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.
How Flexible Is Your Retirement Spending Plan?
A lot of expenses are negotiable, but many just aren’t. You have to buy groceries. You have to pay your homeowner’s insurance premiums. You have to go on that golf trip this winter (this one may be open to debate). As we’ve discussed in the past, it can be very useful to break expenses down […]
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.
How to Use Life Insurance
Life insurance can be confusing. Especially since so many people want it to be. But it doesn’t need to be. Life insurance is one of the simplest financial tools out there – as long as you use it correctly. There are two basic components to your wealth: Your Financial Capital – All the stuff you […]
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.”
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.
How Does Diversification Actually Work?
Diversification is a good thing. Nearly everyone agrees that it’s just about the only free lunch in finance.
But not many people stop and think about how diversification actually helps them, beyond the general “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” argument.
What is a Bond Ladder?
Bond ladders sound like another complicated finance concept only investing geeks understand, but they’re actually pretty simple. The easiest way to view them is as though you’re setting up your own annuity by prepaying for at least some of your income in retirement.
Ratcheting Up Retirement Spending
In 2015, Michael Kitces proposed a ratcheting rule for retirement spending that shared the basic framework of constant inflation-adjusted spending while still allowing spending to increase if the portfolio performs well in retirement. As with many of these rules, the ratcheting rule could be implemented in numerous ways.
