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Insights & Chartbooks

Perspectives help cultivate ways of thinking about and understanding things and sightlines help develop clarity about what lies ahead.

These helpful primers, books and blogs can help you think about situations and problems in more wise and reasonable ways. They can help you develop longer-term perspectives and sightlines to withstand the shifting winds of short-term thinking. They can help you bypass  camouflaging distractions and help you stay focused on the key issues that matter most to the long-term success of your plan.

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We help you develop and maintain perspectives and sightlines to your plan.

Insights & Chartbooks

Perspectives help cultivate ways of thinking about and understanding things and sightlines help develop clarity about what lies ahead.

These helpful primers, books and blogs can help you think about situations and problems in more wise and reasonable ways. They can help you develop longer-term perspectives and sightlines to withstand the shifting winds of short-term thinking. They can help you bypass  camouflaging distractions and help you stay focused on the key issues that matter most to the long-term success of your plan.

Shortfall Risk is the Greatest Risk to Retirement Success The greatest risk to retirement success? For most of us, it’s shortfall risk …

Retirement Plan Distribution Planning

Retirement Distribution Planning May Help Minimize Your Overall Tax Expenses If you’ve diligently saved and invested throughout your working years, congratulations! You’re …

Asset Location Strategy

Better Asset Location Strategy Helps Lower Your Tax Exposures Asset location strategy helps punctuate the old adage, “It’s not what you earn, …

Investing lessons from the pension world help us to focus on the critical importance of matching our long-term retirement liabilities with proper …

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Retirement Distribution Planning

Retirement Distribution Planning May Help Minimize Your Overall Tax Expenses If you’ve diligently saved and invested throughout your working years, congratulations! You’re on your way to funding a more comfortable retirement. But when you finally do stop working, you’ll face a new challenge: Making sure that your assets last as long as possible. One way to accomplish this is to withdraw money from your various investment and retirement accounts in a tax-efficient manner. Creating tax efficiency involves effectively structuring your withdrawals from your taxable accounts and distributions from your tax-deferred and tax-free accounts to help minimize your overall tax expenses. These calculations and the scenario analyses involved are commonly referred to as ‘retirement distribution planning.’ Retirement Distribution Planning Requires Coordination with Your Taxable Accounts Retirement distribution planning can require a fair bit of analysis of the tax treatment of withdrawals from your taxable investment accounts and distributions from your various types of retirement account in order to minimize and optimize your tax exposures. Taxable accounts − Dividends, interest and other investment income are generally taxable in the year earned, and capital gains are taxable when realized.  The tax rates specific to you on your dividends, interest and capital gains may

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Asset Location Strategy

Better Asset Location Strategy Helps Lower Your Tax Exposures Asset location strategy helps punctuate the old adage, “It’s not what you earn, but what you keep.” Part of investing more successfully is structuring your investments to help minimize your overall tax exposures. That’s no easy feat, given exposures to federal and state income taxes, the alternative minimum tax, capital gains tax, the surtax on investment income, Social Security tax, Medicare tax, estate and gift tax, generation-skipping transfer tax and the corporate tax. With such an array of taxes waiting to be levied on your investment returns, it’s easy to see why taxes should rank highly on your list of risks to be understood and managed, along with “market crashes,” and the panoply of other investment risks. The negative impact of taxes on your investment and wealth management strategies can meaningfully reduce your after-tax returns and increase your shortfall risk. A study published in the April 2020 Journal of Finance found that it is relatively easy to avoid destroying value for taxable equity mutual fund investors by managing investment taxes. While that particular study involved taxable accounts and mutual funds, taxes are a matter that all investors will have to contend

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Investing Lessons from the Pension World

Investing lessons from the pension world help us to focus on the critical importance of matching our long-term retirement liabilities with proper long-term investment assets. Investing Lessons from the Pension World Help Us Generate Better Retirement Expense Estimates Asset/liability matching originated in the pension world.  Pension managers are responsible for meeting specific objectives, namely, paying specific amounts of retirement benefits to a specific number of individuals at specific points in time.  To meet their ongoing “liabilities,” these managers must invest their assets carefully to earn the necessary returns, while taking the least risk possible. As of 2013, liability-driven investing was practiced by more than half of U.S., U.K. and Canadian corporate pension plans, according to research from The Brandes Group.  Its use has more than doubled since 2007 ‒ an indication that the 2008 market crash forced many funds to adopt more prudent investment approaches. Increasingly, asset/liability matching and liability-driven investing are making their way from pensions and other institutions into the world of individual and family investors. The practices fit neatly into goals-based wealth management.  Rather than investing with the simplistic goal of “beating the market,” goals-based investors thoughtfully determine their financial objectives.  And then they translate those goals

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