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My Take On “What I’ve learned after 14 years at the most ‘depressing’ job in America”

This article has been shared widely since it was published a few days ago.  I appreciate the perspective the author shares as a journalist who’s covered personal finance topics for 14 years.  He has had to share many sad truths with his readers about how the majority of Americans are not saving enough for retirement, and how an increasingly complicated field of products and services leaves many Americans confused.

I agree with many of his comments and a lot of his lessons.  I have a different takeaway from the article.  It’s more proof that personal financial planning is more challenging than ever before and a trusted financial advisor is needed to help navigate the obstacles and set a proper course for people to reach their goals.

With all the tools and products that exist in the market, it is now possible to build a truly customized one-of-a-kind plan to help a client reach his or her financial goals.  Annuities may be a bad idea for most investors, but for some, an annuity is exactly what is needed.  Same goes for a reverse mortgage.  Most people will never have a need for one.  But for a select group of people, it may be a much-needed lifeline.

When someone gets their paycheck, they have lots of decisions on how to spend it.  As a society, we spend too many of those dollars in the present and save very little for the future.  Americans, in general, opt for things like a daily cup of coffee without realizing how much it adds up in the future ($3 a cup every workday for 30 years totals $23,400).  They make these decisions all day long without realizing the kind of impact this has on their future.

This, again, is where a financial advisor can help.  We often help to coach our clients in deciding how to pay off debts and nudge them into saving a little more for retirement.  In a sense, we are advocating on behalf of their future self.  And when market volatility returns, we are there to coach them to stay the course with their investment strategy.

To summarize, Roberts article provides a great perspective. I just wish he talked about how a financial advisor can help to provide guidance on many of these decisions that most Americans struggle to solve on their own.

A Simple Strategy To Save a Million Dollars (And Why It Is So Tough)

Over the last few years, I have worked with a lot of young families to plan how they will save for retirement and fund education costs for their children.  Their problem was simple: they knew they needed to save more but they didn’t know where to trim their budget.  Or their budget was already trimmed if a spouse was staying home to raise children and they lived on one income.  They didn’t know how to get started.

One solution that I brought up was to earmark the majority of any future raises (or future income from the spouse not currently working) to be directed into savings (college, retirement, other).  On paper and in concept, it makes a lot of sense.  This post shares the experience of someone who carried out the same kind of strategy for many years.

The problem that ends up holding many people back from reaching their goal with this kind of strategy is a concept called Lifestyle Creep or Lifestyle Inflation.  This occurs when someone receives a raise and instead of immediately increasing their 401(k) contribution amount, they put it toward something to make their life more enjoyable.  It could be an improvement to the house, an extra vacation, a new car, or just eating out more frequently.  The “needs” of today end up outweighing the “needs” of tomorrow.

Turns out, there is an evolutionary reason for this mindset.  In the early days of our existence, it was feast or famine. Our ancestors adapted to their reality by consuming as much food as possible when it was available so they could survive when food was scarce.  Unfortunately, we have not yet evolved to shed that mindset from our thinking.  Short article here helps explain the concept.

The solution to this evolutionary crutch is to systematically and regularly increase savings rates.  I work with some clients where we are increasing the rate at which they save two or three times a year.  Mentally, it is easier to increase your savings rate by an extra $100/mo every few months rather than increasing the savings rate by $400/mo every year.

But even then, that solution doesn’t make up for good-old-fashion discipline.

How To Retire Early: A Critique of A Widely Shared Article

Recently, an article has been floating around the internet that presented a simple strategy to retire early.  It seemed too good to be true.  The gist of it is  “Even by simply upping your savings rate from 10% to 20%, you could shave off over 14 years from your retirement timetable.”  But what really caught my eye was the a simple chart that accompanied the quote suggesting the more aggressive you saved, the earlier you could retire:

If interested, you can read the full article here.

