Creating a Paycheck for Retirement – A Series on Retirement Income Pla…

in any case your retirement dreams, they can nevertheless be made a reality. It just depends on how you plan and manage your resources. On any journey it helps to have an idea where youre going, how you plan to travel and what you want to do when you get there.

If this sounds like a vacation, well, it should. Most people invest more time planning a vacation than something like retirement. And if you think of retirement as the Next Act in your life and approach it properly, you wont be so easily bored or run out of money to continue the journey or get lost and make poor money decisions along the way.

Its How You Manage It That Counts

How much you need really depends on the lifestyle you expect to have. And its not necessarily true that your expenses drop in retirement. Assuming you have an idea of what your annual expenses might be in todays dollars, you now have a target to shoot for in your planning and investing.

Add up the income from the supplies you expect in retirement. This can include Social Security benefits (the system is solvent for at the minimum 25 years), any pensions (if youre lucky to have such an employer-sponsored plan) and any income from jobs or that new career.

Endowment Spending: Pretend Youre Like Harvard or Yale

Consider adopting the same approach that keeps large organizations and endowments running. They plan on being around a long time so they target a spending rate that allows the organization to sustain itself.

1.Figure Out Your Gap: Take your budget, subtract the expected income supplies and use the consequence as your target for your withdrawals. Keep this number at no more than 4%-5% of your total investment portfolio.

2.Use a Blended Approach: Each year look at increasing or decreasing your withdrawals based on 90% of the prior year rate and 10% on the investment portfolios performance. If it goes up, you get a raise. If investment values go down, you have to tighten your belt. This works well in times of inflation to help you continue your lifestyle.

3. Stay Invested: You may feel tempted to bail from the stock market. But despite the roller coaster weve had, it is nevertheless prudent to have a portion allocated to equities. Considering that people are living longer, you may want to use this rule of thumb for your allocation to stocks: 128 minus your age. in spite of, you really should keep at the minimum 30% of your investment portfolio (not including safety net money) in equities.

If you think that the stock market is scary because it is inclined to periods of wild swings, consider the risk that inflation will have on your buying strength. Bonds and CDs alone historically do not keep speed with inflation. Only investments in equities have demonstrated this capability.

But invest smart. While asset allocation makes sense, you dont have to be wedded to buy-and-keep up and accept being bounced around like a yo-yo. Your chief allocation can be supplemented with more tactical or defensive investments. And you can change up the mix of equities to dampen the roller coaster effects. Consider including equities from large companies that pay dividends. And add asset classes that are not tied to the ups and downs of the major market indexes. These alternatives will change over time but the defensive ring around your chief should be reevaluated now and then to add things like commodities (oil, agriculture products), commodity producers (mining companies), dispensing companies (pipelines), convertible bonds and managed futures.

4.Invest for Income: Dont rely simply on bonds which have their own set of risks compared to stocks. (Think credit default risk or the impact of higher interest rates on your bonds fixed income coupon).

Mix up your bond holdings to take advantage of the characteristics of different bond types. To protect against the negative impact of higher interest rates, consider corporate floating rate notes or a mutual fund that includes them. By adding Hi-provide bonds to the mix youll also provide some protection against eventual higher interest rates. While called junk bonds for a reason, they may not really be as risky as other bonds. Add Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS) that are backed by the complete faith and credit of the US government. Add in the bonds from emerging countries. While there is money risk, many of these countries do not have the same structural deficit or economic issues that the US and developed countries have. Many learned their lessons from the debt crises of the late 1990s and did not invest in the exotic bonds produced by financial engineers on Wall Street.

Include dividend-paying stocks or stock mutual funds in your mix. Large foreign firms are great supplies of dividends. Unlike the US, there are more companies in Europe that tend to pay out dividends. And they pay out monthly instead of quarterly like here in the US. Balance this out with hybrid investments like convertible bonds that pay interest and offer upside appreciation.

5. Build a Safety Net: To sleep well at night use a bucket approach dipping into the investment bucket to refill the save that should have 2 years of expenses in near cash investments: savings, laddered CDs and fixed annuities.

Yes, I did say annuities. This safety net is supported by three legs so youre not putting all your eggs into annuities much less all into an annuity of a certain term. For many this may be a dirty information. But the best way to sleep well at night is to know that your must have expenses are covered. You can get comparatively low-cost fixed annuities without all the bells, whistles and complexity of other types of annuities. (While tempting, I would tend to pass on bonus annuities because of the long schedule of surrender charges). You can stagger their terms (1-year, 2-year, 3-year and 5-year) just like CDs. To minimize exposure to any one insurer, you should also consider spreading them around to more than one well-rated insurance carrier.