Dynamic Income Strategies for Retirement Planning Insights

Dynamic income strategies provide retirees with flexible spending options, adapting to market changes for peace of mind.

### Comparing Retirement Strategies: Monte Carlo vs. Dynamic Income Approach
* 💰 When considering retirement, one must choose between a traditional Monte Carlo probability of success, which may indicate a **95% chance of success**, or a dynamic income strategy that **adapts to market fluctuations**.
* 📊 The dynamic income strategy, facilitated by software like Income Labs, offers a **more flexible approach to retirement spending**, allowing retirees to **adjust their withdrawals based on market performance**.
* 💵 For example, with a million-dollar portfolio, retirees could initially withdraw **$7,700 per month**, but in the event of a market downturn, they might need to reduce their spending to **$6,700 or even lower**.
* 📈 A significant benefit of the dynamic strategy is its ability to provide a **clear spending capacity**, which can **increase or decrease depending on market conditions**, as opposed to the rigid structure of Monte Carlo simulations.
* 📉 In contrast, the Monte Carlo approach often presents a **binary success or failure outcome**, which can be misleading; for instance, if a retiree can only withdraw **$7,000 instead of the desired $8,000**, it is deemed a failure despite still being a **viable option**.
* 🔍 The retirement spending smile concept illustrates that spending tends to be **higher early in retirement** and may **taper off later**, which can be better accommodated with a **dynamic income strategy**.
* 💡 Ultimately, the choice between these strategies can significantly impact **peace of mind during retirement**, as retirees can benefit from **regularly updated spending capabilities** rather than relying solely on static models.
* 🗣 Feedback from viewers is encouraged to gauge interest in how the **dynamic income strategy** could **enhance financial planning for retirement**.

Today, I'm going to attempt to answer probably the most popular question on YouTube, at least for people who watch this channel. And the question is, If I'm 60 years old and I have a million dollars in my retirement account, can I afford to retire? Put another way, I cannot work another day, can I go ahead and quit? So, I know other channels have answered this question, but I think if you stick around to the end, you'll be glad you did. And let me explain why. I'm going to begin by using Right Capital, which is the financial planning software that I use. What I'm going to do with Right Capital is very similar to how many financial planners operate. You're going to walk into our office and say, I cannot work another day. I'm done. I want to quit. And then we're going to begin asking you some questions. The first question is, How much money do you think you're going to need to spend in retirement? And then the next question is going to be, Do you have social

security. Do you have a pension, and how much money do you have in your investment accounts? And then from there, we're going to enter that information into software like Right Capital or eMoney, and we're going to give you an idea of whether that is a feasible plan, and often it'll be attached to a probability of success. There's going to be a percentage; it's going to tell you how likely this plan is to succeed or fail. So, we're going to start by doing that. We're going to look at Phil and CLA, who we've looked at before, although we're going to change the variables, and we're going to ask the question: if you're 60 years old and you have a million dollars in your retirement accounts and $100,000 in the bank, and you want to spend about $88,000 a month, can you afford to retire? So, we're going to start there, see how that plan works, but then I want to take a completely different look at this same question, and I think it may surprise some of you how

different the answers are going to be. But first, let's jump into right capital and kind of look at the situation with Phil and Clair. So here we have Phil and Clair. If you played with right capital, I know many of you have access to this, and so you've been able to run some scenarios on your own. But you have the bank. They have $100,000 in the bank account. They have a million in their investment accounts, $600,000 in Phil's 401K, $400,000 in Claire's 401k. And then for income, they have $3,200 a month from Phil's Social Security at his full retirement age. And then they have $2,000 a month coming from Claire's Social Security at her full retirement age. Their goal is to retire with $88,000 a month in monthly expenses. So now we can go back over here and we can look at their plan. What's the probability of success? So this number is what a lot of advisers use to help

people know how they're doing on their retirement journey. And so this number is based on a Monte Carlo simulation. So what the computer does is it runs a thousand different simulations, a thousand different possible worlds, and says in each of these different variables, right, the market goes up, the market goes down, the market stays flat. And so what the computer does is says in what percentage of those probable worlds that we tested does this plan work. So in 25% of the possible worlds, no problem. In 75% of the possible worlds, this plan fails. So then what an adviser will do is they'll come down here and say, okay, what can we do to maybe improve this plan. So maybe they could take a bit more aggressive investment risk. They can go maybe a 60-40 to a 70-30. Let's see if that does anything. So that bumps it up a little bit. And then what they can do is they can say, you know, we're using just inflation-adjusted retirement spending. So then they come look at this inflation-adjusted

