Friday, January 25, 2019

When the Market Kicks Like a Mule

Retirees are just now opening their 401(k) statements after an ugly fourth quarter and raising the inevitable question spawned by every significant market decline: should I rush for the exits?

There will be the requisite response from every financial columnist in the country and most will say, "do nothing."

Ah, if life were that easy!

Here's my alternative response. First, what you should do depends on your age and whether you are in your earning years, approaching retirement, early in retirement, or late in retirement. For those still working with at least a decade until planned retirement, "do nothing" is often a good idea. You have many years for the market to recover and to save more.

It might be a good answer for those in the other three life stages, too, but that depends entirely on your financial situation. I wouldn't hazard a suggestion without those details.

Regardless, a significant market downturn can be very educational. During a long bull market, it's easy to decide that you're a risk-taker and that a 25% decline in the S&P500 index wouldn't prompt you to panic-sell at a market bottom. But, you truly understand your risk tolerance only when the decline is actually happening.

My goal for clients is to make them so comfortable with their investments that, like me, they never even think about market downturns. If last quarter's market correction caused you significant anxiety, what it hopefully taught you is that you have too much invested in the stock market. In that case, the correct answer is to sell some of your stocks (as your stomach is trying to tell you to do) and invest the proceeds in something safer, like CDs or a short-term bond fund.

I have about 40% of my portfolio invested in equities so it is unlikely that I will lose more than 15% of my total portfolio in a severe downturn like 2007-2009. A temporary dip of that magnitude wouldn't threaten my standard of living so I ignore downturns.

A friend called this week, noted that her 401(k) had declined in value last quarter and asked what I thought she should do. Some of her colleagues were bailing out of the market but her inclination was to do nothing. She got it right. Perhaps they did, too.

The first question I asked was if she thought she would need to spend the money in her 401(k) investment portfolio anytime soon. Her answer was no, so I told her to ignore the market until she has a need to spend from her portfolio.

If you don't need the money anytime soon, then you needn't care if stocks decline in value temporarily. Those lower prices are what someone would be willing to pay for your stocks today but you're not going to sell them today.

If you have money that you will need to spend in the next 5-7 years, then it shouldn't be invested in stocks. You might be forced to sell stocks at market-bottom prices to pay those expenses before the market has a chance to recover. There is no guarantee that stocks will recover from losses in 5 to 7 years, either, but the odds are pretty good that they will.

Selling stocks and getting back into the market later is called market timing and it is a terrible idea. Research shows that hardly anyone can successfully time the market and investors who try consistently lose money. If you decide to sell because you have too much invested in the market and it's keeping you awake at night, don't be tempted to buy back in during the next bull market. That's a loser's game.

A good retirement plan, by the way, would anticipate market declines and tell you how to deal with them.

Get off the Rolaids Treadmill in two steps. Take any funds you expect to spend in the next 5-7 years out of stocks and put them in a safer place. Then make sure the amount that remains in stocks doesn't exceed your risk tolerance.

As a guideline, investing 40% of your portfolio in stocks would probably result in a 15% portfolio loss in the worst of bear markets compared to a 25% portfolio loss for a 60% stock allocation.

If you lost enough of your portfolio in the recent downturn to cause you pain, don't waste a learning experience. Fix it now. As a Senator from Kentucky likes to say, there's no education in the second kick of a mule.

And that's a record for me—a two-blog post day. You can check out the other at Forbes.com. Now, I need to soak my overworked fingertips (metaphorically) in a glass of something else Kentuckians like to say.



Friday, January 18, 2019

Take Your Best Shot at a Retirement Plan

This column was first posted at Forbes.com on January 11th. I will continue to post here at The Retirement Cafe´and the columns that originate here will tend to more in-depth. I invite you to follow me at both blogs (forbes.com/sites/dirkcotton and theretirementcafe.com) and on Twitter as @Retirement_Cafe. You can receive my posts via email by entering your address in the "Follow by Email" box in the right column.
I've been retired for more than a decade and I'm often asked about my biggest retirement regret. It's an easy call for me. I most regret retiring with an inadequate understanding of the risk I was taking.

It could have been disastrous. Research documents the risk of poor investment returns early in retirement, "sequence of returns risk," and I retired in 2005, just before the Great Recession. A relatively conservative equity exposure and substantial retirement savings saved me and I weathered the storm quite well. Still, I have the lingering feeling that I won a bet without fully understanding the odds.

Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good.

A better description of my mistake is that I was more focused on investment performance than the risk to my standard of living. I've come to understand that retirement planning is, from most perspectives, more risk management than portfolio management, although the latter seems to get all the love.

Retirement planning is often explained in terms of two schools of thought, a probabilist school and a safety-first school. Probabilists focus largely on maximizing portfolio returns and minimizing the probability of a shortfall. In a sense, they try to outrun standard-of-living risk with better portfolio returns.

In the safety-first school, the goal is to first insure the risk of an unacceptable standard of living with annuities, maximized Social Security benefits, TIPS, bond ladders and the like, and only then to pursue greater portfolio returns. For safety-first advocates, almost any probability of a disastrous outcome is too much risk.

We can look at retirement income as a portfolio optimization problem in which we try to sustain or improve our desired standard of living. The downside is that we could make it worse.

Alternatively, we can view it as a risk management problem and try to minimize our risk of losing our standard of living as we age, at the possible cost of limiting our upside. Of course, nothing says we can't choose a goal in between that better fits our risk tolerance, insuring more or less downside and risking more or less upside.

A result of focusing my retirement decision primarily on investing is that it drew my attention from the other risks of retirement, like unexpected expenses. There was a risk that I would have high medical expenses and very expensive health insurance (I did). There was a risk that my adult children would need substantial financial assistance (they did). There was a risk that we would retire into a brutal bear market (we did.) There was a risk that I wouldn't be able to buy affordable long-term care insurance (I can't).

There were dozens of other risks, some manageable, some not, that I didn't consider but would have had I approached my retirement planning more from the perspective of risk management than simply as an investment game.

As I said, I weathered the first decade of my retirement in great shape. Still, I feel a little like a basketball player who took a really poor game-deciding shot and somehow saw it go in.

If I had it to do over, I'd take a better shot.



REFERENCES

Retirement is a Risky Business –– Here's a List, Dirk Cotton.