I couldn’t find enough details on how these figures were determined.  There was no complete list of assumptions used to arrive at these calculations.  Was Social Security factored into these calculations?  What about inflation? How did they define success?  I decided to do my own analysis and critique the findings on either end of the chart.

 

Save 10% for 51 Years

For the analysis that follows, I assume a 21 year old saves about $10k a year (10% of a $100k income) and does so for 51 years. And then in retirement, he would live off $100k. Social Security is not factored into this equation.  When we model this scenario, the results are very underwhelming.

The Result:

This scenario is not promising.  There is an extremely high chance that the portfolio would last for only about 12 years in retirement.  When we run through a 1000 market simulations, only 9% of the time will the portfolio last until age 95.

A Modification to Consider:

Let’s add social security to see how this affects the probability. Assuming social security of $30k per year, we can see that probability has jumped from 9% to 74%.  That means that in 74% of the 1000 market simulations, the portfolio lasted at least until age 95.  By leaning on social security to partially fund retirement, the investor doesn’t have to take as much from his savings.

We are getting closer to success, but I would not be comfortable with this plan.  I want to see a confidence level in the 90% range.  To get to a confidence level that I would feel comfortable with, I see three options to consider doing in addition to factoring in social security:

  • Increase savings to $1000/mo
  • Retire three years later
  • Live off $1000/mo less in retirements.

An Even Better Approach:

Let’s go back to our original scenario (without factoring in social security).  Let’s assume that the investor would increase the amount he saved each year by the rate of inflation.  In year one, he saves $10,000, but by year 5 he is saving $10,510.  Now this produces an interesting result:

That small change of saving a little more than the previous year had a profound impact when spread over five decades.  And the best part is that social security is icing on the cake.

Conclusion:

With modifying the assumptions a little bit, this scenario is very realistic.  This closely matches a lot of rules of thumb out there, so I’m not surprised that this scenario is workable.

Save 70% for Nine Years:

Let’s move to the other end of the spectrum and see how we can make the more aggressive goal possible.  Here is a hint: it’s a real stretch.

The obvious issue:  A client earning $100k per year would save $70k in this scenario leaving $30k for taxes and living expenses. That’s simply not enough to live on and pay taxes upon.  Under normal circumstances, I’d stop right there in my analysis. But to make this scenario at least plausible, let’s assume that he works for a company that provides food and that he camps in the parking lot.  You may be laughing, but it does happen. Basically, he has no living expenses and that $30k is used to pay taxes.

Result:

If we take the same client situation as we outlined in the previous example and accelerate retirement to begin in 9 years, the client has absolutely no chance of having the portfolio last through our planned life expectancy of age 95.  I’d be happy if the portfolio lasted for 10 years.

 

A Modification to Consider:

To make this scenario even remotely possible, the investor would need to slash his retirement income to about $1900 per month if he wants to have a good probability of retiring in 9 years and living off his portfolio until age 95.

Conclusion:

We may find it comical to consider the premise of only working for 9 years and saving the rest, but if this hypothetical person had an extremely modest lifestyle, this modified scenario could be considered.  The author of the chart referenced at the beginning of this post is a proponent of these kinds of retirement strategies and has even retired early himself.  His blog captures his thoughts and strategies and a few months back, I even wrote about this growing extreme retirement trend.

 

24% of Americans Have Absolutely No Emergency Savings. And That’s Good News!

Imagine losing your job or getting hit with an unexpected medical bill.  Chances are you have a some money stashed away to help pay for emergencies.  But 24% of Americans don’t have a single dollar set aside to pay for these emergencies. When an emergency affects them, they have to use credit cards, borrow, or make very difficult decisions about how to pay for emergencies.

But there is a silver lining to this statistic.  This is at the lowest level since 2011, when bankrate.com started doing this poll.  In fact, almost 1 out of 3 Americans have enough cash to cover six months worth of living expenses, which is the highest Bankrate.com has seen.