retirement spending. So often when someone is calculating retirement spending, what they'll do is they'll take, you know, you need $8,000 a month to live in 2024, and then we'll look at that same number in 2025, but we'll add the rate of inflation. So if it's 3%, we'll take $8,000 a month plus 3%, and then the next year we'll take that new number and then we'll add another 3% of inflation or whatever the number ends up being for the rate of inflation for those years, and we just keep going, adding, and so that number just keeps building and building and building and building throughout your retirement. It's kind of this flat linear line that just keeps increasing by the rate of inflation, but of course, that's not how retirement spending works. It looks more like a smile. If you watch this Channel at all, you're tired of hearing this, but typically, it's much higher early in your retirement when you begin to do all the

things that you dreamed of doing in retirement: going to see the grandkids, taking those trips, golfing. Then, as time goes on, you kind of get tired of taking trips and maybe you're a little, you know, less energetic, and so you start staying home more and you just spend less money. And then for some people, if there's long-term care needs later in retirement, there might be another spike towards the end of retirement. That's called the retirement spending smile. So what if we move away from just kind of this linear inflation-adjusted spending to the retirement spending smile? Let's refresh it, and now you can see after we made that adjustment, we took it from a 25% probability of success to an 80% probability of success. Most people are beginning to feel a bit better right about now and are already beginning to imagine what they're going to tell the boss on Monday morning. And we could keep tweaking this strategy, trying to make it even better, right? We could play with the asset allocation, we could play with Social Security, maybe

Finding an optimal strategy around Social Security. We could have Phil work part-time or CLA work part-time to fill a gap, right? There's all these different things we could do to begin to make this plan even more successful. But a group of advisers have begun to push back against the Monte Carlo-based way of doing financial planning. And one of the reasons they're pushing back is because it's a flawed system, partially because it's a binary system. So let me give you an example. Let's say that Phil and CLA need $8,000 a month to live, but the market is doing poorly, and they're only able to pull $7,000 in one of the possible worlds. Remember, there's a thousand different possible worlds, and one of those worlds, they cannot pull the full $8,000. They can only do $7,000. In a Monte Carlo world, that's considered failure, right? It's pass-fail. Did it give them $8,000 a month, or did it give them $7,000 a month? In reality, what most

people do is they just spend a little bit less, they tighten their belt, and everything would be fine. So, there's a group of financial advisers who say there needs to be a better way to do this. We need a dynamic income strategy that can evolve with the market as the market moves up and down. And so, to help advisors kind of implement a dynamic income strategy, there's a new piece of software that's been released called Income Labs. It's been around for a couple of years, and I've just started testing it in the back end. I haven't rolled it out to clients yet. I'm still using Right Capital. In fact, I always will use Right Capital. I think it's a really powerful planning tool. But I've been kind of interested to compare and contrast how Income Labs handles retirement planning as opposed to Right Capital. Like I said, I haven't rolled this out to clients yet. Most clients haven't seen this because I don't want them to be guinea pigs. But I am playing in the round of the background and

double-checking my assumptions using income labs. And so today, I want to walk you through income lab. I am a novice at this; I have not spent much time in the software at all, so I am showing you something that I'm not very proficient at. But I think you'll find it really interesting how income lab approaches retirement income as opposed to right Capital. So, I'm going to use the same variables. Phil and CLA are the same age; they're 60 years old. They're going to retire at age 60. They have $1 million in their retirement accounts. They have $100,000 in the bank, and they have a little bit of Social Security coming in. So, let's flip over to income lab and see how it looks different. So, let's start by looking at the variables. So, here's the plan info. One thing to note: In both plans, I have them as residents of the State of Florida simply because I didn't want to deal with state taxes for this example. Then I have they're 60 years old.

their assets. Phil has $600,000 in his IRA. Claire has $400,000. And then they have a little bit of Social Security, same numbers. Phil's primary insurance amount is $3,200. Claire's primary insurance amount is $2,000. And their expenses are $88,000, or that's what they'd like to do. Now here's where income lab looks completely different than Right Capital, because what income lab does is it says, Look, the current balance is $1 million, right? That's how much they have in their accounts, plus $100,000 in their checking account. Their spending capacity is $7,700 a month. What I really like about this is typically when someone comes to me, I ask them how much money do you spend, and then I try to build a plan around this. What this software does is it comes at it from a different approach. It shows you your spending capacity. If you have a million dollars, your spending capacity is $7,700. Then it gives you a number to work backwards from, and for

some people I think that's really helpful. Instead of making them come up with a number and then trying to build a plan around that number, to say, Look, you can spend $7,700 a month. Do you think you can retire on that? And then here's where that Dynamic strategy really comes into play. So you can see here, you've got these guardrails, and this is slightly different than the traditional guardrail strategy, but that's for another video. You can see if the market does really well, if the market is up by 5%, you can spend an extra $385 a month. So you can spend a little bit more. But here's what's really interesting: if you have a 20% drawdown in the market, you can still spend $7,300 a month. And so now you have a very concrete number. One of the problems with guardrail strategies and some of the other more Dynamic income strategies, it's just really hard for clients to know, How much can I spend, and is this the time I need to pull back? Well, this

