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“Several of Oracle’s bear cases were addressed head on” in the latest earnings report, according to an analyst.

Back in the late 70s and early 1980s, my small town had a mom-and-pop convenience store, Paul’s Market, as well as one location of a regional chain, Richdale’s. It later added a store from a larger chain, White Hen Pantry.

7-Eleven and other large chains existed, but local stores, even one-offs, were common. Now, just over the past few years, a number of bigger players have swallowed up some smaller chains.

The banner retirements are real and named, according to data from NACS Magazine.

GetGo was sold to Circle K, Redwood Markets went to Jacksons (24 stores, California), and Maverick bought the Kum & Go Brand, which included about 400 locations. In all three cases, the name changes were gradual as stores got remodeled, but in the end, the classic names disappeared.

Now, the same thing has happened again as Casey’s has begun the process of removing the CEFCO name from the 198 stores it added when it bought the rival chain in 2024.

Casey’s is ending the CEFCO name

Casey’s, which operated 2,959 stores as of July 31, 2026, in 19 states, according to a recent SEC Filing, purchased Fikes Wholesale, Inc., owner of CEFCO Convenience Stores, in an all-cash transaction for $1.145 billion. The purchase price includes tax benefits valued at approximately $165 million for a net after-tax purchase price of $980 million, according to a press release.

Since the transaction closed, Casey’s has been remodeling CEFCO stores, then rebranding them under the Casey’s banner.

Casey’s CEO Darren Rebelez talked about the ongoing remodeling and renaming process during the company’s first-quarter earnings call.

“The stores that have been already remodeled to Casey’s in prior periods have performed exceptionally well, and we expect to remodel Cefco stores throughout the fiscal year,” he said.

Rebelez shared the progress on the transition.

“During fiscal year 26, we remodeled approximately 50 Cefco stores to Casey’s. In the first quarter of fiscal year 27, we have remodeled 24 more stores, We are extremely excited about the results we are seeing, as the average PFMDB lift at the stores that were remodeled to 30% versus its results of the same period prior to remodel,” he added.

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The ongoing remodeling, he noted, has not stopped Casey’s from adding new stores.

“While we are busy with CEFCO conversions, [it] does not stop us from continuing to grow the store base, as we are on track to meet our 120-store unit goal for the fiscal year,” he shared.

Rebelez did not share when the remodels would be completed and the CEFCO name retired.

Casey’s has a unique business model. About 71% of its locations are in towns with fewer than 20,000 people, and roughly half are in Iowa, Missouri, and Illinois, according to the SEC filing referenced above.

The chain comes in third by store count behind market leader 7-Eleven (12,700) and Couche-Tarde (7,308), according to CSP Daily News data.

Casey’s store count will soon surpass 3,000.Shutterstock

Convenience-store chains have been consolidating

“The pace of merger and acquisition activity in the U.S. convenience store sector is accelerating, with recent trends suggesting the nation’s c-store landscape is ripe for more change. While most of the transactions in 2024 involved smaller chains or single-store operators, several larger operators inked deals to significantly expand their footprints into new regions,” according to a report from CoBank.

That’s something Rebelez also commented on during Casey’s Q1 earnings call.

“I would say the M&A environment is, is still really good. And that is a reflection of the challenging environment that the industry finds itself in, particularly the small operators. And so it would not say it is changed. I would say it is still consistent, maybe even gotten a little better from a buyer’s perspective,” he said.

Others operating in the space see the same thing.

“There still remains a large number of chains out there in the 10 to 100 store range that, depending on what their long-term strategy is — especially if they’re family-owned businesses — may decide that they want to get out,” Rob Gallo, chief strategy officer for c-store consultancy Impact 21, told CStoreDive.

And while many of these companies have been in the same family for multiple years, their operating challenges have increased.

