Goals
Preparing for Retirement When You’re Starting Late
Everyone knows that you’re supposed to start saving for retirement early, but that doesn’t always happen. In fact, if you look at the numbers, it’s actually pretty rare. Most people are woefully unprepared for retirement, but you can change that.
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Building and Maintaining an Investment Portfolio
Building a diversified and effective investment portfolio is an important part of creating an efficient retirement income plan. Much of the research around retirement income planning tends to focus on other matters and not put a lot of weight on portfolio-creation matters.
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What Are Annuities?
Annuities are like power tools. In the right hands, they can help you considerably, but if you don’t know what you’re doing, you could cut your fingers off.
Read MoreWhat are Longevity Goals?
Of all of the different goal types, longevity goals are probably the least intuitive. Your longevity goals are based around the possibility that you will live longer than you expect. That sounds great, but your income plan needs to be able to…
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4 Steps To Prepare Your Retirement Portfolio For The New Year
The end of the year is a great time to get your financial house in order. As the market bounces along throughout the year, your portfolio bounces right along with it. Every once in a while, you need to give it a checkup. And it’s not just rebalancing your investment portfolio (though I cover that in step 4) – you need to make sure your entire financial picture is in good working order.
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How Much Wealth Will You Have 30 Years Into Retirement?
Thus far, we have compared the historical performance of various spending strategies when the initial spending rate is 4%. Over the next couple weeks, we will apply an XYZ rule and consider how spending may be impacted by the low-interest-rate environment facing retirees.
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Diversification Works In A Crisis (But It Doesn’t Work Miracles)
There are a lot of myths about diversification. Today, I want to address a pernicious lie floating around out there that diversification only works when times are good.
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How Can Retirees Adjust Their Spending For Inflation Without Breaking The Bank?
A final example in the decision rules category is the Target Percentage Adjustment method introduced by David Zolt in his 2013 Journal of Financial Planning article, “Achieving a Higher Safe Withdrawal Rate with the Target Percentage Adjustment.”
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The Original Retirement Spending Decision Rules
The next decision rule approach provides the name for this category of methods. The Guyton and Klinger spending decision rules derive from work by Jonathan Guyton in 2004 and the team of Jonathan Guyton and William Klinger in 2006.
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A Simple Way To Keep Your Portfolio In Line
Investing isn’t simply picking the best funds or building your perfect portfolio. Keeping your portfolio in line over the long term is just as important (if not more so).
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When Tax-Loss Harvesting Makes Sense (And When It Doesn’t)
Tax-loss harvesting, when done right, is the equivalent of turning your financial lemons into lemonade, by converting your market losses into tax savings. Successful tax-loss harvesting lowers your taxes without substantially impacting your long-term investment outcomes.
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A Terrible Way To Protect A Retiree From Inflation
People seem to think commodities (especially gold) are suitable guards against inflation. I want to explain why that’s not true, and tell you about some of the much better tools available.
I want to explain why that’s not true – at least over any useful time frame – and then tell you about some of the much better tools available.
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