smaller than the one you have been carrying, because in my experience plenty of people never have.

The time from Ian O.'s first outreach message to a closed $4,200 monthly gap, still employed throughout. That was his timeline and his number, not a benchmark. Not financial advice. Example only. Your results will vary.

A book about the savings side of this, which is the half that tends to get taken more seriously and still gets overcomplicated. The argument is that the strategy worth following is duller and simpler than the industry has any interest in telling you. I am recommending it this week specifically because it handles one half of the calculation properly, and this issue is about the half it leaves out.

I spent years giving people retirement advice that was arithmetically correct and practically useless.

Save more. Start earlier. Adjust the assumptions. All true, all of it, and all of it aimed at the one lever that gets harder to pull the closer you are to needing it. I was answering the question the model asked instead of the question the person had.

The question they had was usually some version of: is there anything left I can actually change. And there was. It just was not on the form.

P.S. If you have run your number and it came back bigger than you expected, hit reply and tell me what it was. Not for a plan. I am curious how many people have a figure at all, because most of the ones I ask do not.

A few things I've built, if any of them are useful this week.

No pressure on any of it. Take what's useful, skip the rest.

Scott Fulbright

This newsletter is for informational and educational purposes only and is not financial advice. Any figures, projections, or outcomes mentioned are examples based on individual circumstances, not guarantees, your results will vary. Consult a qualified financial advisor before making retirement or income decisions.

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