I'm getting close to retirement, or at least semi-retirement with decreased hours to keep up the mental stimulation and camaraderie but with more free time. As I have a defined benefit pension, though frozen without additional funding since 2016 (which instead went to a defined contribution pension), I've maintained a pretty high equity portion of my investments. Even with the recent drop I've probably come out ahead because of that, but that doesn't mean it's not painful to see the drops and it makes me worry about the sequence of returns risk. A big concern is the extreme volatility and how long it takes the company retirement manager to make changes. If, for example, I want to sell from my main company retirement account investments and put it in my external brokerage account to increase my investment options, it may take up to 10 days. I don't want to trade increased options for locking in a bigger paper loss than I expected. The one silver lining with the market tanking is that this may be a good time to do Roth conversions on retirement accounts so I can pay tax on a lower amount. But again with the delay in it happening and the volatility I could end up paying a lot more taxes than expected (when I'm still at a fairly high tax rate) if there's a bounce when the order goes through.
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I'm getting close to retirement, or at least semi-retirement with decreased hours to keep up the mental stimulation and camaraderie but with more free time. As I have a defined benefit pension, though frozen without additional funding since 2016 (which instead went to a defined contribution pension), I've maintained a pretty high equity portion of my investments. Even with the recent drop I've probably come out ahead because of that, but that doesn't mean it's not painful to see the drops and it makes me worry about the sequence of returns risk. A big concern is the extreme volatility and how long it takes the company retirement manager to make changes. If, for example, I want to sell from my main company retirement account investments and put it in my external brokerage account to increase my investment options, it may take up to 10 days. I don't want to trade increased options for locking in a bigger paper loss than I expected. The one silver lining with the market tanking is that this may be a good time to do Roth conversions on retirement accounts so I can pay tax on a lower amount. But again with the delay in it happening and the volatility I could end up paying a lot more taxes than expected (when I'm still at a fairly high tax rate) if there's a bounce when the order goes through.
Post: Tariffs and our retirement assets
Link to comment from April 6, 2025