Decumulate & Downsize

Most of your investing life you and your adviser (if you have one) are focused on wealth accumulation. But, we tend to forget, eventually the whole idea of this long process of delayed gratification is to actually spend this money! That’s decumulation as opposed to wealth accumulation. This stage may also involve downsizing from larger homes to smaller ones or condos, moving to the country or otherwise simplifying your life and jettisoning possessions that may tie you down.

Buying a home in Retirement? You’ll need these Resources

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Photo Credit: Rawpixel

By Sharon Wagner

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

Buying a home and preparing for retirement can be stressful enough on their own, so when the two intersect it can be easy to feel like you’re in over your head. With some careful planning, you can avoid a lot of the headaches that often go with buying a new home. These resources can assist with making informed choices when it comes to budgeting for your new home and your move.

Planning & paying for your new home

Money can be tight in retirement, so it’s important for you to think carefully about all of the potential expenses that can come with purchasing a new home.

Address retirement finance concerns before diving in; you can access reliable information through Financial Independence Hub.

Preparing for the costs of Aging in Place

Aging in place features are important for seniors, so make sure you know which features to look for and what costs to expect.

Decluttering & downsizing your current home

Cut stress and expense by decluttering and budgeting for help.
Continue Reading…

Retired Money: You can still count on 4% Rule but there are alternatives to settling for less

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MoneySense.ca; Photo created by senivpetro – www.freepik.com

My latest MoneySense Retired Money column looks at that perpetually useful guideline known as the 4% Rule. Click on the highlighted headline to access the full article online: Is the 4% Rule Obsolete?

As originally postulated by CFP and author William Bengen, that’s the Rule of Thumb that retirees can safely withdraw 4% of the value of their portfolio each year without fear of running out of money in retirement, with adjustments for inflation.

But does the Rule still hold when interest rates are approaching zero? Personally I still find it useful, even though I mentally take it down to 3% to adjust for my personal pessimism about rates and optimism that I will live a long healthy life. The column polls several experts, some of whom still find it a useful starting point, while others believe several adjustments may be necessary.

Fee-only planner Robb Engen, the blogger behind Boomer & Echo, is “not a fan of the 4% rule.” For one, he says Canadians are forced to withdraw increasingly higher amounts once we convert our RRSPs into RRIFs so the 4% Rule is “not particularly useful either … We’re also living longer, and there’s a movement to want to retire earlier. So shouldn’t that mean a safe withdrawal rate of much less than 4%?”

It’s best to be flexible. It may be intuitively obvious but if your portfolio is way down, you should withdraw less than 4% a year. If and when it recovers, you can make up for it by taking out more than 4%. “This might still average 4% over the long term but you are going to give your portfolio a much higher likelihood of being sustainable.”

Still, some experts are still enthusiastic about the rule.  On his site earlier this year, republished here on the Hub, Robb Engen cited U.S. financial planning expert Michael Kitces, who believes there’s a highly probable chance retirees using the 4% rule over 30 years will end up with even more money than they started with, and a very low chance they’ll spend their entire nest egg.

Retirees may need to consider more aggressive asset allocation

Other advisors think retirees need to get more comfortable with risk and tilt their portfolios a little more in favor of equities. Adrian Mastracci, fiduciary portfolio manager with Vancouver-based Lycos Asset Management Inc., views 4% as “likely the safe upper limit for many of today’s portfolios.” Like me, he sees 3% as offering more flexibility for an uncertain future. Continue Reading…

Are you tax planning for you …. or for your estate?

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By Aaron Hector, B.Comm., CFP, RFP, TEP

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

“In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” – Benjamin Franklin

While death and taxes may be certain, the variables in and around them are certainly not. That’s why they warrant attention and planning. The following analysis provides some food for thought when deciding whether to use proactive tax planning to optimize your living net-worth or your after-tax estate.

A tisket, a tasket, a future tax basket

Most retirees have baskets of “future tax” that are just sitting there in abeyance. The most common of these tax baskets is the one that’s attached to RRSP accounts. When you contribute to your RRSP, you get a tax deduction which gives you a break on the taxes payable in that year. But when the time eventually comes to make a withdrawal, each dollar you remove from your RRSP will be fully taxable and increase your income accordingly.

