Longevity & Aging

No doubt about it: at some point we’re neither semi-retired, findependent or fully retired. We’re out there in a retirement community or retirement home, and maybe for a few years near the end of this incarnation, some time to reflect on it all in a nursing home. Our Longevity & Aging category features our own unique blog posts, as well as blog feeds from Mark Venning’s ChangeRangers.com and other experts.

Pensionize your Nest Egg with Annuities, your Super Bonds

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By Dale Roberts, CuttheCrapInvesting

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

Most Canadians do not have a defined pension with guaranteed income. Speaking of birds and nest eggs, those guaranteed pensions are going the way of the dodo bird. Just 33% of Canadians have a defined benefit workplace pension where the income is guaranteed and usually indexed to inflation.

That’s according to Pensionize Your Nest Egg: How to Use Product Allocation to Create a Guaranteed Income For Life.

There’s only one way for me and you to create a generous and guaranteed income stream and that’s by way of the annuity. It’s a topic and product category that gets little attention. And when it gets attention it’s often negative. Annuities are offered by insurance companies. Strike One. Annuities come with ‘high fees.’ Strike Two. Let’s not go to Strike Three; we want to keep this blog post alive. In the process we might keep your retirement in good shape as well.

Hear me out. I’ll admit that I have not been a fan of the annuity in the past. I’ll also admit that I knew very little about annuities. That’s always a good way to form an opinion, right? Give that thumbs down based on the headlines and 5 minutes of research. So please join me in a more than surprising and interesting discovery of just what the heck an annuity is.

With an annuity you simply purchase your own pension

Yup, it’s that simple. As an example, you hand over $100,000 and the insurance company will pay you monthly income, guaranteed for life. Of course that’s a Life Annuity. There are a few types of annuities, but for now we’ll stick to the most common and most popular annuity.

And of course the rates available will fluctuate based on a few factors. Here’s a site that will give you an idea of the rates available in today’s market.

In March of 2019 here are the rates for a Canadian single male. The payment is in the range of 6% annually for a male at age 65.

Annuity RatesYou can purchase an income stream for life. And of course, the longer you wait to purchase that annuity the greater your payments. You might stagger your annuity purchase(s) over many years and periods of your retirement. That’s typically the advice found in Pensionize Your Nest Egg and offered from advisors who Pensionize a portion of their clients’ nest eggs.

When you hand over your money, it’s a done deal

These are irreversible contracts. When you purchase an annuity you usually exchange control of those funds for guaranteed income for life. When you die, your money goes to the insurance company. To be exact, a portion of your monies goes to the survivors:  to those who purchased annuities and who might live to 85, 90, 95 or 100. That’s how insurance companies can afford to pay you rates that are well beyond the bond and GIC rates of the day. With an annuity the unlucky (the dead) pay for the lucky (the living).

In the above quote table there is a 10-year guarantee, meaning that the payment would continue for 10 years from time of purchase even in the event of an early death.

Many Canadians are living well into their 90s

And from the many tools available at pensionizeyournestegg.com here’s a shocking survivability table for a 65-year-old male.

Survivability TableFor a 65-year-old Canadian male there’s a 25% chance that they’ll live to age 94. Yikes. What side of the annuity grass will you be on? This table demonstrates why a certain level of guaranteed income might be a good idea. You might at least cover your basic living needs for life and projected oldage home payments with guaranteed income.

The 3 product allocation buckets

The main theme of Pensionize Your Nest Egg is to think product buckets, not traditional asset allocation that would normally include your mix of cash, GICs, stocks and bonds. Instead the theme and 3 buckets is …

  1. Guaranteed Income For Life.
  2. Guaranteed Income Plus Growth Potential.
  3. Asset Growth Potential (your personal portfolio) Continue Reading…

Volatility arrived in 2018 but the ETF Exodus didn’t

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Figure 1: Market Share, Canadian ETFs

By Jeff Weniger, WisdomTree Investments

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

 Money managers had a rough year in 2018. The S&P/TSX Composite Index was off 8.8%, while the MSCI World Index of global equities was down 0.1% in Canadian dollar terms. About the only bright spot was the S&P 500 Index, which was down 4.4% in USD but up 4.1% for Canadians because of U.S. dollar strength. But these tepid figures mask the freefall’s extent; many markets met the bear market definition — declining more than 20% — inside the confines of Q4.

Figure 1 above grabbed attention in our 2019 Canadian ETF Industry & Market Outlook. Many didn’t realize how much market share the smaller players have gobbled up recently.

No doubt, the biggest ETF providers are doing just fine. In fact, we imagine most of the 33 Canadian ETF companies in our corner of the asset management industry must be downright giddy. Many are hitting the sweet spot where track records are becoming seasoned, brand recognition is solidifying and product users are now proselytizing for them.

Grasping at straws

“Active” mutual fund managers have for years been tossing around a prediction that needs to be checked at the door.  To paraphrase them: Wait until we see a downturn in stocks. That’s when everyone is going to dump their ETFs and come back to active mutual funds.

Be careful what you wish for; we think the exact opposite.