“It’s just more difficult to manage the chain if you’re a small operator compared to the big guys, especially with the consolidation going on across the country and in many cases, in their backyards,” Jesse Betzner, senior director for Capstone Partners, an investment banking and M&A advisory firm, told CStoreDive.

Besides acquiring CEFCO, Casey’s has bought the 22-site Lone Star Food Stores chain and is in the process of buying the 24-location Pak-A-Sak brand. Some Lone Star locations will be rebranded as Casey’s, but others may retain their original name while being remodeled to match Casey’s on the interior.

No public decision has been made on the Pak-A-Sak brand.

Smaller operators still dominate

There are 151,975 convenience stores in the United States, a slight decrease of 280 stores (0.2%) compared to the year prior, according to the 2026 NACS/NIQ TDLinx Convenience Industry Store Count.

And while it seems as if larger chains dominate, small players still play a signifcant role.

“The industry continues to be dominated by smaller operators. Overall, 95,672 stores are owned by a company that has 10 or fewer stores, 63% of the total store count. Companies operating 500-plus stores own 33,810 stores, or 22.2% of the overall total,” according to NACS data.

In addition to the slight decrease in overall stores, there has also been another meaningful change.

“While the overall store count dipped slightly, the number of convenience stores selling fuel increased by 768 stores (0.6%) to 122,620, the highest number in eight years. Convenience stores sell an estimated 80% of the fuel purchased by consumers in the United States. Overall, 80.7% of convenience stores sell fuel,” added the NACS.

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Artificial intelligence has created an uncomfortable question for companies whose businesses depend on selling information: What happens when AI can find, summarize, and synthesize enormous amounts of data almost instantly?

Bill Ackman seems to believe investors are asking the wrong question. The billionaire’s Pershing Square added ICE (Intercontinental Exchange), the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, to its portfolio, which also included Netflix, Visa, Mastercard, Alcon, and S&P Global.

The ICE investment is especially intriguing, since Ackman is not just counting on additional stock market transactions.

Pershing’s premise is that artificial intelligence may add value to ICE’s exclusive financial data, since most of that data cannot be scraped off the internet and recreated by a chatbot.

ICE CEO Jeff Sprecher has made a very similar case, converting what looks like a legacy financial infrastructure investment into an unanticipated AI bet.

Bill Ackman sees an AI advantage investors may be missing

While ICE is perhaps best known for owning the New York Stock Exchange, it does much more than that.

It runs futures exchanges and clearinghouses and sells fixed income data, analytics, connectivity services, and mortgage technology. That combination is important as financial institutions embrace AI.

AI models can analyze huge volumes of publicly accessible data. But pro investors still require trusted pricing, reference data, and other licensed information that can be tracked back to respectable sources.

This gives rise to a possible scarcity premium around private datasets.

According to a report shared with TheStreet, Sprecher described ICE’s information as data that “cannot be scraped or synthesized.”

Related: Bill Ackman’s surprising $934 million bet after dumping Alphabet

ICE is already developing technology to make that data usable in AI applications, including a Model Context Protocol server that can surface regulated ICE information into customers’ AI processes with the proper rights and audit trails.

The inference is counterintuitive.

AI might commodify information, making it available to everybody. But it might increase the value of private and regulated financial information that is difficult to duplicate.

ICE’s numbers strengthen Ackman’s argument

The underlying company already has the type of recurrent revenue Ackman normally likes.

ICE reported $2.7 billion in second-quarter net revenue, up 5% year over year. Adjusted diluted earnings per share reached $1.90, up 5%.

More importantly for the AI thesis, recurring revenue grew 8% to $1.35 billion.

Fixed Income and Data Services earned $645 million in sales, up 8%, while recurring revenue within the business grew 10% to $531 million. Fixed Income Data and Analytics sales grew 9% itself.

ICE then upped its full-year recurring revenue growth outlook for Fixed Income and Data Services to a range of 7% to 8%.

Meanwhile, the business produced $3.3 billion of operational cash flow through June and $2.6 billion of adjusted free cash flow.

