Are Guaranteed Lifetime Income Products Part of Your Investment Strategy in Retirement?

As discussed in our post of November 27, 2021, balancing the sometimes-conflicting requirements to grow, protect and carefully spend household assets is an important element of a financially successful retirement plan.

How Much Did You Spend in 2021?

The first three steps in our Recommended Financial Planning Process involve estimating your annual recurring and non-recurring expenses in retirement and categorizing those estimated expenses as either “Essential” or “Discretionary.” In this post, we suggest that you begin this process for 2022 planning purposes by gathering your actual spending data for 2021. In a future post, we will encourage you (as we do every year around this time) to perform an actuarial valuation of your assets and spending liabilities using your estimated future recurring and non-recurring annual spending. 

How Will Your Spending Change During Your Retirement?

This post is a follow-up to our post of March 19, 2021, “What is Your Plan for Future Spending in Retirement?” Impetus for this post was the recent release of a retirement spending pattern research paper by Anqi Chen and Alicia Munnell from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College entitled, “Do Retirees Want Constant, Increasing or Decreasing Consumption?”

We briefly discuss the results of Mses. Chen and Munnell’s research and possible implications for your financial planning in or near retirement.