The stock market peaked in September, but the exodus from ETFs and into mutual funds never materialized. As an industry, our collective AUM is ever so slightly off its peaks, but that’s because of market losses, not outflows. Continue Reading…

The touchpoint: on being “Packaged” out from the Corporation

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By Kevin Press

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

Since being restructured out of my 14-plus-year, rather comfortable position with a global insurance company, I’ve been asked one question more than any other.

Did you see it coming? The answer in my case is yes. I suspect that’s true for most 50- or 60-somethings who’ve found themselves accepting an invitation to “the touchpoint” from their boss, only to find that it’s been moved from their office to HR at the last moment.

Of course, if you’re anything like me (which is to say that you go to work every day like a Jimmy Stewart character in a Hitchcock movie) then nothing comes as a surprise.

I had two thoughts in quick succession when I received my summons. First, what day is it? Tuesday. Dreaded dead-man-walking Tuesday.

Second, how many documents can I email home between now and zero hour? (Nothing sensitive of course, for the record.)

It’s at this point that things began to turn a bit darkly comic. On my walk to HR, I’m stopped to commiserate with a colleague about the dumb email she just got from her boss. Smile and nod.

Young HR person hands me “The Package”

Turn the corner and my fears are realized. The boss is sitting with a too-young member of the HR team, both sporting the kind of sympathetic look that makes you wish you’d forgotten your glasses. I’m told I’ve “had a good run,” which makes me feel a good deal older than my 52 years. Continue Reading…

Retired Money: Whether you’re a stock or a bond may determine when to take CPP/OAS

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When to take CPP/OAS? My latest MoneySense Retired Money column passes on a fresh perspective on the old topic of whether you should take CPP or OAS early or late. You can find the full piece by clicking on the highlighted text here: Why aggressive stock investors should consider taking CPP early.

One of the main sources cited in the piece is fee-for-service financial planner Ed Rempel, who has contributed guest blogs to the Hub in the past. See for example Should I take CPP early? Some Real Life Examples or Delay CPP and OAS till 70? Some case studies.

Ed Rempel

When he recently turned 60, Rempel opted himself to take CPP himself because of course he considers himself primarily a “stock” when it comes to investing (using the concept from Moshe Milevsky’s book, Are you a stock or a bond?). He figures he can get good enough returns by investing the early CPP benefits that he will more than make up for the higher payouts CPP makes available for waiting till 65 or 70. Same with OAS, which he figures even balanced investors should take as soon as it’s on offer at age 65.

The corollary of this is that if you consider yourself primarily a fixed-income investor, then you should probably take CPP and perhaps OAS too closer to age 70. Compared to taking CPP at 65, taking it at 70 results in 42% more payments, while OAS is sweeter by 36% by delaying the full five years.

The MoneySense piece also quotes retired financial advisor Warren Baldwin, who chose to take CPP himself by age 66. Like Rempel and most financial advisors, Baldwin has a healthy exposure to equities. But he also cites a couple of other reasons for his decision. Baldwin, (formerly with T. E. Wealth), figures the value of the CPP fund to pay you the pension at age 65 is at least $250,000: more if you factor in its inflation indexing. The latter is an important consideration, especially for those (like Yours Truly), whose Defined Benefit pensions are not indexed to inflation.

Baldwin took his own CPP at 66, a year after his final year of full-time employment income. He did so “mainly for the cash flow and portfolio maintenance.”  But Baldwin has other reasons too. “I do not want to leave the CPP too long into the future in case the government changes the terms on it or the rate of income tax might rise … Look at how many changes they have made in the last 20 years.”

If a retiree’s marginal tax bracket jumped from 35% to 45%, Baldwin says deferred CPP would face a heavier tax load, while if benefits are taken earlier they would be taxed at more modest rates. And if retirees also have significant sums accumulated in RRSPs and RRIFs, the extra income might push up their Marginal Tax Bracket.

CPP survivor benefits also need to be considered

Warren Baldwin

Finally, Baldwin considers the “estate value” of CPP. “If two spouses have the maximum CPP and one dies, the survivor will not get much from the ‘survivor-ship’ aspect of CPP … So, if the ‘value’ of the CPP at 65 is in the range of $300,000, then if you die before you collect, there is quite a loss. Continue Reading…

The 4% Rule conflates Asset Accumulation with Income Stream

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De-accumulation blogger Edward Kierklo

By Edward Kierklo

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

Nothing has worked more effectively for the financial industry to justify asset accumulation or AUM (Assets Under Management) than the theoretical underpinnings of the 4% “rule” or “guideline.”

There are innumerable articles on how individuals will require one million dollars or more for retirement based on this dubious principle.

Certainly it is crucial to save but to focus on any particular threshold misses the point that what counts in retirement is a regular, dependable stream of income for a lifetime.

Motley Fool does not debunk the 4% rule explicitly but offers lots of caveats in this piece.

Take this recent article on Marketwatch saying that one million is not enough.

Balancing lifestyle and longevity

There are two factors in retirement to balance: lifestyle and longevity. Any 4% or otherwise rule is irrelevant if longevity is uncertain. Most people want to maintain a certain quality of life in retirement as well as living healthy.

Here is a hypothetical question: would you take Social Security if it were offered as a lump sum or continue to collect it monthly for the rest of your life (with the bonus of inflation adjusted payouts)? Continue Reading…