Its board recently raised ICE’s share-repurchase authority to $4 billion starting July 1.

Bill Ackman sees an AI winner hiding in plain sight.Bloomberg / Getty Images

AI could strengthen more than ICE’s data business

There’s another dimension to Ackman’s wager.

AI is also changing how people consume financial information. Financial exchanges may monetize the new marketplaces they are generating.

In July, ICE said it was planning futures with NATIVX linked to GPU compute, treating processing capability as an asset with a price that corporations may want to hedge against.

The contracts would follow tokenized energy-normalized GPU compute pricing, ICE claimed.

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This raises the intriguing possibility that ICE may profit both from the use of AI by financial businesses and from the economic instability that AI technology itself would produce.

The company has also expanded physical infrastructure for automated markets. As demand for low-latency connectivity and computing capacity has increased, ICE has more than doubled colocation capacity at its Mahwah, N.J., data center since 2020.

Ackman’s ICE bet comes with one important risk

But Ackman’s logic doesn’t entail that AI inevitably makes ICE more valuable.

Financial institutions might push prices on data providers. Competing data sets could emerge. And ICE’s mortgage-technology sector has its own issues, apart from artificial intelligence.

The stock also competes with exchange owners CME Group and Nasdaq Inc.

But ICE has something that makes this bet different from many of Wall Street’s more visible AI bets.

You don’t have to build the biggest, most advanced language model. You don’t have to spend tens of billions on GPUs. It owns infrastructure and information that AI systems may increasingly need to access.

That helps explain Ackman’s willingness to purchase when ICE’s value dropped.

Pershing Square has always looked for enduring firms with pricing power, substantial obstacles to entry, and reliable cash creation. ICE’s rising recurring income and proprietary data sets fit within that structure, and AI may possibly add another layer to the moat.

The market has spent a lot of time trying to figure out which firms the AI boom will disrupt.

Ackman’s purchase in ICE poses the opposite question. If AI drives down the cost of easily accessible information, what happens to the cost of information that cannot be simply copied by machines?

The solution might convert what seems to be a defensive financial-data firm into one of Ackman’s most unorthodox bets on AI for the owner of the New York Stock Exchange.

Related: Billionaire Bill Ackman doubles down on these stocks in Q2

The New York Yankees face some competition from the St. Louis Cardinals and others in the sweepstakes for a young international outfielder.

