First: why would you be changing your investment strategy?
During accumulation I was 100% stocks and I wanted to see my assets grow to provide for a time when I no longer can or want to work as hard. The risk and volatility of the market bothered me, but I stayed the course because I had a good income and no specific time horizon and I could always work longer if the market went down.
Things have changed. My jobs with a large enough pay to live and save it no more (by choice). My part time jobs covers 100% of my expenses, but leaves little room for new savings. Giving the change in my circumstances, I'm pondering changing my investment strategy. For better or worse my investment strategy did not deal with the change in my circumstances.
I recently I moved to an 80/20 allocation, but this was not so much based on a deep dive on my finances and asset allocation as it was a temporary move until I figure out what to do next.
You don't *have to* change your investment strategy once you finish accumulating. Unless we know exactly what you are trying to achieve compared to accumulation, we can't really give you advice.
I acknowledge that not clearly defining what I'm trying to accomplish is part of the problem. I'm still working through this. The answer is a combination of wanting to live well on my savings with a decent potential of growth and a level of risk I'm comfortable with. I guess in some ways many of us want this. How then, for me, do I accomplish this? No one can answer that for me, except me. But hearing others peoples answers is helpful.
Okay, so you're kind of overcomplicating it.
Look at it this way, at a certain level of wealth, both high risk and low risk approaches make sense.
So, say I need 40K to live on, and I have 10M. I could leave it all in 100% stocks, because the market basically can't get low enough for me to lose money with such a small withdrawal rate. Likewise, I could leave it in cash and never run out of money. The outcome is exactly the same no matter what I do, I won't ever run out of money.
What's my point? My point is that one approach isn't necessarily better than another, or even any different in terms of outcomes.
Obviously you aren't in a 40K spend with 10M assets situation, so the key is to figure out the differences that actually matter, your specific risks, and account for them.
So what's the actual risk of leaving your investments in 100% stocks? Now, I'm going to use the term "risk" for it's actual meaning, and not for to mean volatility. From this point on, I will only use "volatility" when referring to market performance. So, what is the actual risk of leaving your money in 100% stocks? Is there actually ANY risk?
Not necessarily.
There is only risk in 100% bonds if there's a need to withdraw enough money to erode your principal. But do you have to do that? Not necessarily. As long as you can reduce your withdrawals in a given period of time in proportion to market forces, then there isn't actually any risk to staying 100% stocks.
So, for example, if you have a couple where one spouse has a pension and the other has investments, and they can live on the pension alone, then they never need to worry about hedging against market volatility. They can just elect to have some years where they spend less from their investments.
That's not your situation either, but you do have the capacity to earn. So that has to be accounted for as well.
Basically, how much do you really need? How much are you able and willing to cut down on withdrawals in a down market? Are there market forces that would make the markets low AND reduce your earning power at the same time (meaning, is your employability recession proof or recession fragile?). Etc. etc.
So the amount of volatility taming investments like bonds or cash that you might want are directly proportional to how difficult it would be to modulate your withdrawals in any given year.
If you were someone with limited professional skills in an industry filled with ageism and competition, who has a special needs adult child who is fully dependent on you, and you have to live in an HCOL area for their medical care, and you are living 100% on investments for the next several decades, plus will have to leave behind a lump sum for your special needs kid's care once you are gone? And you don't have a huge excess of savings????
Yeah, you are going to have to balance your volatility management and growth very carefully.
However, if you don't have a ton of factors forcing you into a necessary high spend, and have a lot of flexibility in terms of withdrawal, either through cutting spending or adding income at will, then there's no need at this time to hedge against market volatility.
The key is to understand your ACTUAL risks, and understand how to hedge against them.