Our daily roundup of retirement news your clients may be thinking about.
The Trump administration is considering pushing back the age at which retirees have to take required minimum distributions from tax-deferred retirement accounts, according to this article from personal finance website Motley Fool. Currently, retirees are required to start taking mandatory distributions from these accounts when they reach 70 1/2, and these withdrawals trigger an automatic tax bill. The proposal would give retirees more time to grow their savings on a tax-deferred basis and avoid taxes on the RMDs.
A paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that the impact of delaying retirement by three to six months could be the same as socking away an additional 1% of the salary for 30 years, according to this article from Nasdaq. Working longer means reducing the number of months of relying on fixed income. It also means delaying Social Security benefits, boosting the monthly benefit payouts in the process.
A contributor for Forbes proposes what he calls the "Retiree Discretion Rule" instead of the 4% rule to draw income from a retirement portfolio, according to this article. This RDR is designed to address the weaknesses of the 4% rule, he says, by making the risks explicit and placing them under the retiree’s control. It also incorporates the unique concerns of each retiree, according to the article. It calculates the initial monthly draw based on the following metrics: age, gender, value of financial assets, annual inflation rate desired, age retiree wants monthly draws to last and rate of return on assets.
Retirement investors should treat utilities as a defensive investment and not just an investment that offers reliable income and insulation from international volatility, writes an expert on MarketWatch. "The truth is that while rising interest rates since 2015 have been causing investors to sell utilities reflexively, we believe utilities themselves are in the best shape they have been in many decades," explains the expert.
