You Are Different This Time

You don’t always see a respected member of the financial commentariat argue that it’s different this time. But that’s almost what Morningstar’s Christine Benz has done in an excellent recent article.

What Benz means is that you’re different now than you were during past market cycles. More specifically, you’re older now than you were during the last market debacle, so you have less time to recover from another one if it should occur. That might not mean much if you were 10 in 2008 and 20 now. But it means a lot if you were, say, 50 in 2008 and 60 now or even 45 in 2008 and 55 now. If you’re five to 10 years from retirement, the risk of encountering a period when bonds outperform stocks is high enough – and dangerous enough to your retirement plans — so that you should reduce stock exposure.

The Math Is Different in Distribution

And, if you’re retired and withdrawing from your portfolio, the “sequence-of-return” risk – the problem of the early years of withdrawals coinciding with a declining portfolio – can upend your entire retirement. That’s because a portfolio in distribution that experiences severe declines at the beginning of the distribution phase, cannot recover when the stock market finally rebounds. Because of the distributions, there is less money in the portfolio to benefit from stock gains when they eventually materialize again.

I showed that risk in a previous article where I created the following chart representing three hypothetical portfolios using the “4% rule” (withdrawing 4% of the portfolio the first year of retirement and increasing that withdrawal dollar value by 4% every year thereafter). I cherry-picked the initial year of retirement, of course (2000), so that my graphic represents a kind of worst case, or at least a very bad case, scenario. But investors close to retirement should keep that in mind because current stock prices are historically high and bond yields are historically low. That means the prospects for big investment returns over the next decade are dim and that increasing stock exposure could be detrimental to retirement plans once again. In my example, decreasing stock exposure benefits the portfolio in distribution phase, and that could be the case for retirees now.