Deaccumulation is the new new thing in finance for an obvious reason: the US population is aging, which means that retirement becomes an increasingly pressing issue for financial planning. Perhaps the leading challenge for this critical task (other than accumulating a sufficient pot of money) is managing the withdrawals from a retirement portfolio. The task is a delicate balancing act of maximizing deaccumlation in the short term (over a one-year period, for instance) without running out of money before a retiree shuffles off this mortal coil. An absolute solution will always remain elusive due to the standard issues that bedevil finance, but some basic modeling applications can wrestle the uncertainty down to a comparatively tame beast.
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