When you are earlier in your investment career in your 20s, 30s and 40s and maybe even into your 50s market volatility is often quite easy to shrug off. To be sure, some of us get more wound up in volatile markets than others. But because retirement is still years in the future, market volatility is more an annoyance, a headache, a stressor at that point in one’s life. Your portfolio has time to bounce back, and weak markets, even truly ugly troughs like 2008, aren’t likely to make or break your plan.

But that all shifts in the years before retirement, as well as during retirement. If you haven’t taken action to protect your portfolio and your plan before serious gyrations in the market, short-term nuisances of volatility can quickly become real risk. Volatility is just the reality that markets move up and down over the years; it’s something that you’re simply going to have to put up with if you want to earn more than the paltry yields guaranteed investments provide. (And I’d advise against that, because inflation can eat most if not all, and then some, of your return.) Volatility becomes risk if those gyrations occur when you need to spend your money and you haven't taken action to protect you against that risk.

I have written a lot about how retirees protect themselves and their plans from weak markets. Pre-retirees, which I define as people within 10 years of retirement (note that I’m speaking loosely here), will want to take some of the same defensive measures for the same reasons. But since their retirements have yet to start, pre-retirees have even more tools in their tool kits than retirees whose paychecks have stopped and are tapping their portfolios for living expenses.

If you’re within 10 years of retirement and spooked about the possibility that declining markets will wreak havoc with your plan, here are the main steps to take.

Step 1: See Where You Stand

I know, you probably do not want to look. But if market gyrations are giving you the shakes, your first step is to take a close look at where your retirement plan stands now. Are you going to be more than fine, or is there a reasonable possibility that you will die prematurely in your lifetime, unless you act?

The surest way to wrap your arms around those questions is to sit down with a fee-only financial planner who will put your plan in context, including your portfolio, when you might hope to retire, tax considerations and Social Security, among other key variables. If you want a fast check on whether you’re on track, as opposed to, or maybe in addition to, a detailed analysis, spending rules like the 4 percent rule can be a shortcut. Is 3 percent or 4 percent of your entire retirement portfolio less whatever your tax rate is, an amount you could at least live on, supplemented by other sources of income, such as Social Security or a pension? For a more granular assessment of whether your portfolio can keep you in the style to which you’re accustomed, try a retirement calculator, such as T. Rowe Price’s Retirement Income Calculator or Vanguard’s Retirement Nest Egg Calculator.

Step 2: Turbocharge Savings

If you’re staring down a retirement-income shortfall that’s coming directly in the face of down-market volatility, then that can be an unnerving combination. Taking control is best accomplished by reviewing your budget in an effort to increase your savings rate. However, investing more in a down market can be a heavy lift, logistically and psychologically. But if you can invest more money in the market when it's down, you’ll have added to your portfolio at attractive valuations, and that’ll bolster its long-run prospects.

On the positive side, many people nearing retirement have already funded their short- and intermediate-term goals; and they may have also paid off their houses and helped their children fund their college education. That can free up discretionary cash to put toward retirement savings. The financial planning guru Michael Kitces observes that “the empty nest transition” is a chance for people in their 50s and 60s to block an impending retirement gap. A full 15 years of saving 30% of one’s income — no easy thing, mind you — before retirement can do a lot to pull a too-small retirement portfolio off the ledge.” Even in this stage of life you should still prefer tax-sheltered vehicles such as IRAs and 401(k)s, using the additional $1,000 (IRA) and $6,500 (401(k), 403(b), 457) available in catch-up contributions when older than 50. Health savings accounts with contributions, compounding and withdrawals free from tax offer investors who have maxed out on dedicated retirement accounts additional funding vehicles; catch-up contributions to these accounts are available to individuals over the age of 55.

Step 3: Dictating Your Date of Retirement

“I just need to work for another five years.” I’ve heard that refrain, or some version of it, from plenty of friends and acquaintances over the years. They know how staying in the workforce and bringing in a paycheck for as long as possible affects the overall health of their retirement plans. Working longer results in more retirement savings and compound growth, more time to spend down your portfolio and time for your Social Security filing to grow, among many of the most salient financial advantages. And deferring retirement can be especially powerful if you’d be retiring into a particularly weak market environment, in the sense that taking too much out of your portfolio at a market trough can hurt how long it lasts. But the reality is, you can’t always control your retirement date entirely, according to research by David Blanchett, now at PGIM. Worse, if a down market came with a recession, that could undo what until then had been generally low unemployment rates, meaning it would be that much more difficult to stay with a plan of working longer.

So how do you take matters into your own hands regarding your retirement date? Needless to say, a healthy lifestyle will help ensure (but certainly not guarantee) that health issues won’t prematurely usher you out of the workforce sooner than you’re ready to go. You can also take steps to enhance your human capital. That involves investing in continuing education and conferences, staying current on your industry’s developments and keeping up with the latest advances in technology.

It’s certainly not healthy, mentally or physically, to stick it out in a job you hate. But you may want to plan for something that contributor Mark Miller refers to as an encore career, a second career later in life that is more rewarding and less burdensome (although perhaps less lucrative) than your primary career. The mere ability to earn income even on a part-time job will reduce in-retirement portfolio withdrawals and help your portfolio last longer than it otherwise would.

Step 4: Review the ‘Safe’ Section of Your Portfolio

A retirement plan is most at risk if you retire into a weak market environment and withdraw too much from a portfolio that’s simultaneously declining; this is the perfect storm. Because that overspending means that less of the portfolio is left to recover when the market does, that can diminish the chances that the portfolio will last for the 25 to 30 years (or longer) that it might need to.

