Tag Archives: retirement

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The Key To Saving More For Retirement: Using Your Imagination

The coronavirus is dominating our attention so pervasively in the present moment that the notion of retirement seems even more distant for savers. That’s understandable—natural, even. But it’s precisely our fixation on the present that causes us to struggle to follow through on our intentions to secure our future. Let me show you why.

I have a proposition for you: I’d like to give you one of two gift certificates to your favorite restaurant (that is sure to reopen when the quarantine is lifted). But first, please picture that inviting atmosphere at 7:00 p.m. on a bustling Saturday night, the thoughtful waitstaff, the right musical backdrop, and the perfect meal in front of you and your ideal dinner companion. Now, choose between a $200 gift certificate you would receive today or a $400 gift certificate you would receive 10 years from now.

Time’s up. Which did you choose?

Unless you’re gaming the system – that is, you’re anticipating a financial advisor would never encourage seemingly impulsive behavior over deferred gratification – you almost surely chose the $200 gift certificate today. I would too. Lord knows we’re going to be ready for a night on the town when we return to public life! And that doesn’t make us wasteful or foolish. It makes us human.

Do it today
Now…or later?GETTY

To be clear, our all-so-human behavior isn’t inherently foolish or wasteful, especially in this instance. After all, your tastes could change 10 years from now. Another new restaurant could come into town. Heck, your favorite restaurant could shutter its doors, making your gift certificate worthless! A guaranteed two hundo today is almost certain to win over $400 a decade from now for most of us.

This tendency is a cognitive bias called hyperbolic discounting. It suggests that we’d prefer having something today rather than tomorrow, and that our bias for the present only compounds the further away on the calendar we place our hypothetical tomorrow.

But hyperbolic discounting moves out of the hypothetical and into reality when we examine it within the context of saving for retirement. Psychologically – biologically, even – we’ll generally default to today over tomorrow, and the result is that a generation of retirees hasn’t saved enough to meet their goals in retirement.

The odds were stacked against future retirees when the 401(k) was introduced. Think about it. You’re enduring one of life’s more stressful endeavors – starting a new job. You’ve exhausted your mental capacity and willpower on a long series of important decisions. After selecting tax withholding, choosing health insurance coverage, and navigating an array of other benefit options, you arrive at your 401(k) or equivalent retirement plan. And this is how your brain hears the question:

“Would you like to further reduce the amount you can spend today by setting even more money aside for a day decades in the future that might never come?”

How many people do you think opted-in to a 401(k) within the first six months of work? The numbers are atrocious – one study found 34%. But then, inspired by behavioral economists, companies started using an opt-out mechanism, requiring new hires to choose not to set aside at least a modicum of savings. The numbers shot up.

That sounds great, but our bias to choose the default doesn’t actually address hyperbolic discounting. More people may be saving, but they still aren’t saving enough. How, then, can we solve the hyperbolic discounting dilemma? Can we rewire ourselves to prefer saving more?

The answer, according to extensive research by Hal Hershfield on the subject, is to picture yourself in retirement. In one of his studies, Hershfield showed that digitally altering images of present-day participants, extrapolating what they might look like years down the road, could positively affect their saving behavior.

Furthermore, we can employ our imaginations to animate those future images. What do you most want to be doing in retirement? How do you want to feel?

In other words, to save more, we should first think about the lifestyle we want in the future and then back into the financial decisions required to make it a reality. And the degree to which these visions of our future self are vivid and positive will increase our propensity to save more.

Man standing in field admiring imaginary house
Imagine Retirement GETTY

Now, back to our initial proposition. The notion of $200 to spend today or $400 to spend 10 years from now isn’t so outlandish. If you’re earning an annual average return of 7% – a reasonable expected return for a balanced investment portfolio – your money doubles in roughly 10 years. And in retirement, it’s precisely stuff like food – and housing, transportation, travel and recreation – that add up to the lifestyle we desire.

So, wherever you are on the continuum from now until your personal retirement then, consider using your imagination to help increase your motivation to save for the future.

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How should retirees deal with crazy markets when they don’t have time to “stay the course”?

