Retirement Readiness
Making money last for thirty years or more is not easy for individual investors or professional money managers. In this age of financial repression, it’s simply hard to make money on your money, no matter how much you have. Then there’s volatility and bad timing; losses can lock any portfolio for a loop and send the plan it supports reeling. The years 2000-2009, for example, proved to be a “lost decade” when Wall Street’s signature strategy (the 60/40 portfolio) failed. With interest rates at historic lows and equity markets at historic highs, some valuation measures warn of possible danger ahead. We believe retirement investors should consider retooling.
The Components
Realistically matching increasing lifelong income needs to all available income sources—guaranteed and otherwise—to project annual sufficiency, surplus or deficit. Includes contingencies in a worst-case scenario. The plan is your GPS, enabling you to tell if you’re spending too much or too little, keeping you on track and mapping needed tactical adjustment along the way.
A lynchpin of your retirement planning, determining when to claim the benefits you’ve earned is a complex decision that depends on your marital and financial circumstances and retirement objectives. The SS Administration is not legally authorized to provide this personalized analysis, which should recognize the possibility of a 24% reduction in benefits expected to take effect as early as 2027 but currently no later than 2034.
We believe it's time to re-tool your retirement portfolio focused on your "safety net," using the latest risk-control strategies designed to mitigate or totally avoid market losses while still enabling you to participate in positive outcomes.
Optimizing income means deriving the lifetime cash flow you need from the least amount of capital required. Rather than using low-yielding bonds, we employ more efficient alternatives that not only generate better income; they're also built to help you keep up with inflation.
Income taxation is a dominant force in personal finance. Staying ahead of systemic changes and minimizing their adverse effects is essential for both wealth accumulation during the runup to retirement and wealth de-cumulation during retirement itself. Rooted in formal training, and in collaboration with your advisory team, our approach seeks to shelter you from the erosive effects of income and capital gains taxation during both phases of your financial life.
Life is filled with unexpected events—positive and negative—that trigger economic consequences. In retirement planning, some negative probabilities can be hedged by off-loading their attendant risks to insurers or reserving capital to cover them. It’s vital to identify them and their potential impacts in advance to choose the best way to get a measure of control over their impacts on your retirement outcome.