Rick, a client of ours, was talking to his friend,Mark, and they were discussing their finances and doing some basic comparison on how well they were doing in their retirement funds. Mark was lamenting the 19% loss in his portfolio during the 4th quarter of 2018.
“Yeah, the market was ugly that quarter, but I didn’t get that huge loss like other folks” Rick was happy to announce. “The Market lost 19% but I only had a slight 3% decline. But when the market recovered in January 2019, it was up 8% and was able to catch 7% of the upswing” he added.
Mark was now more curious than before and wanted to know what Rick was doing to protect his nest egg. Rick was ready with a quick response and let his friend know that he had professional planners at American Retirement Advisors that assisted him in building his retirement income plan to protect him against such losses and help him with guaranteed income during his retirement years.
The thing that folks need to understand that when building a plan for your retirement nest egg, you must have a “preservation/distribution model” not an “accumulation model”. A lot of the planning needs to be done with expert and experienced planning partners who will research investments that will mitigate downside losses when the market takes a hit that effect individual investors, but at the same time enjoy the gains as the market turns to recovery.
There must be a long-term view when building a retirement income plan, not some short, quick and easy, get-rich-quick scheme. Planning, reviewing, and then selecting these vehicles is the key. This is known as doing the homework.
There is also no one-size-fits-all. In the end you need a customized plan that will endure the roller coaster ups and downs of the market. In your younger earning years, you can afford to take chances because you have time to recover. But in retirement years, you have what you have and can’t afford to lose it, because you have no way to recover the principal, unless you go back to work. Yuck!
Mark wasn’t shy about asking for a phone number….for guess who?
So, do you still have accounts scattered all over the place? Is your plan protected for the large swings in the market? Call us, we can help!