All Thought Leadership Posts

Attempting to sustain a fixed living standard using distributions from a portfolio of volatile assets is an inefficient retirement income strategy. This is a unique source of sequence risk. Four…

Individual investors are vulnerable to the sequence of market returns experienced over their investing lifetimes. Individuals who behave in exactly the same way over their careers—saving the same percentage of…

A TIPS ladder can be constructed similarly to a Treasury strips ladder, using the same date from the Wall Street Journal Market Data Center, which provides a daily report of…

Building bond ladders for retirement income is an important but understudied topic. Especially since we are at a point in time when many are worried about future interest rate increases,…

Bonds can be purchased on both primary (when bonds are first issued) and secondary (subsequent trading) markets. There are wholesale markets for large institutions (with trades of at least $1…

When it comes to retirement income bond ladders, Joe Tomlinson created a taxonomy of different types in his 2014 Advisor Perspectives column, “Why the Risk Reduction Benefits of Bond Ladders…

Those seeking a do-it-yourself approach to duration matching with bond funds may underestimate the difficulty of the task. Duration-matching is not straightforward when shares of the bond fund must be…

Last time, we discussed how DFA’s target-date retirement income funds can help guard retirees from interest rate risk. Today, I want to look at another example of a bond fund…

Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA) takes a more direct approach to immunizing retirement liabilities through their target-date retirement income funds. These funds provide a useful case study for understanding the role…

Though reverse mortgages have long held a bad reputation, research and public policy in recent years are shedding new light on their potential uses in retirement. The vast majority of…