Our daily roundup of retirement news your clients may be thinking about.
In this article on Kiplinger, an investment adviser makes a case against target date funds for clients who are investing for retirement. There is no guarantee that TDFs generate the needed returns, and these funds may have hidden multiple fees, the expert explains. "Finally, the product’s oversimplification can result in a lack of education for investors about risk tolerance. Understanding your capacity for risk is important, and it comes through good investment education."
Clients should put retirement saving ahead of other financial priorities and ensure that they contribute consistently to their retirement accounts, according to this article on Motley Fool. They should also sock away their retirement funds in a 401(k) plan or IRA and not in a savings account and avoid using their retirement accounts as a piggy bank. Retirement investors should also remain invested in the stock market and stick to their investing plan when the market slows down.
Investors should hold on to their exchange-traded funds after they retire, as these funds can still help boost their overall returns, according to this article on Yahoo Finance. "Lower costs, diversification and tax efficiency are strong reasons to keep ETFs in your portfolio," says an expert. "In retirement, you're making withdrawals and it's extremely beneficial to find ways to decrease the impact of those withdrawals on the portfolio's value."
Retirement savers are allowed to reverse their IRA withdrawal within a 60-day period after taking the distribution, according to this article on Money. Undoing a withdrawal from a tax-deferred retirement account is a good move to avoid the tax bill on the distribution, as well as the early penalty if clients are below 59 1/2. Clients who roll over their IRA assets into another IRA face no tax liability and those who roll the funds back to the original IRA won't also trigger a tax bill.“You just have to put it back into an IRA. It doesn’t have to be another institution,” says a tax strategist.
Studies have found that spending is likely to decline as people go through retirement, says Michael Kitces, a financial planning expert, in an article on Morningstar. This bodes well with safe retirement withdrawal rates, which would rise from 4% to 4.4% or 4.8%, Kitces says. "So, we get maybe a 10% or 20% increase in safe withdrawal rate for what could actually be a 30% or 40% decrease in cumulative spending."
