Target Date Funds

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.

There is one and only one S&P 500 sector that is up massively this year.

Let me give you an example of what it truly means to serve a niche.

Do your clients include a senior retiree with looming debt and considering filing for bankruptcy? Here is a list of 14 financial resources that can help get their finances in order.

My article, “The Trial of Ken Fisher for Crimes Against Annuities,” marked the beginning of my effort to aggressively defend annuities against criticisms that had become too exaggerated, too longstanding, and too inaccurate to be left unchallenged.

It can be daunting to get back on track once you’ve fallen behind.

While growth and succession can be accomplished using a DIY approach, there are benefits (professional and personal) that come with working with a strategic partner to achieve those goals.

I explain how attempts to view advisor compensation through a moral lens instead of an economics lens lead to false conclusions about the relative merits of each pricing model and hence to misguided predictions for the future of planner compensation.

A close look at the historical data suggests that the excess performance of stocks relative to bonds occurred mainly in two historical periods and has been inconsistent over the last 25 years.

The views you often read on advisor compensation models and their future are misguided.

In the current unstable economic environment, producing safe, reliable income over the course of an unknown retirement is a daunting goal for any financial professional. As a result, many Americans sub-optimize their retirement experience.

A few billion dollars cannot move a multi-trillion inflation needle. Two types of inflation are in play: one is transitory, but the other is not. The Fed cannot control inflation, but we want to believe it can.

What do you need to know about selecting the best stock photos to support your marketing strategy?

When it comes to a comfortable retirement, women in the US have the cards stacked against them.

We meet the official definition of a market correction and the unofficial definition of a recession, and we’re close to the definition of high inflation. Market corrections can and have caused recessions. Be prepared for all three problems coexisting for many years.

There was a major development in 2006 that transformed how Americans invest for retirement. It solved one problem, but created another that will be causing extra pain to people who retire in this economy.

This is the first in a series of articles that will explore tax-efficient retirement distribution strategies.

When starting with a niche, you may find it difficult to produce topics for your content marketing. To get ideas, take notes about what your prospects are talking about. This article covers specific points to create an effective content strategy.

Marriage in the US also unlocks an under-discussed retirement option: the spousal IRA.

What could be worse than having a qualified prospect slip through your fingers and vanish?

The Financial Alliance for Racial Equity (FARE) and the CFP Board Center for Planning collaborated on one such scholarship, Financial Alliance for Racial Equity CFP^® Certification Diversity Scholarship, which was created to financially assist seven Black and African American candidates on their journey to becoming a certified CFP^® professional.

Home equity is a powerful risk management tool that many higher net-worth individuals and their advisors are starting to explore.

When creating your marketing message for your niche, you want to articulate the one unique problem your niche faces. Here are questions to help you address that overriding problem.

Most people budget not for true emergencies — which are, thankfully, rare — but for what we might call predictable surprises.

Last month I advised abandoning stocks and bonds in favor of inflation-protected alternatives. That hasn’t worked out. I have not changed my mind. Interest rates will increase and cause losses in stock and bond markets.

None of us can control markets, but it’s critical that our clients know how they have performed relative to appropriate benchmarks.

To be an uncomparable financial advisor, you need a marketing message that is simple, clear, and repeated often. Here’s a framework for creating your message.

The decision to annuitize at age 65 may be optimal in instances of extreme longevity (age 90-95+) or if there is a prolonged environment for stocks and bonds that is as bad or worse than any conditions experienced in the historical record.

Depending on risk and diversification, 401(k) plans have lost between 4% and 20% so far this year. Unlike most other periods when stocks lost money, bonds have not defended well this time.

Two forecasting methods predict a 54% stock market loss in 2022. Someday the stock market bubble will burst. But the data says we have not seen the worst of equity market declines.

The one speed bump advisors keep tripping over is that, well, people are funny about their money.

In 2003, at age 19, Elizabeth Holmes founded Theranos, and it became a $10 billion company by 2014. But it was a fraud. Aspects of target date funds mirror the Holmes story.

Those who are familiar with my articles know that I see market crashes in stocks and bonds occurring in this decade, combined with serious inflation. Readers ask how I recommend protecting. This is it.

Whenever I surf television cable news channels, I see the plethora of ads for financial planning. But they are run by companies that sell financial products or are owned by huge insurance companies.

This article explores the benefits of annuities with lower explicit fees, a category I dubbed as “annuities Lite” in a previous article that focused on GLWBs.

The U.S. debt cannot be paid, even in inflated dollars. Serious inflation is inevitable that will crash stock and bond markets, in addition to devaluing the dollar.

When you say: “Hi, I’m just ‘following-up…” it sends the message that you care about making the sale more than solving their problem.

Each April, we are moved by hope – it is financial literacy month. To help close the growing savings gap, we strongly feel financial literacy and better knowledge of retirement and financial planning fundamentals are critical to securing more stable financial futures.

Does the scenario below sound likely? If so, you are among the thousands of RIAs who are likely to lose significant assets over the next decade.

In this article, I will explain how to structure an income strategy that best serves the needs of constrained investors. Demographic, economic, cultural, and social forces argue for a new approach to retirement planning.

As dangerous as it is to simply extrapolate past returns into future expectations, an even bigger mistake is planning a financial future based on nominal gross returns, forgetting about how large bite expenses, taxes, and inflation will take from the bottom line. Use our premium membership service to forward this article to clients with your logo.

If you’re looking for a case-study in economic groupthink, try Googling the phrase “Fed behind the curve.” Informed opinion, it seems, has congealed behind a conventional wisdom that the U.S. Federal Reserve has been too slow to restrain accelerating inflation.