Investors are flocking to theme-based exchange-traded funds again. They’ll probably wish they hadn’t. I’d last written about thematic ETFs back in January 2025. At the time, I’d noted these ETFs had seen poor dollar-weighted returns: The average dollar lost more than 7% per year over the three years ended Nov. 30, 2024—considerably worse than the ETFs’ 1% annual aggregate loss over that span.Why the poor outcome? Investors binged and purged, buying thematic ETFs with abandon in 2020 and 2021—the ETFs hauled in $95 billion those years—and then fleeing from 2022 through late 2024. Those redemptions might have seemed prescient at first, as the average thematic ETF lost 36% in 2022. But they proved costly when the ETFs rallied hard the following years. They’re BackFast forward to now: Thematic ETFs appear to have won back investors, gathering $76 billion in net inflows since 2024, with artificial intelligence, energy transition (think: smart-grid), and security (think: defense tech). Will things turn out differently this time? I doubt it. Consider the most popular ETF theme these days: AI, or in the parlance of our thematic-classification taxonomy, “Artificial Intelligence & Big Data.” Here are the rolling 12-month average returns of ETFs assigned to that theme. These ETFs have been red-hot, routinely generating 20%-plus returns over recent 12-month periods. Investors have noticed and have piled in. Ding, Ding, Ding!That more or less fits the pattern we’ve seen more broadly for thematic ETFs: A narrative takes hold in ways everyday people can relate to and intuit, in this case AI’s potential to transform life as we know it; investors seek confirmation of the story, which they find in standout returns; and then they give chase. Lest you doubt how often investors have chased performance in this fashion, here’s a plot that compares thematic ETFs’ rolling 12-month returns and flows over the decade ended Aug. 31, 2026. Most of the time, inflows coincided with recent gains and outflows with losses. For instance, thematic ETFs raked in $65 billion in net new money over the year ended Jan. 31, 2021, during which the average thematic ETF rose 58%. Conversely, investors yanked $12 billion over the 12 months ended Feb. 28, 2023, when the average ETF lost around 21%. That wouldn’t have been a problem if the performance trend had continued, but too often it reversed, wrong-footing investors. For example, the average thematic ETF lost 13% in the 12 months ended Jan. 31, 2022, right on the heels of the aforementioned $65 billion inflows. Similarly, thematic ETFs gained 14%, on average, in the year ended Feb. 29, 2024, following the $12 billion outflow. You can see the relationship between flows and subsequent returns more clearly in this plot, which compares rolling 12-month flows against the average thematic ETF’s return over the subsequent one-year period. The upper-right (that is, inflows followed by gains) and bottom-left (that is, outflows followed by losses) regions are “good,” while the upper-left (that is, outflows followed by gains) and bottom-right (that is, inflows followed by losses) are “bad.”There was a whole lot more “bad” than “good,” and that’s taken a toll on dollar-weighted returns. While my previous article focused on the three years ended Nov. 30, 2024, I’ve expanded the analysis to cover all trailing periods—ranging from one year to 10 years—ended Aug. 31, 2026. The gap has been narrower over the shorter trailing periods primarily because the themes that have gotten the heaviest flows have kept chugging along. But as you extend the measurement period, the gap between the return of the average dollar and the ETFs’ aggregate total return widens dramatically. This reflects poorly timed purchases and sales in prior years as well as the effect of compounding those errors.Investor TakeawaysReject Good StoriesThematic ETFs are predicated on the idea that you can tap into a burgeoning trend and ride a wave of popularity and adoption to big gains. A rule-of-thumb I use is that by the time I come across or make sense of something, it’s already been discovered and priced in by legions of other market participants who boast greater faculties and deeper resources than me. Distrust Your IntuitionSure, it sounds defeatist to say you shouldn’t count on your ability to make sense of an investment and play out its future. Heck, AI is already big, and it’s going to get bigger; if that’s the conclusion you’ve reached, I’m not here to tell you you’re wrong. But that isn’t a sturdy enough reason to buy something. Why? You need to be able to distinguish between the story you’ve constructed in your own mind and the story the market has effectively incorporated into the security’s price. When they differ, you can run into big problems. Sideline EmotionWe seek patterns and extrapolate because it can instill a sense of calm and order in a world that otherwise might feel chaotic and random. Theme-based ETFs can seem to dispel complexity and make investing seem almost linear, where if something “gets big” or “breaks through,” you win. I’m not here to say you should reject your emotions, but they shouldn’t drive the decision. If buying feels exciting or selling brings relief, I’d revisit the decision. Keep PerspectiveIt might not seem like it, but if you invest in a broadly diversified stock portfolio, then you probably have exposure to many of the leading themes. No, it’s not as fun and won’t win you any bragging rights. And, yes, it’s watered down compared with an allocation to an ETF that is focused like a laser on that theme. But let’s keep things in perspective: The average thematic ETF returned 10.5% annually over the decade ended Aug. 31, 2026, which was 5 percentage points per year less than the S&P 500’s gain over that span. Find Another Way?Full disclosure: Morningstar licenses thematic indexes that various ETFs track. So it would be pretty hypocritical for me to lecture anyone about launching theme-based ETFs. (I say that even as someone who is not involved in those commercial arrangements.) Nevertheless, as an unreconstructed believer in the idea that fund companies win over the long term when their investors succeed, I guess I’d hope that thematic ETFs’ poor dollar-weighted results would have fund companies doing at least a little bit of introspection? Maybe to ask whether we really need another drone-, photonics-, or “space-industry income blast”-themed ETF? Switched OnHere are other things I’m writing, reading, and watching:Amy Arnott on the hocus-pocus at YieldMax Ultra Option Income StrategyChristine Benz with a needed reality check on bonds’ role in your portfolioBryan Armour on untangling the semiliquid fund fee knotMichael Santoli’s “Market Memo” newsletterA thread on trends in ETF share splits, just becauseDaisy chain: A proposed ETF that would invest in swaps tied to futures linked to private firmsWhat’s in your special purpose vehicle? The SEC wants to know. The Hugging Face hack was bigger and creepier than we thought“The Older I Get, the Less I Seem to Know” by Jonathan Eig“Aliens” gets the Rewatchables treatmentDon’t Be a StrangerI love hearing from you. Have some feedback? An angle for an article? Email me at jeffrey.ptak@morningstar.com. If you’re so inclined, you can also follow me on Twitter/X at @syouth1, and I do some odds-and-ends writing on a Substack called Basis Pointing.

