Recent posts by John Ameriks
John Ameriks leads Vanguard's Investment Counseling & Research group, which provides portfolio recommendations along with topical commentary and investment counseling.
This blog post was written jointly by Steve Utkus and John Ameriks.
Vanguard is not an insurance company, but that doesn’t mean we don’t appreciate the potential value that some see in having a guaranteed income in retirement.
In fact, you may have heard that Vanguard recently introduced Vanguard Annuity Access™, powered by the Income Solutions® platform. This is an online annuity marketplace where you can compare quotes on comparable fixed annuities from a set of leading insurers. The program is designed to facilitate easy, apples-to-apples comparisons among different annuity contracts, with the highest degree of fee transparency possible. This new service may be very helpful to those people seeking the kind of income guarantees an annuity can provide.
I’m often asked what I think about the “4% rule” for spending in retirement. According to this rule of thumb, an individual who is planning on a 30-year investment horizon and is holding a broadly diversified and balanced investment portfolio of stocks and bonds, can—with a reasonably low probability of running out of money over 30 years—spend an amount equal to roughly 4% of their total retirement portfolio in the first year, and then adjust that withdrawal every year thereafter for inflation.
We’ve been hearing a lot about gold over the last few months, related to concerns about inflation, the creditworthiness of various governments, and fallout from the financial crisis—all against the backdrop of what is the most significant increase in inflation-adjusted gold prices since the early 1980s.
For many years, the government has published statistics on Americans’ age and employment. A version of that data is shown in the chart below. My sense is that these figures are the basis for much of the conventional wisdom on the age at which people retire, as well as for whatever general notions people have about when they’ll start to need “replacement income.”
Given all the back and forth in Washington these days, with policy meetings and dramatic proposals to revolutionize retirement, I’ve got retirement-income solutions on the brain. So here’s a modest proposal for providing “Retirement Income Security for All.”