Retirement Income Flexibility Archives

The challenge in building an effective retirement income plan is to use available income tools and tactics in a strategic manner to meet the financial goals of retirement while also managing the risks confronting those goals. The financial goals of retirement include sustainably meeting a lifestyle spending goal for as long as one lives, providing…

Rather than developing an exhaustive list of to do’s that may or may not be appropriate for everyone, our approach is to help the client develop a retirement framework for retirement or way of thinking about retirement. We call this the “CARE” retirement framework and it will help you build a foundation for a successful retirement.

Most people are focused on saving for retirement so they’ll have the money they need to fund their income in retirement. However, ask most people how much they’re going to spend in retirement and they have no idea. To plan for retirement effectively, you need to have some sense of what your spending needs are actually going to be.

By providing your financial objectives and the ways you want to fund them with essential and discretionary expenses, you can create a framework. Your Funded Ratio score will tell you how close your aspirations are to your reality.

Distinguishing between “safe” withdrawal rates and “optimal” withdrawal rates is an essential piece of the retirement spending conversation.

There has been too much emphasis on the portfolio and spending conservatively to keep failure rates low. This is not the whole story for retirement income. Certain circumstances, which we will explore, may allow retirees to accept a higher probability of “failure,” and spend more aggressively from their investment portfolio.

The Retirement CARE Analysis can help you figure out your asset allocation and an appropriate spending rate for retirement.

Often, retirees are limited to accepting whatever a researcher assumes about market returns in order to obtain guidance about sustainable spending rates. I proposed a general framework for determining a safe withdrawal rate for a given retirement duration, acceptable failure probability, asset allocation, and capital market expectations.