Carmakers eventually learn the same lesson. The market that made you can also trap you. Build your entire business around one country, and you inherit that country’s slowdown, whether you earned it or not.

That is the trap China’s auto industry has spent this year trying to escape. Retail sales in the world’s biggest car market slumped 24% in August to 1.54 million units, and year-to-date sales are down more than a fifth, Bloomberg reported, citing China Passenger Car Association data.

For BYD (BYDDY), the damage at home is specific. Domestic sales fell 32.72% to 1,505,755 vehicles through August, dragging total sales down 6.84%, according to data compiled by CnEVPost.

Tesla (TSLA) has been running a version of the same play from Shanghai, shipping cars out of a market where its share keeps eroding. Exports have quietly become a pressure valve for both companies, which makes the monthly ranking of who is actually shipping the most a useful scoreboard.

Then came the Wednesday, Sept. 9, export ranking. BYD claimed 35.4% of China’s passenger new energy vehicle, or NEV, exports in August, while Tesla China dropped to fourth with 7.0%, according to China Passenger Car Association (CPCA) figures published by CnEVPost.

That is not a gap. That is a different weight class.

China’s August export rankings: BYD vs. Tesla China

BYD exported 183,746 passenger NEVs in August, up 130.8% from a year earlier and 5.8% from July. Its share climbed from July’s 32.2%.

Tesla China exported 36,119 vehicles, down 45.5% month over month. Its share fell from 12.3% in July, knocking it from third place to fourth behind Geely and Chery.

Related: BYD just answered the question Tesla keeps fighting in court

Stretch the frame and the picture holds. Through the first eight months of 2026, BYD shipped 1,126,797 NEVs abroad for a 33.9% share, against Tesla China’s 331,443 and 10.0%.

One wrinkle is worth naming, because most coverage blurs it. BYD’s own reported overseas sales for August were 189,466 vehicles, a larger figure than the CPCA export count, because it includes cars built at plants outside China.

When I ran both series side by side, the divergence between them is the story: The gap widens every time BYD opens a factory abroad.

BYD export share hits 35.4% as Tesla China falls to 4th.- / Getty Images

Why BYD’s 2027 target changes the math for Tesla

BYD now expects to sell more than 2.5 million vehicles overseas in 2027, a target disclosed in a Deutsche Bank research note after management’s post-earnings call, CnEVPost reported.

Management also lifted 2026 overseas guidance to between 1.9 million and 2.0 million vehicles. That target started the year at 1.3 million and was raised to 1.5 million in March.

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Read that sequence twice. A company does not raise the same forecast three times in nine months because demand is soft.

The constraint was never buyers. Management said shipping capacity held volumes back this year and that sales would have been higher with enough ships, according to the Deutsche Bank note. BYD is answering with a bigger dedicated carrier fleet and more local assembly.