Investing is a young person’s game, am I right? I mean, I can understand the argument for ignoring short-term market dives when it’ll be decades before you need to actually touch the money. But what about retirees who need income today? Should retirees and near-retirees be cashing out of stocks on fears that a worldwide pandemic will continue to throttle markets?

I recently discussed this concept on CNBC. Click the image to watch the video.

First, it’s important to address this question on an emotional level before attempting to respond rationally, because it’s not cold, calculating rationale that leads the charge in times of high market volatility, especially of the downward variety. (Indeed, as my friend Jeff Levine said, “Nobody ever seems to mind volatility when it’s up.”) Furthermore, when we are feeling and responding through the fast-acting, impulsive processor in our brain, thoughtful logic isn’t particularly comforting.

Retirees, in particular, may feel downright scared, and perhaps their fear is justified, because:

  1. They feel disempowered because they’re no longer earning a paycheck and are now reliant entirely on sources of income beyond their control. 
  2. They don’t have as much time as an investor in his or her 20s, 30s or 40s to recoup losses. 
  3. The math does change for those who are in the distribution phase of their life. Losses can indeed be compounded when you’re taking income out of a portfolio, rather than opportunistically buying through regular contributions.

Therefore, whether you’re a financial advisor counseling someone through turbulent markets or a white-knuckled investor eyeing the eject button, please know this: Every emotion is valid and worthy of acknowledgement. The best financial advisors will take it one step further and explore the emotions in play, even enlisting them in support of the best long-term investment strategy.

Once we’ve addressed this valid concern on an emotional level, it’s time to look at it from a logical perspective, and indeed, for most retirees, it’s important to maintain a healthy allocation to stock exposure in order to ensure that your lifestyle keeps up with inflation. In determining how much risk any investor should take, one’s “time horizon”—the ability to take risk—is a material consideration. A retiree in her late 60s has a shorter time horizon than a new investor in his early 20s, but, however limited, the retiree’s time horizon still isn’t zero.

Retirees need to satisfy income needs today, but they also need to address income needs in the future. Therefore, while it’s a slight oversimplification of a total return portfolio strategy, in times of extreme market volatility, I would invite retirees to view the meaningful portion of conservative fixed income in their portfolio as their income engine in the short-term while their portfolio’s stock exposure is designed to generate income years from now.

(Of course, this presumes that one’s fixed income portfolio is actually conservative, a stabilizing force in your portfolio. Corporate, longer-term, and especially high-yield bonds tend to have equity-like characteristics in down markets; so dare to be boring with your fixed income allocation.)

The optimal percentage of equities in a retirement portfolio will be driven by the retiree’s need to take risk. If you don’t need to take the risk, who am I (or any other financial person with a propensity for stock market cheerleading) to convince you otherwise? Yes, you might need a boost from market returns to outpace inflation. And yes, even if you’d struggle to spend all your money in this lifetime if you kept it in a Mason jar, you might consider investing it for the next generation. But there’s no moral imperative to endure market volatility if you don’t need or want the long-term benefits we expect to receive.

And that’s especially because the most important factor in determining how much equity risk you take in your portfolio is your internal willingness to assume risk. This is the gut-check test, and if you’re at risk of bailing out at the bottom—the worst possible time to sell—you must limit your exposure to stocks. Sticking with a conservative portfolio will earn you more in the long run than fleeing a more aggressive one.

Of course, you can only “stay the course” if you have one. You can only stick with the strategy that exists. Typically, emotions are heightened among those who don’t fully understand or can’t fully articulate their strategy and especially among those who don’t have one. 

Too many investors own a collection of securities—or even a collection of someone else’s strategies—that have built up over a lifetime, rather than a well-designed, purposely built, customized portfolio. Those investors should be concerned, and they should use this market hysteria du jour as the catalyst for a substantive portfolio review.

If you’re in the minority, however, who do have an understandable, goals-based strategy—who have considered their ability, willingness and need to take risk—and who have proportionately set their exposure to stocks, then by all means, rest easy and rebalance. Know that however ugly this particular market event gets, it likely will not amount to a blip on the radar when looking at your lifetime of investing. Acting rashly in these situations is more likely to do harm than good.