When looking at a client situation, this is one of the very first areas we review.  We want to make sure that if an emergency were to arise, that our client would have enough cash to cover the expenses that would arise.

If you’re interested in reading more about the recent bankrate.com study, you can read more here.

Top Money Mistakes People Make in Their 30s

I see lists like this all the time and for the most part I cringe at what I read.  The lists over simplify the issues or miss the boat entirely.  But this one is different.  It actually covers most of the items that I see with clients.  With each of the eleven money mistakes, I can think of one client that had made that mistake.

If I were writing this article, I would include a few other top mistakes.  For starters, I would include mistakes around homeownership and when is the right time to buy a bigger house.  That’s a common question or issue I run across.  I’d also suggest that people in their 30’s have an emergency fund set aside in cash.  Finally, I’d strongly encourage people in their 30’s to eliminate any credit card debt.

How to Plan When You Don’t Know Your Goals

Defining one’s goals isn’t easy for some people. Trying to envision what your life will look like at some point in the future can be difficult.  There are so many emotional and financial variables and so many unknowns in life that it can leave you feeling stuck or in a holding pattern until you find clarity.  We know that because it is a relatively common issue that we run into with our clients and an issue we try to help resolve for them. Retirements, illness, or the death of a family member can be very disruptive.

We help clients find clarity by trying to quantify the financial impacts of their situation and model other scenarios they are considering.

To illustrate what we do, let’s consider a typical client situation.  A couple with two college-age children have come to us looking for guidance in planning for their future.  They have very good incomes and a vacation property, but there expenses are high and they have not saved as much as they should have in the past.

Here is our process to help get this client out of their holding pattern:

  1.  We model their current financial situation and extrapolate those results out through their retirement.  Every conceivable financial variable is used to model the current situation: income expenses, accounts, assets, social security, etc.  The result is some perspective on the likelihood of maintaining the current lifestyle assuming nothing changes.  The model is summarized in a simple graphic, an example of which is below.
  2. The graphic above is presented to the client. The big circled number at the top provides a probability of success for the client to reach their financial goals.  The calculation uses Monte Carlo Simulations to imagine sequence of returns risk.  Basically, the model runs 1000 simulations to imagine how rates of returns affect a client reaching his goals.  What happens if there is a big recession early in retirement?  What happens if there is a big recession later in retirement?  What happens if the markets are flat for several years?  These are all scenarios that are modeled and considered and shows that of the 1000 simulations, 77%  result in their goals being met:
  3. In the first example above, it shows that their annual savings of $27,500 is used to successfully fund college education for two children as evident by the two green bars.  But it comes at an expense -their retirement is not fully funded as seen by the yellow bar.  This is where the conversation begins.
  4. We can begin to model changes on the fly to see how certain changes will affect their future in retirement.  In this example, the client has been wondering if they should sell their vacation property and use the savings for retirement.  We can quickly quantify the long term impact of that decision:
  5. Then we can see how that change will affect the probability of success.  We can see below that by making this one change, we have increased the probability of success from 77% to 93%.
  6. Sometimes, this gives the client enough clarity to make a decision and move on.  But that’s not always the case.  After the client has thought about making a major decision (such as selling a vacation home), they may come back saying they can not actually sell their vacation property and need to consider other options.  Below is a comparison of their current situation compared to a scenario in which they delay retirement for two more years.  The result is almost the same as if they sold the vacation property.

After this exercise, the client has two viable options to consider to get them on track for retirement.  By seeing certain scenarios modeled, it can make possible decision more real to them and hopefully more achievable.  The illustration we provide help them make better decisions.

There are lots of emotional decisions that revolve around major life decisions, like retiring, changing jobs/careers, and moving.  We believe that by addressing the financial impacts of these decisions, we can affect the emotional considerations that may be holding our clients back.  Our goal is to provide that nudge to get them moving in the right direction and to keep them from making mistakes.

If you feel like you are stuck or need help laying a clear path forward, please reach out to us: