Jerry Golden on Retirement

Too many financial advisors ask the wrong question

April 24, 2018 By Jerry Golden in Income Power Tags: Annuities, Baby Boomers, Income power, retirement income

Baby Boomers are the 401(k) generation.

When Boomers started working, nearly every major company offered some form of pension providing lifetime income. Now, as members of this cohort are retiring in large numbers, pensions are nearly extinct outside of government employers.

The 401(k) was invented 40 years ago and now shares the retirement landscape with Social Security. Many Boomers have a good amount of money in their 401(k) accounts, but that doesn’t mean they can stop planning. In fact, this is when critical retirement planning begins.

Can you answer the question?

Annuities: The “bad,” the “good” and the “misunderstood”

March 26, 2018 By Jerry Golden in Annuity Tags: Annuities, Baby Boomers, Go2Income, QLAC, retirement income

For some investors, annuities have an image problem. Read the headlines on the advertisements from a few marketing-focused financial advisors to understand why. They often include words like scary, avoid, and often just plain “bad.”

The problem with this characterization is the total failure to distinguish between the broad categories of annuities and to analyze the features of each. As I said in a recent seminar, you don’t drop your life insurance because you are unhappy with the claim adjuster on your automobile insurance.

Do you have enough income to retire?

March 13, 2018 By Jerry Golden in Income Allocation 5 Comments Tags: Annuities, Dependable spendable income, Guaranteed Income, Income allocation, retirement income

Part III – Study confirms more income with less volatility

In Parts I and II in this series, I suggested that you could receive more retirement income with less volatility if you and your advisor moved from asset allocation to income allocation. It’s one thing to suggest and another thing to prove. So we conducted a study and will publish the full results and the underlying methodology in the next few weeks. As you will see, there are dramatic advantages to focusing on income allocation.

For this article we selected one of the case studies (a male 70, who has $1 million in retirement savings, 50% in a rollover IRA) with a current asset allocation of 30% to equities based on the “100 minus age” rule of thumb, and 70% to bonds and CDs. We compared that case to an income allocation strategy. You will see the results throughout this article, including a table of detailed results at the end of this article. Here are some highlights for this case:

Pre-tax income is increased by 32% over the investor’s lifetime.
Income volatility is reduced from 72% to 29%.

Do you have enough income to retire?

February 28, 2018 By Jerry Golden in Income Allocation 2 Comments Tags: Income allocation, Income annuities, Income power, retirement income

Part II: Income planning starts with income allocation

As a famous TV sports reporter would say, “Let’s go to the videotape!” When the talking is done, it’s always good to look again at the results to find out who won the race and why they won.

Unfortunately, most “experts” often view the wrong race. In the case of your retirement, many advisors will tell you that in this race against time you win when you hit a magic savings number. When we go to the videotape (or in our case an Excel spreadsheet), we realize that isn’t the correct focus. Instead, we should be asking, “Do I have enough income to retire?”

Most retirement planning asks, “How much savings?” The right question is, “Do I have enough income to retire?”

February 13, 2018 By Jerry Golden in Income Allocation 3 Comments Tags: Income allocation, Income annuity, Income power

A Multi-Part Series

The stock market just gave us a reminder of what volatility feels like.

I’m writing on the day following a two-day, 8% plummet in the Dow Jones average. Everyone I talk to asked, “What happened?” “What do I do?” “Will it get worse?”

The most frantic questioners were those who had the largest amount of their savings in stocks, especially the ones who depend on equities to provide them with their retirement cash flow. (Even the Millennials got spooked when their robo-advisors jammed up.)