MarketWatch On The Retirement Crisis

Retirement Experts Offer Advice and Potential Solutions

Retirement expert Robert Powell penned a lengthy column for MarketWatch outlining the retirement crisis and the most significant developments that came out of the retirement planning industry last year. From the SECURE Act, to annuities in 401(k)s, to SeLFIES, to ESG funds, and more, Powell provides a bird’s eye view into activity in 2021 with commentary from experts across the retirement space.

Among the experts cited is Wade Pfau, PhD, American College of Financial Services Professor of Retirement Income, who talked about two new tools that he thinks might help. The first is the launch of Retirement Income Style Awareness Profile (RISA); the second is the launch our new Portfolio Retirement Income Guarantee (“CDA”). Here’s the excerpt from the article:

“…RetireOne’s contingent deferred annuity or CDA, which, according to the company, is a tool for individual investors that allows them to create a structure that acts like a ‘personal pension plus’ by covering retail ETF and mutual fund investments with insurance protections in IRAs, Roth IRAs or brokerage accounts. These protections, according to RetireOne, allow individual investors to insure their retirement savings against sequence of returns risk, market risk, and longevity risk.”

As individual investors enter the “fragile decade” – the last five working years and first five years in retirement – they need to protect their portfolios from forces out of their control. That’s where this innovative new income protection comes in. Our new CDA allows for the risk to the income from an existing investment portfolio to be wrapped without moving the assets and creating a taxable event.

The article ends with a list of statistics from recent reports from the Society of Actuaries on the impact of COVID-19 on Americans’ plans for retirement. What caught our eye is that 35% of workers have changed or considered changing when they plan to retire as a result of COVID‐19, with most of these respondents delaying their retirement.

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