Retirement income management is all about making sure your retirement savings provide enough income for your needs, and that you don’t outlive your assets. This starts with setting up and managing a portfolio that’s right for you.

Although the concept of an ideal retirement portfolio is somewhat relative, many financial planners would define this in terms of what it is able to do. An “ideal” plan in this sense is one that would meet the retiree’s financial needs throughout their golden years.

Starting Out

The investment needs of your retirement portfolio will likely change over time. Proper retirement planning can help you choose a portfolio that best meets your objectives and risk tolerance.

Ideally, you should start your retirement portfolio as early in your career as possible. A ‘lifelong growth portfolio’ is a good option for investors with a longer term horizon. For those aged 35+, the retirement income experts at CKS Summit Group recommend the SMART Portfolio:

SMART is the Strategic Movement Around Retirement Taxation and its goal is to limit your post-retirement taxation – not your income. It involves:

• How to use tax arbitrage to dramatically increase your retirement income without risk.
• Ways to reduce the amount of money you give to the IRS during retirement.
• Why rate of return is Wall Street’s half-truth and how they use misleading math to sell you.

While most retirement portfolios are highly customizable and can serve a broad range of ages and needs, if you are closer to retirement age (55-75) with a portfolio of $250K or more, you should look at other options focusing on long-term upside growth potential…

Stock Market and Non-Stock Market Portfolios

As well as providing healthy, long-term upside growth potential, professionally managed portfolios can be very effective at preserving principal while allowing for a high degree of downside risk protection.

At CKS Summit Group for instance, we believe the right mixture of carefully chosen non-stock market and managed market accounts can create a blended portfolio which is capable of producing increasing income, stable growth, preservation of principal, safety and flexibility all at the same time. These options include:

• The Lifetime Income Portfolio: Designed to bring a high level of flexibility in order to accommodate the ever-changing financial world. This portfolio involves blending non-stock market accounts and insured accounts into a master portfolio. By accomplishing the right blend, it allows the strength of each investment to be used correctly while reducing any possible disadvantages associated with that investment.
• The Strategic Insured Portfolio: This particular option is recommended for those who want absolutely no downside risk in their retirement portfolio. This is favorable for those who have had bad stock market experiences previously and now looking for a more secure and reliable option for their money. This goal is achieved by providing more of a ‘laddering’ strategy, producing multiple streams of revenue that can be turned to at different intervals.

Getting Started

Portfolio management is all about determining strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats; and many other trade-offs encountered in the attempt to maximize return at a given appetite for risk.

Because certain financial vehicles are good at some things and poor at others no single product can achieve all of the important objectives that most retirees have. Through the correct blending of vehicles together, multiple objectives can be met at the same time.

This where asking the right questions enables us to offer retirement income options for you. At CKS Summit Group, every strategy session with us is complimentary. So let’s get you started, come experience the new evolution of retirement income and contact us here today.