I’m hoping I’m three years away from retirement. I’m not 100% happy with my local retirement guy. Especially when he talked me into a Annuity (shame on me).
Talking with Fisher for the last six months. They have a different outlook. Instead of “you should work till you’re 80, then live frugal, and die broke at 90”, investing heavily in bonds, Fisher says “the stock market always recovers and historically gives investors a much better return. When you retire, we will do our best to make sure you have as much or more as when you started”. Or something like that.
In searching this site, I’ve found several that use Fisher. So I guess I’m looking for honest, real life interaction with Fisher and their strategies. 100% stock investments throughout retirement a good idea? That’s how I’ve invested since I started saving.

Any experiences and opinions would be greatly appreciated.

I have used J.P. Morgan/Chase Private Banker for several years and I have been happy. They seems to balance my investments well and continually change them based upon performance.

Good Luck.

RMD

100 percent stocks in retirement is pushing it. You should gradually reduce your stock exposure as you go through retirement.

Vanguard Advisor Funds. Every article puts this investor-owned firm at the top of the list for low-cost, quality investments and investment advice (which is what I choose to pay for).

I am with them and while Vanguard is never going to double my money overnight with bitcoin and other schemes, their plain vanilla approach to investing helps me sleep at night over the fact that my money is invested wisely with a risk/reward ratio that I'm comfortable with (since every investment has some risk).

I've seen how aggressively Fisher advertises and I would be concerned about what their costs are for investors. (Who's paying for that marketing?)

It is different for everybody. But a 50/50 mix of stocks and bonds at your point would be a prudent approach if I was in your shoes, which I am pretty much.

Questions like what else do I have for assets and and how soon am I going to be regularly relying on these funds going forward. And for how long do they need to last are all legitimate things that need to be considered.

Another major question is what is you take on gaining vs loosing vs maintaining the principal of your portfolio?

This is referred to as your risk tolerance.

Another important question is this. Is everything paid for except expense's, taxes and insurance. If so that is huge. You do not want to enter retirement with major debt issues.

Lastly, the more involved you are the better it will be for you imho. Good luck.

Thanks for the inputs. We are debt free, own our home. We don’t do extravagant or need the latest things. Our newest car is 2014. So normal bills and what pops up unexpectedly.
Mhead, I’ve come across Vanguard advisor in my searches, I’ll look into them.

What are their fees? IMO, that is just as important - maybe more important - than their advice.

Unless you happen to be an ultra high net worth individual, when you get right down to it, investing advice for us lesser humans is pretty "generic" (just look at the rise of roboadvisors). So, if you're paying, say a fee of 1% of assets under management for someone to tell you to put your money in a 60/40 or 50/50 mix of stock and bond funds, you're adding a 1% drag on your return for nothing. A mix of stock and bond funds is good advice for many folks, so much so that you shouldn't be paying an investment firm for that "advice".

My view is that simpler is better. Deposit your money with Fido, Vanguard, or Schwab. Use their online tools to suggest a mix of low fee index funds. Rebalance every couple of years as necessary.

no need for a firm like that

as mentioned -- open an account at Vanguard or Schwab or Fidelity

buy low fee index funds and hold long-term. you want broad exposure / diversification with low fees.

another approach is the advent of Retirement Date Portfolio -- with names like the 2035 Fund, 2030 Fund etc. They would automatically diversify and re-balance for you. The ultimate invest it and forget it type account. again -- make sure the specific fund is low fee.

You simply have no need for an account at Edward Jones, Fisher, etc. the money they make comes at the expense of your returns.

-----------------------------------

quote:

Originally posted by rduckwor:
I have used J.P. Morgan/Chase Private Banker for several years and I have been happy. They seems to balance my investments well and continually change them based upon performance.

Good Luck.RMD

Another JPM Chase/Private Banker client here. Also had a Guardian Variable Annuity in which more than doubled in 12 years - with a guarantee of 6% minimum annually for 10 years. I'm close to retirement (70 next month), so I liquidated my Guardian Variable annuity and invested in (3) 5-year fixed annuities at 3.35% annual. I've got about half my liquid net worth with JPM, and half in the fixed annuities. If the JPM goes to hell I'll be okay but not happy; if it runs up like a stripe assed ape I'll try to be okay with 3.35% I can pull from the fixed annuities.

