What is a Bond Tent? A Bond Tent is a retirement glide path where you temporarily raise your bond allocation around the retirement date, then gradually reduce it over the first 10–15 years, specifically to defend against sequence-of-returns risk. The shape of the allocation over time resembles a tent peaked at retirement.
Worked example: at age 40 you hold 90/10 stocks/bonds. Starting at age 50, you shift toward 60/40 by retirement at 55. For the first 10 years of retirement, you spend down bonds preferentially in bad market years, letting equities recover, and re-equitize over time, ending at age 70 with ~80/20. Research by Michael Kitces and Wade Pfau shows this rising equity glide path improves worst-case outcomes materially vs a flat 60/40.
The Bond Tent is most useful for early retirees because their sequence risk window is longest. In practice, many FIRE practitioners implement a simpler version: hold 2–5 years of cash and short bonds as a “spending bucket”, then rebalance the rest aggressively toward equities. The math is similar; the behavioral ease is better.