To determine how long a retirement account is likely to last, a retiree must estimate the average rate of return on their portfolio. For those who are nervous about running out of money in retirement, estimation may not be enough.

Instead, some retirees have decided to withdraw only the interest earned on their retirement accounts each year, leaving the principal untouched. That means withdrawing more in years their portfolio is doing well and scaling back when the market is down. The goal for many is to die with the same amount of principal they started with.

For the truly risk-averse, this withdrawal strategy seems sound. However, there are several reasons it may not work for you.

For most, the math doesn’t add up

Let’s say you’ve done everything within your power to maximize your Social Security benefits but need an additional $25,000 annually to provide you with the life you want in retirement. If your portfolio earns an average of 6% annually (before taxes), that means you’d need a portfolio size of $535,000. However, that calculation leaves no room to increase your annual withdrawals to keep up with inflation.

If you need an extra $50,000 annually to lead your best retirement life, an account earning an average annual return of 6% before taxes would need to be worth roughly $1.1 million. Again, that doesn’t account for inflation.

Given that the median retirement savings for adults aged 65 to 74 is $200,000, most people can’t afford to draw interest only.

The guessing game sticks with you

Withdrawing interest alone doesn’t eliminate the guesswork from retirement planning. The interest rates and returns you’ll earn are unpredictable. Due to market volatility, some years will deliver strong gains while others may produce depressing losses. When interest rates are low, it becomes more difficult to generate the income you need to live well.

There’s also the matter of inflation. At an average inflation rate of 3%, your purchasing power would be cut by approximately 50% over 24 years. Your retirement account absolutely must account for inflation, particularly given the higher healthcare costs you’re likely to face as you grow older.

Opportunity cost

An interest-only strategy may require you to unnecessarily sacrifice quality of life. If limiting yourself to interest only means missing out on travel, helping family, or other experiences that enrich your life, it may not be worth the trade-off.

A financial or retirement advisor’s input could be invaluable here, helping you create a personalized withdrawal plan that addresses any concerns about outliving your money while providing enough income to live comfortably.

About 974,000 recent graduates aged 20 to 24 will be hired at small businesses (firms with one to 49 employees) during the 2026 hiring season, from April through September, according to a recent report from payroll and benefits platform Gusto. It’s a small bump from last year’s onboarding of 962,000 early-career workers, but the market has still not fully returned to the COVID years of 2020 to 2022, when employers went on a hiring blitz. Still, there’s also been improvement with net new grad job creation; it’s crept up from a low of 60,000 in 2023 to over 100,000 in 2026. 

Mom-and-pop businesses seem to be enthusiastically hiring young workers, while titans of industry pull entry-level listings from their sites. Big companies argue that AI can now do the work of junior staffers, but some smaller owners are pushing back on that notion, actively recruiting recent grads for their tech-savvy and relationship-building skills. Mark Cuban even picked up on the trend, advising fresh-faced grads to eye up small companies for opportunities.

“Large companies are playing defense. Small businesses are playing offense,” Aaron Terrazas, an economist at Gusto, tells Fortune. “When big employers pull back on entry-level hiring, small businesses see an opening…Small business owners are also taking advantage of this, being the first graduating class that grew up with AI as a native tool, not a new skill to learn, and that makes them uniquely valuable for businesses looking to modernize fast.”

While these employers are steadily pulling stronger hiring numbers, the talent they’re looking to snag has changed entirely. 

Career tracks that once guaranteed bountiful six-figure jobs post-graduation have since dried up; financial analysts, software engineers, and research associates have all suffered the biggest declines in their share of the new grad job market. Meanwhile, both AI-centric gigs and hands-on roles are juxtaposed as the strongest growing titles for budding professionals. 

Founding engineers and AI engineers both saw the strongest growth, and conversely, AI-proof roles like field managers and service technicians are right at the top with them. And it could be capturing an interesting dichotomy in Gen Z’s labor market: those leaning into tech for success, and those making their mark in the physical trades. 

The AI revolution is ramping up tech-savvy gigs—and blue-collar work

While Gen Zers leaving college are advised to embrace AI or risk being left behind in their careers, a growing number of young professionals are ditching desk jobs for the trades. And they could be tapping into a goldmine of well-paid work, from small businesses to large. 

About 78% of Americans have noticed a rising interest in trade jobs among young adults, according to a 2024 Harris Poll survey for Intuit Credit Karma. Many of these roles—from carpenters to service technicians—offer the ideal of being your own boss while paying well. 

More Gen Z talent is catching on. Enrollment in vocational-focused community colleges jumped 16% in 2024, reaching the highest level since the National Student Clearinghouse began tracking the data in 2018. And certain professions have been catching young workers’ attention: there was a 23% surge in Gen Z enrollment in construction trades from 2022 to 2023, and a 7% increase in participation in HVAC and vehicle repair programs. Despite AI threatening to upend white-collar work, there should be no shortage of opportunities for blue-collar talent; about 3.8 million new manufacturing jobs are expected to open up by 2033, according to research from Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute.

Meanwhile, certain tech roles are also having a renaissance of their own. AI engineer is the fastest-growing job title for young workers on LinkedIn in 2026, according to the platform’s analysis from earlier this year. And between 2023 and 2025, about 75,000 of 639,000 new AI-related U.S. job postings added to the career site were AI engineer roles. Enterprise AI platform PromptQL even offered $900 hourly wages to its AI engineers building and deploying AI agents within the business. The company’s CEO said that sky-high compensation reflects their “intuition” and technical prowess in keeping up with the AI revolution.

“We’re seeing more AI Engineers and more Founding Engineers because companies have an urgent need for young people who are native to AI to innovate,” Terrazas explains. “The graduating class of 2026 is the first college cohort to complete its entire higher education in the AI era, and many small business leaders see these young people as bringing vital cutting-edge AI skills to their companies.”