Depending on the situation, there could be several other future tax baskets as well. For example, you might have unrealized capital gains that are attached to a non-registered investment account, or even an additional property. When these assets are sold in the future, the capital gain at that time will be subject to taxation.

Our tax system is progressive, which means the tax rates continue to increase as your income does, thus moving you from a lower tax bracket to a higher one. When you die (without a surviving spouse), all of the remaining tax baskets are dealt with at that time. This often results in a significant amount of taxable income that’s exposed to the highest marginal tax rates which can exceed 50%, depending on your province of residency.

Managing future tax

What can be done to manage this future tax in a way that avoids exposure to such high tax rates? One popular approach is to look at your projected retirement income and identify when in the future there might be years where income is lower than average or higher than average, and then try and shift income away from the high years to fill in the low years. This “tax averaging” often results in an acceleration of income in earlier years, which then lowers the exposure to high tax rates later in life or upon death.

If you think this sounds challenging, remember that any financial planner worth their salt should be able to review your assets and liabilities, then map out your projected income going forward on a year-by-year basis. The low-income years most commonly occur immediately following retirement; the paycheque has stopped, but maybe you have ample cash and non-registered savings that can be used to fund your lifestyle. It’s quite possible that the income you would report on your tax return in these years would be minimal. However, by the end of the year that you turn 71 your RRSP accounts must be converted into RRIF accounts, giving rise to forced annual withdrawals that are fully taxable. These mandatory withdrawals might mark the beginning of your high-income retirement years and may even result in your Old Age Security (OAS) being clawed back. That being said, it really depends on one’s individual circumstances.

The nice thing about the future tax is that, for the most part, you have flexibility in deciding when you convert that future tax into current tax. Just because you can wait until age 72, when you are forced to make your first withdrawal from your RRSP (RRIF), doesn’t mean that you must wait until you are 72. Furthermore, this doesn’t need to be a cash flow decision. If you don’t need the money to fund your lifestyle, then you can simply take the money that is withdrawn from the RRSP and then (subject to withholding taxes) reinvest it back into another account such as your TFSA or non-registered account. The point here is that you have the option of choosing what you believe to be an optimal year to increase the amount of income that will be reported on your tax return.

Similarly, you can choose to trigger a capital gain within a non-registered account at any time. A sale of a stock doesn’t need to be an investment decision – it can be a tax decision. Simply sell the stock, thereby triggering the capital gain, and then immediately rebuy it. The capital gain will then be reported on your tax return in the year it was sold, and your taxable income will be increased accordingly.

In a nutshell, every dollar of income that you accelerate is a dollar of income that you don’t have to report in the future, and you get to choose what tax rates get applied to that dollar; the current marginal rate, or the future marginal rate (which could be higher). It’s easy to see how this process can result in your paying a lower average lifetime tax rate.

How to impact your lifetime assets and estate

Let’s dig a bit deeper. How do these choices carry forward and impact your lifetime assets and ultimately your estate? I’ll begin with some foundational ideas and then provide a real-life example.

Imagine a scenario where your current marginal tax rate is 30% while living, but if you died then the marginal tax rate on your final tax return would be 50%. Continue Reading…

How (and When) to Rebalance your portfolio

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Setting up the initial asset allocation for your investment portfolio is fairly straightforward. The challenge is knowing how and when to rebalance your portfolio. Stock and bond prices move up and down, and you periodically add new money – all of which can throw off your initial targets.

Let’s say you’re an index investor like me and use one of the Canadian Couch Potato’s model portfolios – TD’s e-Series funds. An initial investment of $50,000 might have a target asset allocation that looks something like this:

Fund Value Allocation Change
Canadian Index $12,500 25% —
U.S. Index $12,500 25% —
International Index $12,500 25% —
Canadian Bond Index $12,500 25% —

The key to maintaining this target asset mix is to periodically rebalance your portfolio. Why? Because your well-constructed portfolio will quickly get out of alignment as you add new money to your investments and as individual funds start to fluctuate with the movements of the market.

