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Showing posts from January, 2019

Portfolio Balance, Investment Strategy, and Sources of Retirement Funds

I'm hopefully about four years away from retirement. I have a good salary and, looking out to 2023, I think I'm in good shape overall. There will be three main sources of funding for the retirement years. 1. Wife's and my 401ks and IRAs 2. A lump sum retirement contribution from my employer 3. Social Security 1 and 2 are about equal right now, 3 is a fixed future monthly payment. The stock market has been hot since the crash of 2008. The Dow is now around 25,000. How much higher will it go? Is it going to crash? Would it be wise to transfer some funds from stocks into cash or bonds? My first thought was Yes, of course! But, I did a little digging on this and one piece of advice was that people approaching retirement should have a couple years worth of cash in their accounts so they don't have to sell stocks in a down market. That makes a lot of sense, I have seen literature that shows how a stock market decline immediately following retirement can demolish ret