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.
Understanding Bond Returns
Bonds may not be as flashy as stocks, but they form the bedrock of your portfolio, so you should understand how they work.
What Happens to Your Pension If Your Former Employer Goes Under?
Pensions, along with Social Security, are the core of most people’s reliable income in retirement – they’re what many people plan to live off of. They’ve contributed to their pension fund for years, often decades, and they’ve built up a sizable chunk of change – with a little help from their employer – to draw […]
Which Retirement Spending Strategy Is Right For You?
Deciding on the right retirement spending strategy for your particular situation is both incredibly difficult, and incredibly important. There are huge numbers of reasonable options, but how do you know which is right for you? The answer depends on several factors.
Retirement Spending And Required Minimum Distributions
One final spending rule serves as a reasonably easy way to implement an actuarial method for retirement spending. Actuarial methods generally have retirees recalculate their sustainable spending annually based on the remaining portfolio balance, remaining longevity, and expected portfolio returns.
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.
Which Are You More Worried About: Running Out Of Money While You’re Alive Or Dying?
As David Blanchett says: failure is really only failure if wealth is depleted while you are still alive, not just over an arbitrarily long time period.
Which Is Better for Retirement Income: Insurance or Investments?
Retirement planning experts have long debated the question: Which is better for retirement income: insurance or investments? Wade Pfau weighs in.
Improving Retirement Income Efficiency Using Reverse Mortgages
Maintaining higher fixed costs in retirement increases exposure to sequence risk by requiring a higher withdrawal rate from remaining assets. Drawing from a reverse mortgage has the potential to mitigate this aspect of sequence risk by reducing the need for portfolio withdrawals at inopportune times.
How Does the Line Of Credit for a Reverse Mortgage Work?
A mortgage’s effective rate is applied not just to the loan balance, but also to the overall principal limit, which grows throughout the duration of the loan.