Indeed, different asset classes produce different returns over time, so naturally your portfolio’s asset allocation changes. At the end of one year, it wouldn’t be surprising to see your nice, clean four-fund portfolio look more like this:

Fund Value Allocation Change
Canadian Index $11,680 21.5% (6.6%)
U.S. Index $15,625 28.9% +25%
International Index $14,187 26.2% +13.5%
Canadian Bond Index $12,725 23.4% +1.8%

Do you see how each of the funds has drifted away from its initial asset allocation? Now you need a rebalancing strategy to get your portfolio back into alignment.

Rebalance your portfolio by date or by threshold?

Some investors prefer to rebalance according to a calendar: making monthly, quarterly, or annual adjustments. Other investors prefer to rebalance whenever an investment exceeds (or drops below) a specific threshold.

In our example, that could mean when one of the funds dips below 20 per cent, or rises above 30 per cent of the portfolio’s overall asset allocation.

Don’t overdo it. There is no optimal frequency or threshold when selecting a rebalancing strategy. However, you can’t reasonably expect to keep your portfolio in exact alignment with your target asset allocation at all times. Rebalance your portfolio too often and your costs increase (commissions, taxes, time) without any of the corresponding benefits.

According to research by Vanguard, annual or semi-annual monitoring with rebalancing at 5 per cent thresholds is likely to produce a reasonable balance between controlling risk and minimizing costs for most investors.

Rebalance by adding new money

One other consideration is when you’re adding new money to your portfolio on a regular basis. For me, since I’m in the accumulation phase and investing regularly, I simply add new money to the fund that’s lagging behind its target asset allocation.

For instance, our kids’ RESP money is invested in three TD e-Series funds. Each month I contribute $416.66 into the RESP portfolio and then I need to decide how to allocate it – which fund gets the money?

 

Rebalancing TD e-Series Funds

My target asset mix is to have one-third in each of the Canadian, U.S., and International index funds. As you can see, I’ve done a really good job keeping this portfolio’s asset allocation in-line.

How? I always add new money to the fund that’s lagging behind in market value. So my next $416.66 contribution will likely go into the International index fund.

It’s interesting to note that the U.S. index fund has the lowest book value and least number of units held. I haven’t had to add much new money to this fund because the U.S. market has been on fire; increasing 65 per cent since I’ve held it, versus just 8 per cent each for the International and Canadian index funds.

One big household investment portfolio

Wouldn’t all this asset allocation business be easier if we only had one investment portfolio to manage? Unfortunately, many of us are dealing with multiple accounts, from RRSPs, to TFSAs, and even non-registered accounts. Some also have locked-in retirement accounts from previous jobs with investments that need to be managed.

The best advice with respect to asset allocation across multiple investment accounts is to treat your accounts as one big household portfolio. Continue Reading…

Absurdity in certainty: finding yield during a pandemic

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Franklin Templeton/iStock

By John Beck, Franklin Templeton Fixed Income

(Sponsor Content)

An inverted yield curve, historically a harbinger of a recession, lived up to its reputation this year. The beginning of 2020 saw an inverted curve in both the United States and Canada as equity markets reached record highs. Then came the realization that COVID-19 was not simply a regional issue centralized in Wuhan, China, but a pandemic that would turn the global economy completely on its head.

A precipitous drop in stock valuations followed, reaching a nadir in mid-March, but stocks have rallied strongly since then, recovering many of the losses of that late-February/mid-March period. In the bond markets, unprecedented monetary stimulus and across-the-board rate cuts meant yields remained anemic throughout the crisis. That started to change in early June when better-than-expected job and growth numbers saw bond yields edge up. A steepening yield curve with a wider spread between short and longer duration securities is good news for both fixed income investors and the wider economy.

Across the Atlantic, the European Central Bank (ECB) announced in early June that its bond purchasing program would run to at least this time next year, spurring a rally in European bond markets.

Central bank policy

Any macro forecast must come with the caveat that a prolonged economic recovery is entirely contingent on the pandemic. A second wave of COVID-19 this fall or winter will likely mean further lockdown measures across the globe. The French philosopher Voltaire famously said: “Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position, but certainty is an absurd one.” Apt words for the current environment, but investors can take encouragement from the efforts of governments and central banks throughout this crisis. Continue Reading…