“With 10-year Treasuries yielding less than 1 percent, you’d effectively be saying, ‘This is what I’m settling for,’ and most people need a higher rate of return,” she said. “At this stage of life, volatility is still your friend. You can buy more when the market is down.”
Also examine ways to rework your retirement plan in your favor.
Working longer so you can delay claiming Social Security benefits offers a meaningful way to improve retirement income — you’ll get roughly 8 percent more annual income for every 12 months of delay.
There is risk here, too: 37 percent of workers retire earlier than they intended to, according to research by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. But the risk of falling short of working as long as you planned diminishes as you get closer to retirement, Mr. Abolofia argued.
“Planning to work longer is a riskier assumption at younger ages, but if you’re already 65 and still working, pushing out your retirement date by a few years probably is realistic,” he said.
Another safe way to recalibrate your retirement plan is to revisit spending goals. Start by looking at what you are spending annually now, and look for possible cuts you could make in retirement if necessary.
“A lot of people just don’t really have a good sense of how much they’re spending,” said Wade Pfau, professor of retirement income at the American College of Financial Services. He recommends using personal financial management software (examples include Mint, Personal Capital and You Need a Budget) to get a handle on categories of spending, and how they might change in retirement.
If you’re retired
Back in the days when retirees could earn a substantial return only in bonds and certificates of deposit, traditional wisdom held that equity allocations could fall to very low levels. But these days, most professional allocations call for at least some exposure to stocks in retirement.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/article/stock-market-bonds.html
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