Retirement Field Guide

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The Retirement Field Guide

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The Ultimate Retirement Lever

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There are plenty of technical planning topics that can add value to your financial life that range from tax optimization to long-term care planning to estate planning. But if you blow up your portfolio, each one of those planning areas is exponentially worse off which is why I write so much about the simple value of staying the course through all markets. Imagine that around March 23rd of this year,… Read More

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Why Study Market History?

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While I am personally not an advocate of active investing, I follow the writing of many active managers. There are a few who have both a wonderful way with the written word and a track record to boot. Bill Miller of Miller Value Partners is one of them. I wanted to both make you aware of his work and point out a few insightful excerpts from his most recent 2Q… Read More

Where do we go from here?

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I have said before that the primary goal of successful retirement income investing isn’t growth OR income, but growth OF income. For people who are nearing retirement today, as we look over the horizon toward the thirty years that lie ahead, we must ask the question: Is it time to rethink the conventional wisdom of decades past? Historically, the popular answer for providing retirement income (though not necessarily the correct… Read More

Perceived Safety of Bonds

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Imagine standing in the middle of a field as a thunderstorm starts to roll through. About 50 yards away is a tall solitary tree. As someone who grew up in farming country, we grew up knowing that standing underneath the tree is the absolute worst thing we could do, even if it feels safer. The smart thing to do is to make yourself as small as possible by laying down… Read More

The Stock Market and Predictions

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Predictably unpredictable and unpredictably predictable. This is the market in a nutshell. The markets are predictably unpredictable because the market has a way of surprising the greatest number of people. Few people (nobody) saw the market returning 29% in 2019. I realize that’s a distant memory now, but it was still surprising, to say the least. Just as surely, nobody saw an economic shutdown caused by a global pandemic that… Read More

2020 Required Minimum Distributions

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For those who aren’t aware, the CARES Act had already waived 2020 Required Minimum Distributions (RMD). But there was a slight oversight with regard to people who had already taken their RMDs as many retirees do in January each year. Well, last week, the IRS announced that for anyone who already took their RMDs for 2020 can roll those assets back into their retirement account as long as it is… Read More

Market Expectations for the Next 30 Years

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As usual, there are many different scenarios being discussed at the moment. The COVID second wave, economic struggles, interest rate projections, more fiscal stimulus, corporate bankruptcies, and on and on we go. This is applicable to the world of traders, not investors. Investors don’t invest to make a quick buck. Long-term investors - which is a redundant term - invest because it is a prudent choice to expand capital over… Read More

Preparing For “What-Ifs”

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We are now a little more than two months out from the bear market lows. As the swift recovery ensued, I started hearing stories of investors who sold out of their portfolios around DJIA 19,000 “because the market was going lower.” They were right for the blink of an eye. With the market now back above 26,000, when are those investors supposed to get back in? I have to pose… Read More

Dividend Bear Markets

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An astute reader of last week’s blog post, Equities in Retirement: A 30-Year Case Study, asked a great question: “How much of a maximum decline in annual dividend income (based on prior historical experience) should one be prepared for?” In other words, during dividend bear markets, what level of income decline should we expect? The obvious answer is that I do not know because even the worst-case historical event is… Read More

Equities in Retirement: A 30-Year Case Study

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Whenever I ask soon-to-be retirees what the ultimate goal of investing in retirement is, the most common answer I hear is: I don’t want to run out of money. Pretty straightforward, right? Here’s the problem. When I ask many of those same individuals what the primary objective of their retirement portfolio is, this is the typical response: Preservation of principal. Whether retirees realize this or not, those two goals run… Read More