software will actually hook up to the custodians like we use Schwab and Fidelity. It'll hook up to those custodians, and then it'll pull your account data in, and then you can see based upon where I am right now how much money can I spend. And so when you and your adviser meet, you have this conversation, you know how much money can I safely spend this month or this quarter, and you have a much clearer number. So now I want to show you one of my favorite features. You could actually stress test this plan, and you have lots of different stress tests. So this one we're going to look at is the Great Financial Crisis. So you can kind of see what would have happened before kind of you're heading into the crisis, 2009. Your plan spending had been $7,700 or $7,750 with a little inflation. You're going to have to cut your spending by about $400 a month during kind of the worst parts of the crisis. Then you could say what happened after the financial crisis and

what you see is not only can you know this is kind of our most recent past 10 15 years. You can see not only could you have pulled the $7,700 a month you needed to live on, but that amount would have continued to increase. And by today, you'd be spending almost $111,000 a month, and you'd be completely okay. I should mention that these are real numbers; that's using not nominal numbers, so it's taking into account inflation. But what I like about income Labs is it gives you this number that given a million-dollar portfolio, you should be able to spend $7,700. And if there is a market drawdown, if you have a 5% or 20% drawdown, you need to pull down your spending by this amount. And if we're in the next great financial crisis or the COVID crash, it could be $1,000 a month. If so, if you're spending $7,700, can you cut your budget to $6,700? And if you look at your budget, you're

like yeah, no, I can live in $6,700. Then you can probably go in on Monday morning and tell your boss you quit. Don't go do that; we need to do some more planning. But theoretically, right, if in a bad market downturn you could just tighten your belt, then you could probably go ahead and retire now. I'm going to end it there. My goal with this video was not to give you all the tools you need to develop a retirement plan. In fact, we could have really optimized the right capital plan even more. We could have optimized the retirement lab plan anymore. But I want to just look very basic, using simple variables, at a traditional Monte Carlo-based retirement plan and a dynamic income retirement plan, kind of compare and contrast how they approach retirement spending. So leave a note in the comments below; let me know your thoughts. Would a dynamic income strategy, being able to visually see how much you could spend and maybe check in with your advisor once a month or once a quarter on that number, would that help provide any peace of mind as

you enter retirement, or would you prefer a traditional Monte Carlo-based probability of success and say, Look, you've got a 95% chance of this plan winning or working, or Would you rather something more like the dynamic income strategy? I'm kind of curious about your reaction to kind of the dynamic income strategy and if it would provide any additional benefit or peace of mind as I consider rolling this out in my firm. Hey, thanks for watching, and if you heard me mention in there Roth conversions and more optimizations, I have an entire video where I talk about the impact of Roth conversions and how it could potentially save you a fortune in retirement, and you can watch it now.

60 With $1 Million How Much Can I Spend In Retirement

Kevin Lum, CFP®

Using Monte Carlo Simulations for Retirement Planning

Monte Carlo simulations run a thousand different scenarios to determine the success rate of a retirement plan.

Financial advisers can adjust investment risks and use inflation-adjusted software to provide clearer spending guidelines.

The plan can also be stress-tested against historical events, like the Great Financial Crisis, to assess potential impacts on spending.

Retirement spending often follows a pattern, starting with trips and activities, then slowing down as energy decreases, and potentially spiking again due to long-term care needs.

This pattern, known as the retirement spending smile, can significantly impact the probability of financial success in retirement.

Adjusting spending strategies and asset allocation can improve this probability, offering a more dynamic approach to retirement planning.

Dynamic Income Strategies for Retirement Planning

Financial advisers are advocating for a dynamic income strategy that adapts to market fluctuations, leading to the development of a new software, Income Labs.

The author is testing Income Labs while continuing to use Right Capital for retirement planning.

The approach to retirement spending is being re-evaluated, emphasizing that it often resembles a smile curve rather than a linear increase, with higher expenses early in retirement.

Comparing Retirement Income Planning: Income Lab vs.

Phil and Claire have a total of $1 million in retirement accounts and $100,000 in their checking account, with a desired spending of $88,000 per year.

Income Lab offers a unique approach by calculating their spending capacity at $7,700 a month based on their total assets.

The software provides a different perspective on retirement income planning, focusing on spending capacity rather than just expenses.

A new approach to retirement planning suggests setting a concrete monthly spending limit, with flexibility based on market performance.

This strategy offers a range of spending options during market fluctuations, providing clients with clarity on how much they can spend.

The traditional Monte Carlo method of financial planning is being challenged for its binary approach to success and failure, leading to a more dynamic and nuanced strategy for retirement income.

Considering Retirement with a Million-Dollar Portfolio

The dynamic income strategy offers a flexible approach to retirement spending, adjusting withdrawals based on market performance.

With a million-dollar portfolio, one could start with $7,700 a month, and even during market downturns, the strategy provides a plan to reduce spending.

The financial planning software, Right Capital, is used to assess retirement needs and create a personalized plan for those looking to quit working.