Target Date Funds

While a goals-based approach divides a retiree’s liabilities (future spending goals/needs) and assets into separate pieces with separate mandates, it can be useful to see how they all stack together.

In investing, you can have a safe present or future value, but not both!

Incorporating debt planning into your services helps your clients achieve a more comprehensive and sustainable financial future.

Many boomers are invested in target-date funds that are not safe and do not provide the protection they desire.

Despite the increasing popularity of self-directed brokerage accounts (SDBAs) within 401(k) plans, recent data reveals that women are under-utilizing this investment tool.

How do you cultivate a successful referral program?

You need to pay attention to the role of emotions to effectively communicate with your clients.

Advisors and investors wonder what role annuities should play in retirement planning. Here are the pros and cons of a common annuity product versus consuming out of invested wealth.

Target-date funds, which make up over half of total 401(k) assets, are not following investment theory, exposing investors to excessive risk.

Perhaps taking a page from the US, where retirement funds have long made significant equity investments, the UK is hoping that adding lots of private equity to its pension pots will drive higher returns and superior growth outcomes.

Should you be concerned? How can you compete with “free”?

It will be increasingly important to consider the best ways to connect with and support Gen Z as they make some of their biggest financial decisions.

I will describe the general process used by actuaries to maintain financial sustainability, to encourage advisors to employ this same process to their client’s retirement planning.

Evidence on actual spending behavior suggests that real spending falls with age. If that’s true, people need to save less for retirement than we think.

Advising professional athletes is an exciting and rewarding experience. It also presents unique challenges that require a different approach than working with more traditional clients.

No one is bragging about the index fund they own to their friends.

What is the number-one reported factor for a happy and fulfilling retirement?

Whether it’s high inflation or greater market volatility, Monte Carlo analysis will reveal how those uncertainties impact a client and provide peace of mind about their plans.

When planning for retirement, taking even the smallest risk can be life changing. Discover why financial advice during retirement planning is crucial with Harold Evensky.

Here’s how we can improve financial planning projections to result in better forecasts, advice and guidance to households.

April is Financial Literacy month, but all that elicits from the advice industry is a collective yawn.

Special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) impose costs that are subtle, opaque and poorly understood. New research shows just how much SPAC investors stand to lose.

It is challenging to deal with clients who are so clearly stuck in their financial pasts. Strong emotions don’t lead to calculated financial decisions, after all, which makes doing your job much harder.

Early signs of economic unraveling are appearing. The federal corporation that insures bank deposits is woefully underfunded. The Fed is under pressure to pivot away from its inflation fight.

The goal of marketing is to garner loyalty among existing clients while also attracting new ones to drive growth and profitability for your firm. To implement engaging messaging, follow these tips…

Here are six compliance-friendly ways to incorporate social proof into your website to establish trust and capture new leads.

A simple annuity can effectively replace bond holdings in a retirement plan that are earmarked to meet the lifetime spending goal. The question is why should a retiree hold any bonds in the portion of their asset base designed to cover ongoing retirement spending goals?

President Biden has proposed a $6.9 trillion budget that calls for reducing deficits and raising taxes on wealthy people and large corporations. There is a lot of spending in this budget that fuels inflation.

Any of the variable spending strategies I analyzed will reduce sequence risk in retirement and allow for greater initial spending rates, potentially greater average spending amounts, and a generally more efficient spenddown of assets than the baseline constant inflation-adjusted spending rule.

Being flexible with spending matters. My analysis shows that variable spending strategies – including floor-and-ceiling, guardrail, actuarial and other methods – can dramatically increase sustainable retirement spending.

Although most of the SECURE 2.0 changes won’t take effect until 2024 or later, there are things that advisors should keep in mind, particularly for clients who fall into one of these three broad categories: retirees, savers, and small-business owners.

Reducing the U.S. deficit is praiseworthy. How was that accomplished in 2022?

It is a challenge to design a website that addresses the needs and questions of multiple client types.

Probability-based retirement income strategies are highly sensitive to the capital market assumptions used in Monte Carlo analysis. Seemingly small changes in those assumptions can mean the difference between projecting a comfortable lifestyle and financial ruin.

Build your ladder with multiple target-maturity ETFs representing different segments of the bond market, with different target years.

There's only one thing you really need to know about investing in 2023, and it's both stunningly obvious and invariably forgotten: There's no free lunch.

This past year was disappointing for stock and bond investors. The real 25% loss in stocks was in the bottom decile and the real 20.3% bond loss is the worst in the past 97 years. Greater losses lie ahead.

Relative to the accumulation phase, strategies that mitigate the unique risks faced by retirees in decumulation are less understood and researched. By identifying and illustrating those risks, planners can better prepare clients for retirement.

When I heard that the investment management firm GMO had created a retirement planning tool to mitigate “sequence of returns” risk I looked forward to learning about it. After setting aside a stumbling block or two in its white papers, I found it to be the best platform for financial advisors I have ever seen.

Let’s look at the powerful feature set an advisory firm could put together from a collection of the higher-rated, low-market-share programs and solutions that I’ve collected from past surveys, many of which you may not even be aware of.

The latest US jobs report doused nascent optimism that the American economy was weakening enough to warrant a go-slower approach by the Federal Reserve in its battle against inflation.

How can advisors turn their clients’ focus from dollars to dreams? How can making a clear connection between their real and financial lives create a meaningful client experience and add value to an advisor’s service?

Lifetime annuities in concert with allocations to stocks, TIPS, bond ladders and other diversified investments help retirees weather changing conditions regarding inflation and interest rates.

A matter that can have large impacts on the marginal tax rates faced by individuals who obtain health insurance coverage through the ACA exchanges is the reduction of the tax credits (or subsidies) for health insurance coverage as incomes increase.

I will outline a relatively straight-forward retirement planning process that advisors can use to help their clients find financial peace of mind in retirement and help them make better financial decisions.

It took 16 months to pay off my husband’s student loans after we got married.

This year has been disastrous for stock and bond investors. But things are not as grim when viewed in a financial planning context that considers how the assets will be used, i.e., the liability or expense side of the household balance sheet.

Clients often assume that their need for life insurance ends when they stop working. I spoke with Neil Drzewiecki, the head of life products for MassMutual Life Insurance Company, about how whole-life insurance can play an important role in your client's retirement income strategy.

This year could be the beginning of the bursting of a superbubble that inflated over the previous 13 years.

One investment with the ability to provide current income, inflation protection, and even the potential for capital appreciation has been largely overlooked – rising dividend stocks.

A growing number of Americans are renouncing their citizenship to escape a law that was designed to crack down on offshore tax evasion.

Introverted financial advisors can stand out from the competition. Here are three marketing strategies to help you play to your strengths as an introvert.

Bill Bengen’s 4% safe withdrawal rule is the standard by which retirement strategies are measured. But it fails as a practical guide to retirement planning. Here is how to fix it.

How do taxes impact the 4% rule for retirement spending?

A new wave of lawsuits alleges that Blackrock’s target date funds (TDFs) have underperformed. These lawsuits open the door to a related and scandalous breach of fiduciary duty – excessive risk.