Its Indonesian plant is producing. Brazil is ramping toward annual capacity of 300,000 vehicles. Hungary is expected to begin assembly in November or December.

Local assembly matters more than the tonnage. A car built in Hungary is not an export. It is a European car, and it sidesteps the tariff structure Brussels built specifically to slow Chinese shipments. Management is evaluating additional overseas plant locations.

The overseas margin story investors keep missing

Volume without profit is just expensive market share, and that has been the honest bear case on BYD for two years running. The export numbers finally complicate it.

Profit per vehicle sold overseas ran about 20,000 yuan, or roughly $2,950, in the first half despite currency headwinds, management said on the call. The company expects that figure to stay broadly stable near term, with volume gains offset by dealer network buildout and new factory ramp costs.

Here is how quickly the overseas base has compounded:

242,765 overseas NEV sales in 2023

417,204 in 2024

1,046,083 in 2025

1,162,260 through August 2026

More than 2.5 million targeted for 2027, according to Deutsche Bank’s research noteSource: CnEVPost

What struck me in my analysis is the shape of that curve against Europe’s demand backdrop.

Battery-electric cars took 20.7% of the European Union market in the first half of 2026, up from 15.6% a year earlier, ACEA reported. BYD is scaling into a market that is still expanding, not fighting for a fixed pie.

What this means for your portfolio

If you hold Tesla, none of this is a thesis-breaker on its own. It is a clarifier.

Tesla’s valuation has not been a bet on selling the most cars for some time. It is a bet on autonomy, energy storage, and robotics arriving fast enough to matter. Every month BYD widens the export gap, that bet gets more concentrated, because the fallback of “Well, it still sells a lot of cars” gets thinner.

TheStreet has tracked how BYD’s volume wins keep arriving with margin caveats attached, and how the price war at home has hollowed out its own profitability. Those caveats have not vanished.

BYD still faces European tariffs, local-content pressure, and political scrutiny in half the markets it is entering. Battery supply is another live constraint. Shortages of the second-generation Blade Battery are not expected to clear until the first quarter of 2027, with an order backlog of about 250,000 flash-charging-compatible vehicles waiting behind them.

So the risk is real. And it is no longer just the risk of a company that cannot find customers.

That distinction matters for anyone holding either stock in a retirement account rather than trading it. A company fighting for demand can be fixed with a better product. A company fighting a rival that has both cheaper cars and more factories on more continents is a slower, more structural problem, and it tends to show up in guidance long before it shows up in a quarterly print.

Watch the monthly CPCA export ranking rather than the quarterly delivery headlines. It updates faster, it strips out the domestic price war, and right now it is the cleanest read available on which of these two companies is buying itself more time.

Related: China’s BYD sets audacious goal: Overtake Toyota by 2030

“I’m concerned that my card issuers might freeze or flag the cards when they suddenly see an extraordinary number of transactions.”

Retirement planning often starts with decades of saving, followed by a plan for how much to withdraw each year. That plan usually assumes that spending will remain fairly steady throughout a 30-year retirement.

The Schwab Center for Financial Research recently flagged changing spending needs as one of three retirement challenges that catch most people off guard.

Spending needs can shift meaningfully across a 30-year retirement, the firm cautioned, driven by longer-than-expected retirements, unexpected healthcare costs, or stronger portfolio returns. 

A Financial Planning Review study suggests that the flat-spending assumption can be costly for retirees who follow it without adjustments.

The gap between what plans assume and how retirees tend to spend creates risks on both ends, from unnecessary belt-tightening to avoidable shortfalls.

What Schwab’s spending warning gets right and what it leaves out

Rob Williams, Senior Wealth Management Executive & Strategist and Former Head of Wealth Management Research at Schwab Center for Financial Research, framed the core challenge in direct terms. 

“You can make educated guesses, but they’re just that — guesses,” Williams said. “And that makes it difficult to know if your money will last long enough.”