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‘Someday Came’: How Our Vision Of The Future Shapes Our Saving In The Present

While on vacation recently in the Abaco Islands, on the outer rim of the Bahamas, I found myself on an important mission: taking the golf cart to the local market to restock our dwindling supply of the necessary ingredients for piña coladas.

I was stopped in my tracks en route by a welcome sign announcing a new resident’s beachside home. It read: “Someday Came.”

The obvious implication is that these folks decided to act on their “Yeah, I’m gonna do that someday” daydreams.

But it raises many questions, right?

Who are these people? What’s their story, financial and otherwise? Did they hammer this sign into the sand after scrimping and saving, finally realizing their retirement dream following a lifetime of toil? Or are they the professionally mobile couple with young kids you see on HGTV’s “Caribbean Life,” who decided they’d just had enough of the rat race?

I’m glad I don’t have the answers, because the big question for the rest of us is worthy of consideration:

How do we define our “someday”? How do you define yours?

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The Ironic Conflict Of Interest Of The Fiduciary Financial Advisor

Originally in ForbesThe Trump administration’s move to delay implementation of the Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule has inspired me to delay implementation of my commitment to remain silent on matters of public policy and politics. It’s that important.

financial-aadvisorIt seems pretty obvious that those in the financial establishment who oppose the rule do so primarily out of self-interest. After all, it’s estimated that they will lose billions in profits if the final rule goes into effect. I get it.

But I was fascinated recently when a member of the media wondered aloud if my advocacy for a wider fiduciary standard was also simply an outgrowth of my own bias.

Indeed, who’s to say I’m not just grinding my own axe on this issue? Maybe I’m in favor of all financial advisors being held to a fiduciary standard because I’m a fiduciary financial advisor and part of a national community of financial advisors that supports the fiduciary standard.

That would be a convenient rebuttal from the anti-fiduciary community, but here’s the (huge) problem with that rationale:

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Top 3 Reasons For Millennials To Choose A Roth IRA

Originally in ForbesMuch—too much—has been said and written about the relative superiority of Roth IRAs versus Traditional IRAs. The debate over which is better too often involves the technical numerical merits. In truth, the Roth wins in almost every situation because of its massive behavioral advantage: a dollar in a Roth IRA is (almost) always worth more than a dollar in a Traditional IRA. This is true regardless of one’s age, but the Roth IRA is even more advantageous for Millennials.

I must first disclaim that you can disregard any discussion of Roth or Traditional IRA if you’re not taking full advantage of a corporate match in your employer’s 401(k)—free money is still better than tax-free money. But after you’ve “maxed out” the match in your corporate retirement account, here are the top three reasons Millennials should consider putting their next dollar of savings in a Roth IRA:

1) Life is liquid, but most retirement savings isn’t.

Yes, of course, in a perfect, linear world, every dollar we put in a retirement account would forevermore remain earmarked for our financial futures. But hyperbolic discounting—and the penalties and tax punishments associated with early withdrawal from most retirement savings vehicles—can scare us away from saving today for the distant future. The further the future, the more we fear.

The Roth IRA, however, allows you to remove whatever contributions you’ve made—your principal—without any taxes or penalties at any time for any reason. Therefore, even though I’d prefer you to generally employ a set-it-and-forget-it rule with your Roth and not touch it, if the privilege of liquidity in a Roth helps you save for retirement, I’m all for it.

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The American Retirement Dream Is Not Dead

American retirees are screwed. The 401(k) experiment has failed. Social Security’s going bust. Savers haven’t saved nearly enough and don’t have the means to improve the situation.

However hyperbolic, this is the message that has been sent and, for many, is indeed the way it feels. But how do the facts feel?

Pension Facts:

  • Many companies have abdicated the role they once played in helping support employees’ retirements through defined benefit pension plans by promoting and then under-supporting defined contribution plans, like the 401(k).
  • Most pensions that remain — even those run by states and municipalities — are “upside down,” lacking sufficient funds to pay what they’ve promised. The entity conceived to insure underfunded pension plans is also underfunded.