So how do you avoid that risk? One is to push off retirement, which I just explained. A second is to avoid large withdrawals in those initial weak years. (The “Down-Market Survival Guide for Retirees” looked at the pros and cons of doing that.) You can also help protect against a bum market early in retirement by building a bulwark of safety investments. This way, you don’t run the risk of touching your long-term assets, mostly stocks while they’re down in the dumps.

Where my model Bucket portfolios have you holding a cushion of cash and bonds equal to 10 years worth of portfolio withdrawals, that’s probably overkill if you’ve got 10 years until retirement. Nevertheless, it is not too soon to start building your cash reserves above the emergency fund you probably maintained throughout your working life up to a year’s worth of living expenses or even more.

Take a closer look at the bond weighting in your portfolio as well, especially if you haven’t tended to de-risk your portfolio recently by cutting stock. The Lifetime Allocation Indexes can help you right-size your portfolio’s bonds with your expected retirement date. Keep in mind that the indexes pour the lion’s share of their bond assets into high-quality core bonds and just token amounts into non-core bonds like emerging-markets bonds. The goal is to expand your allocation to bond types that might hold steady or even rise somewhat in an equity-market shock. The best categories I’ve one-dimensionalized for that job include intermediate-term and short-term core and government-bond funds.

Step 5: Consider Your Equity Positioning

Alongside examining your portfolio’s baseline allocations to stocks versus bonds and cash, consider scrutinizing your positioning inside your equity portfolio, too. After all, it’s probably still the biggest part of your portfolio, and the placement of it is going to be a primary driver of how it behaves. The 2009 through 2021 market rally didn’t lift all boats equally: Value underperformed, at the expense of growth stocks, and international lagged US. An adjusted portfolio is supposed to prevent bias toward such areas that have been on a great performance run, but if you haven’t made changes recently in your portfolio’s equity allocations, you might find evidence of such bias. To view your portfolio’s sector positioning and Style Box positioning, use the X-Ray functionality within Portfolio Manager or the Instant X-Ray tool.

Step 6: Consider When You Will Start Social Security and Withdrawal Sequencing

If you’re making long-term adjustments, as noted above, do keep in mind the accounts in which you hold those assets and the order in which you plan on tapping those accounts when you finally retire. And the order in which you withdraw from those accounts, in turn, can inform where to hold which assets. This would be a good place to seek tax advice or financial planning advice, but the normal order of in-retirement withdrawals has you going through taxable accounts first, then through traditional tax-deferred and finally waiting in line to quint Roth.

That suggests you should have more liquid assets in your taxable accounts (something you probably did already, since you’re likely holding your emergency fund in them). So, for the most aggressive, highest-returning assets (often stocks), there’s Roth accounts. Because they will probably be part of the middle of your distribution queue, are subject to required minimum distributions and probably will represent the largest percentage of your portfolio, your tax-deferred accounts should include a mix of safer, income-producing securities such as bonds as well as higher-returning, higher-risk assets such as stocks.

And keep in mind, Social Security start date is a piece of this puzzle as well. Delaying Social Security is one of the highest payoff strategies to enrich a plan’s viability, being it expands your lifetime benefit, the vast majority of retirement planning experts say. The Social Security Administration Retirement Estimator lets you model out your Social Security benefits based on different Social Security start dates. Another very useful and free Social Security claiming tool is the website Open Social Security. Married couples should be especially careful to plan for Social Security as a couple, considering how to maximize their combined lifetime benefits from the program. (When one spouse is younger than the other and would receive a larger benefit from a spousal benefit than from his or her own benefit, delaying receipt of benefits as long as possible will be especially beneficial to the older, higher earner of the couple.) The decision to delay Social Security, for example, means you will need to draw more from your in-retirement accounts earlier in retirement, which may affect how you structure those accounts.

Step 7: Consider Projected Changes to Lifestyle

Talk about retirement planning typically focuses on the assets side of the balance sheet. But spending is just as powerful a lever.

So use the years leading up to retirement to test run your planned postretirement spending. If it’s looking like you may have a gap, you may be able to find ways to cut your retirement expenses. Housing costs are one of our biggest expenses in retirement and before it, so cutting back on housing whether by downsizing or moving to a cheaper part of the country can be particularly powerful. The name of the game is starting the planning process as early as possible, especially if you’ll be selling a home and/or buying a new one. If you’re in a sellers’ market now, it may be time to sell before you even retire. (Unless, of course, you are also going to be buying in that same seller’s market, in which case it may be a wash.)

Step 8: Evaluate the Safety Net of Your Insurance

You need that cushion of safety built up at this stage of life; that’s your insurance policy in the event of a longer-lasting bear market. That said, it is also important to have insurance for other risks that you’d never be able to pay for out of pocket. There are the usual insurance recommendations leading up to retirement: property and casualty, personal liability and health and disability, naturally. As grown children should be fully off your payroll, it’s also prudent to review whether life insurance should still be a part of your financial picture at this time; whole life insurance can make sense in some circumstances, once your dependents are fully grown, you’ll have less of a need. Long-term-care insurance might be prohibitively expensive by the time you’re in your early 60s, or you might have developed a health condition that prevents you from buying it. But it’s still a good idea to price out a policy, especially if you’ve accumulated a sizable but not gigantic nest egg. You might conclude that a traditional policy still makes sense for you, or you might look for alternatives. At least, ensure that you have a strategy.