The firm’s February 2025 analysis details how those same forces can upend initial spending projections over a multi-decade retirement.

Williams recommends updating a comprehensive retirement income plan at least every few years, if not annually, so small misalignments get caught before they become costly.

The firm’s framework flags that spending will change, but it does not map the specific direction or shape those shifts tend to follow over 30 years.

That dimension is what the Financial Planning Review study now provides, with data challenging the flat-budget models that most retirement plans still use.

Blanchett’s research maps the spending curve retirees tend to follow

David Blanchett, Head of Retirement Research at Prudential Financial, published a study in the Financial Planning Review in June 2026.

Using data from the RAND Corporation’s Health and Retirement Study, the paper found that average retiree spending follows a U-shaped “smile.” Median spending, however, follows a “smirk,” declining without a late-life uptick.

Financial Advisor Michael Stein popularized the three phases behind the curve. The first is the “go-go” years, when retirees spend freely on travel and hobbies.

During the mid-retirement “slow-go” years, which is the second, activity levels and discretionary costs both decline, pulling total spending well below the early-retirement baseline.

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In the third “no-go” years, rising medical costs push total spending back up, creating the upward turn that completes the shape of the smile.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data from the 2024 Consumer Expenditure Survey reinforce this pattern, showing that consumer units with a reference person 75 or older spent about $55,800 in 2024.

That compares with roughly $100,300 for the 45-to-54 age group, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis 2025 data. 

“…Spending tends to decline in real terms, even among those who have the resources to potentially spend more,” Blanchett concluded in the study.

Retiree spending often follows a three-stage curve.alvaro gonzalez / Getty Images

How the spending curve changes the withdrawal math

The withdrawal rate implications of planning around a spending curve instead of a flat line are considerable, the study found.

Blanchett tested three models, each assuming a moderate level of income risk aversion, and the differences were significant across all three.

Both the smile and smirk models supported initial withdrawal rates roughly 20% higher than the flat-line assumption, the study found.

Morningstar’s retirement income research reaches a similar conclusion from a different angle.

Christine Benz, Morningstar’s Director of Personal Finance and Retirement Planning, said retirees who adopt flexible withdrawals can afford a higher starting rate.

“Don’t just take that 3.9% and run with it,” Benz said. “You probably can and should enlarge your spending if you are willing to be flexible.”

For a retiree with a $1 million portfolio, that gap translates to roughly $10,000 to $12,000 in additional first-year spending from the same savings.

Healthcare costs anchor the late-retirement spending spike

Blanchett acknowledged in his study that healthcare expenses remain a “clear wild card” when projecting income needs during the final stretch of retirement.

A 65-year-old retiring in 2026 can expect to spend $185,500 on healthcare and medical costs over the full span of retirement, Fidelity reported.

That estimate rose 7.5% from the prior year’s figure of $172,500, underscoring the pace at which late-life medical costs continue to climb.

Shannon Benton, Executive Director of The Senior Citizens League, has warned that Medicare Part B premiums consistently outpace Social Security cost-of-living adjustments. 

The gap, she said, gradually erodes seniors’ quality of life, with members reporting that their benefits are failing to keep up.

The late-life medical surge forms the right edge of Blanchett’s spending smile and highlights a gap in flat-budget planning that most traditional models overlook.

What spending-curve planning means for retirees

Blanchett’s findings point to two areas where flat-budget plans misalign with actual spending.

The go-go years support a higher withdrawal rate than most models permit, and the late-life medical surge Fidelity projects at $185,500 demands a dedicated reserve that flat budgets never carve out.

The annual plan reviews Williams recommends at Schwab become more pointed when retirees know which phase of the curve they are entering.

Planning around the curve rather than a fixed line can support a higher starting withdrawal rate, Blanchett’s data shows, but the math only holds when early spending freedom and the late-life cost spike are treated as two sides of the same budget.

Related: Schwab warns of a retirement risk easy to overlook

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