401(k) Facts:

  • Some large financial firms have filled many of the 401(k) plans they manage with overpriced, underperforming funds, and offered little in the form of substantive education for the masses now left to their own devices.
  • After a six-year effort to ensure that financial advisors who manage retirement assets would be required to act in the best interests of their clients, there’s a corporate and political movement afoot for firms to reclaim potential lost profits if they were forced to do right by their clients.
  • Even some of the individuals who initially conceived the 401(k) concept and lobbied for it have recanted their support, regretting it ever started.

Social Security Facts:

  • The program intended only to be a safety net has become the primary financial resource in retirement for too many.
  • The surplus funds received when the huge baby boomer generation paid in — which are now being used to help replace the inherent shortfall of smaller generations — are projected to run out in 2034, thereby reducing the system’s ability to pay benefits by 25 percent.

There — how does that feel, now?

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American Pension Crisis: How We Got Here

Originally in ForbesMy adopted home of Charleston might have been ranked the “Best City in the World,” but the state of South Carolina is earning a less distinguished label as a harbinger of the country’s worst pension crises. And yes, that’s crises—plural—because U.S. state and local government pensions have “unfunded liabilities” estimated at more than $5 trillion and funding ratios of just 39%.

What does that mean, exactly?

When a company or government pledges to pay its long-term employees a portion of their salary in retirement—a pension—the entity estimates how much it (and its employees) will need to set aside in order to make those payments in the future. An underfunded pension is one that simply doesn’t have sufficient funds to make its promised future payments.

Corporate pensions in the United States are in trouble, with the top 25 underfunded plans in the S&P 500 alone accounting for more than $225 billion in underfunding at the end of 2015. But states and municipalities are in even worse shape. This week, the Charleston-based Post and Courier estimated that South Carolina’s shortfall alone was at $24.1 billion, more than triple the state’s annual budget!

How did we get here?

There are two glaring reasons: poor investment decisions and greedy assumptions.

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Is Your Attitude Toward Work Killing Your Retirement Dreams?

Originally in ForbesDo you have a generally positive or negative impression of the word “retirement”?

I ask because it dovetails nicely with a series of questions (inspired by Rick Kahler) that I use to begin most speaking engagements. These questions are designed to incite self-awareness, offering us clues about how our life experiences have shaped the (often unarticulated but powerful) beliefs that unavoidably influence the decisions we make with and for money.

Work or retire as a concept of a difficult decision time for working or retirement as a cross roads and road sign with arrows showing a fork in the road representing the concept of direction when facing a challenging life choice.

Regardless of an audience’s homogeneity, their responses are consistently inconsistent. I have, however, seen some generational persistency on the topic of retirement. For example, on average, baby boomers have a generally positive view of retirement—no doubt shaped in part by the incessant financial services commercials that promise a utopian post-career existence with beaches, sailboats, golf and an unlimited supply of vintage Pinot Noir.

On the other hand, the finance and accounting students that I had the privilege of teaching at Towson University—almost all members of the Millennial generation—had a generally negative view of the notion of retirement. This is for two prominent reasons:

  1. They pictured hot, humid, early buffet dinners in rural Florida.
  2. They don’t think that the American dream of retirement is available to them.
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Save Social Security For When You Need It Most–Later

Originally published CNBCI think we’ve been looking at Social Security retirement benefits all wrong. In the long-running debate about when to take Social Security — as early as age 62 or as late as age 70 — the focus has been on timing your claim to get the most money, in total, out of the social safety net.

This is a circular argument that will never be fully decided until the Social Security recipient in question dies. So let’s shift the focus from the question “How do we get the most out of Social Security?” to “How do we get Social Security when we need it most?”

Simply put, you’re more likely to run out of money at the end of retirement than at the beginning.

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Congress Eliminates Two Popular (and Profitable) Social Security Claiming Strategies

The Bad News & The Good News

Originally published CNBCLast week, the world of retirement planning experienced the financial equivalent of a deafening record scratch, courtesy of a Congressional move to end two well-used Social Security claiming strategies. In a matter of months, “File-and-Suspend” and “Restricted Application,” which were on the verge of retirement planning rock-star status, will only be referred to in the past tense.

“File-and-Suspend” and “Restricted Application” — let’s just call them “FASRA,” because it’s not like there aren’t already enough government-related acronyms — were, Congress argues, unintended consequences of the Senior Citizens Freedom to Work Act.