“As you get closer to retirement, move your money to safer investments.” It sounds reasonable. But what if that one piece of conventional wisdom could cost you €80,000 or more?

In this episode, Paddy Delaney unpacks one of the most consequential — and most overlooked — investment decisions you’ll make: whether to reduce investment risk before you retire. For an awful lot of Irish pension holders, this decision has already been made for them automatically, through something called lifestyling — often without their knowledge or consent.

Paddy works through the two opposing risks at the heart of the decision: de-risking too early — and leaving significant growth on the table in your final accumulation years — and sequence-of-returns risk, the single most underappreciated danger in early retirement. Using two scenarios — Sióbhán and Declan, both 63, both with €800,000 — he shows how a default setting can quietly create an €85,000–€100,000 gap, and why the order in which your returns arrive matters more than the average.

You’ll come away with a simple three-question framework to bring deliberate, personalised thinking to your own pension — instead of leaving it to a system designed for an average that doesn’t exist.

What we cover:

•  The two real risks — and why most people only know one

•  Lifestyling: what your provider may be doing without telling you

•  The €85k–€100k cost of de-risking too early

•  Sequence-of-returns risk and the retirement ‘red zone’

•  The bucket strategy as a simple income buffer

•  A three-question framework for the ten years before retirement

‍

📊 Find out how we work and have a look at our Retirement Readiness Scorecard: https://www.informeddecisions.ie

📖 Read the full blog: www.informeddecisions.ie/post/reduce-investment-risk-before-retirement-ireland