VIP Views on Today’s Top Planning Issues

by Jane Wollman Rusoff, Ginger Szala and Melanie Waddell

Feature September 24, 2021 at 08:52 AM Share & Print

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While the markets are having a good year so far — the Dow Jones is up about 13% through mid-September — concerns about volatility remain.

To advisor Christopher Manske, for instance, there’s great uncertainty tied to inflation, the value of the dollar “and the crazy uptick in real assets like real estate and other commodities.” Plus, issues in the U.S. labor market could lead to “some sort of reckoning” that would likely spill over onto the stock market, he says.

But Professor Stephen R. Foerster of Western University, a book co-author on the industry’s biggest names — like the late John Bogle — says it’s easy to get “overly focused” on asset prices and to then “lose sight”of why we are investing for the long term. “If investing for retirement, what you really care about is the income that’s going to be derived,” he explains.

While in the 1990s, some retirees could get by on portfolio withdrawals, that isn’t “a reasonable way” to go about retirement decumulation today due to a number of factors, says Morningstar’s Christine Benz. She suggests different ways advisors can help clients adjust to the latest retirement realities.

To Wade Pfau, director of the Retirement Income Certified Professional program at The American College of Financial Services, advisors need to be vigilant about tax issues affecting retirement. He says that since the threshold for paying taxes on Social Security benefits has not been adjusted for inflation for more than 25 years, many retirees face a “Tax Torpedo.”

Pfau and the other experts whose views are featured here make it their mission to keep advisors informed on the latest developments in financial planning and the conversations they need to have with clients, as well as the appropriate measures they can take. Such insights could prove to be especially helpful as a number of major tax proposals work their way through Congress.