You may wonder how to build a reliable retirement income portfolio as the U.S. economy teeters on the edge of recession. If you were planning to retire or were already there in 2024, you were undoubtedly scared off by the stock market.
A stock market fall can be problematic if you want to use your investment portfolio as a source of annual retirement income because losses in both the stock market and the value of your home due to a combination of these factors can severely damage your retirement savings. You may have to make some sacrifices to make ends meet.
One solution to this problem is constructing a portfolio that generates stable cash flow and leaves room for future gain. If you couple this tactic with a retirement plan based on an accurate projection of your retirement expenses and the most efficient way to start collecting Social Security, you’ll have a solid foundation upon which to build.
This piece will explain how an income-driven strategy for retirement planning works and the advantages of incorporating it into your retirement income portfolio.
Building a Sustainable Income Strategy for Retirement
You may avoid performance-chasing pitfalls and build a sensible retirement income plan by following a few simple steps. Below, you’ll find a breakdown of those three stages:
- Calculating how much money you’ll need to retire comfortably. The budget, or plan of expenditures, should account for mandatory and voluntary outlays of cash. Retirement brings several unknowns, and it’s essential to be prepared for inflation, taxes, and skyrocketing medical bills.
- To maximize retirement income from Social Security and other sources, you must first ascertain the total amount of money you may expect to receive from these resources and then decide when and in what order to begin receiving payments from each.
- The income deficit can then be quickly closed. To get this amount, look at your budget and see what you can cut to have a clearer picture of your financial situation. In the following example, we will discuss one method for accomplishing this goal combining dividend schemes and structured notes.
Explaining the Value of Cash Flow in Retirement Planning
Supposing you’re getting ready to retire. Your pretax income need is $100,000; to this amount, we apply an annual inflation rate of 4% to account for the rising cost of living you might expect to experience in your golden years. The combined amount of your spouse’s and your Social Security benefits will be $64,000 per year. That leaves a yearly income shortfall of $36,000, which must be made up for by withdrawals from your tax-deferred IRAs, which total $1 million.
The missing $36,000 can be made up in a variety of ways. Advisors frequently employ fixed index annuities, have low liquidity, and often have exorbitant fees.
In place of a fixed index annuity, dividend stocks and structured notes are good investment options. It is gaining income and dividend growth to counteract inflation from expanding businesses having a track record of raising dividend payments over time. To bridge this gap, use structured notes. To put it simply, structured notes are debt securities that include a derivative. There is a wide range of maturities and structures to choose from when it comes to structured notes, all of which may be obtained through a financial institution.
Market conditions, interest rate changes, and other factors can influence how much interest is earned on structured notes. These equity-linked structured notes track an underlying market index like the S&P 500, Dow Jones Industrial Average, or Nasdaq 100.
There is a wide variety of formats for structured notes. These equity-linked structured notes are similar to those issued in Europe and include a mechanism known as an interest barrier. Investment interest barriers are set at levels below which investors expect their index to recover within the investment horizon. There is a 50% interest cap on these structured notes.
The notes are structured to pay contingent interest to holders on each review date if the closing level of a group of indices (in this example, the S&P 500, the Nasdaq 100, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average) is greater than 50% of its starting value.
If none of these indexes declines by 50% or more, you will receive your initial investment back, plus interest payments, thanks to the interest barrier. However, the value of your investment would decrease by whatever market loss occurred (be it 50% or more) throughout the time that you held the structured note. The yield payments would continue to be made to you monthly.
Gains and Reduced Dangers
This method has several advantages. Among these is the capacity to maintain a comfortable standard of living without resorting to selling stocks during a down market. This benefit lessens the impact of sequence of returns risk, which arises when withdrawals are made during a low call, further depleting your portfolio and leaving less capital to recover when the market rises again.
Because of this, you may need to reduce your current living standard to avoid having even less principal available in the future.
Moreover, this portfolio’s high degree of liquidity is an additional plus. This means you can quickly reallocate your money if your needs change or you want to.
A cash-flow-driven strategy is helpful to weather market storms like bear markets and severe volatility. Because rather than selling your investments, you get paid in dividends and interest, which buys you some breathing room in the event of a bad market that may otherwise derail your retirement plans.
Dividends and interest earned on assets can be reinvested or cashed off in the interim while you save for retirement. If executed with forethought, such a strategy might net you additional investment capital for growth or enough cash to last you an extra year or two in retirement. You can pay your initial retirement costs out of this cash flow, enabling your investments to grow over time.
In addition to providing a stable and secure income stream in the years leading up to and following retirement, solid investment returns, and favorable tax treatment, dividend investing also provides diversification and growth potential. The potential for huge returns with low risk is a significant draw of structured notes.
There are drawbacks to dividend investing, just like there are to any other type of stock investment, including the possibility that a dividend stock or stocks would underperform and the chance that the market will collapse. Dividend stocks may underperform the market overall. Moreover, the firms you have invested in to get dividends from them may alter their dividend policy.
It’s safer to stick with traditional bonds than to invest in structured notes. You risk losing your initial investment if the market falls more than you predicted.
While dividend stocks are often safer than their non-dividend stock counterparts, you should still familiarize yourself with the benefits and drawbacks of dividend investing before incorporating them into your investment portfolio. Similarly, before putting money into structured notes, you should learn about them and what they offer.