I've spoken to the Fisher people on numerous occasions,but they just rub me the wrong way.

aileron

Fisher *hates* annuities - but they can be useful if you're careful and fully understand the costs involved - not easy, as my Variable Annuity was complex.

I signed with Fisher in 2017. Since end of July 2017. As of Dec 15, 2019, they increased what I gave them by 39.8%.

You don't have to give them everything you have. That's what I did. I gave them a portion. And then, I tried to pick some off their portfolio and I've also signed on to several other stock picking services: three of them from Motley Fool that I started in Feb of 2020 which I can recommend and two from Empire Research which I don't recommend.

Here's their strategy: the stock market will be on the upside in the long run is the basic tenet. They take your goals and risk aversion to come up with a stock to bond portfolio mix. The mix is to lower the volatility while increasing overall return.

Then they take the world benchmark of MSCI. Within the MSCI, they make different calls of whether to overweight or underweight each sector or country. Then they select the stocks in each of the sector or country.

You can put in hard instructions as to stock picks like maybe you don't want any alcohol stocks. You can also override their decisions since it's your money. For example and unfortunately, I wanted to be all cash after the elections, thinking the market will drop with all the election controversy. My advisor talked with me and we settled on switching from 70% stock / 30% bonds to 30% stock / 70% bond. As you know, the stock market went up over time. In the stocks I cashed out under my control and from Motley Fool, I missed out on 25% to 50% gain in the second half of November. I don't think it would have been that much for Fisher but I think it would have been substantial. I haven't talked with my advisor yet. I plan to do so after Jan 20 and get him to make a plan to get me back to 70/30 split again in some form of increment.

What I do like is they used to have plenty of seminars you can go to that are very educational on various topics such as market outlook. Nice places and they feed you. Now, it's just a form of zoom webinar. I think they use Blue Jeans.

I have Schwab and they created a new account and I still have visibility to what's happening in my account.

In deciding on Fisher, I did go interviewing several money market organizations. I do have an MBA in Finance and know a lot about the stock market; I just suck at it. My wife was a lot better and grew our portfolio from when I gave up when it took a dump in 2008.

The deal with annuities is it's a pure arbitrage play for the insurance companies. They take your cash and hold it to pay off any insurance policy and in return, they pay you a portion of the insurance premiums that someone is paying for the right to get the money you just paid the insurance. So they're making a percentage off the insurance premiums and, in the meantime, they can invest your money. When you die and the corresponding insurance policy holder dies, the insurance premium payments stop and the money you gave is just transferred to the other person's beneficiaries. Simplified explanation but that's the gist. And I also have a small annuity, too, but I settled for a CD like annuity in that it's a 5 year CD and I get the money back plus interest of 3.25% APR. I got it at the same time I was interviewing money managers so i'll get it back May 2022.

quote:

Originally posted by Rey HRH:
I signed with Fisher in 2017. Since end of July 2017. As of Dec 15, 2019, they increased what I gave them by 39.8%.

that same time frame with dividends reinvested the basic SP500 index returned ~35%

from July 2017 to Dec 2020 it returned +60%. no advisor needed to make those returns.

and that's just the index -- which you can buy for .03% expense ratio.

curious what their advice was during the pandemic. I increased my stock exposure Mar - Jun and was well-rewarded.

Since reaching the highs of 31K + i have pared back a bit but I'm still probably ~80% stocks widely diversified

----------------------------

quote:

Originally posted by Sig209:

quote:

Originally posted by Rey HRH:
I signed with Fisher in 2017. Since end of July 2017. As of Dec 15, 2019, they increased what I gave them by 39.8%.

that same time frame with dividends reinvested the basic SP500 index returned ~35%

from July 2017 to Dec 2020 it returned +60%. no advisor needed to make those returns.

and that's just the index -- which you can buy for .03% expense ratio.

curious what their advice was during the pandemic. I increased my stock exposure Mar - Jun and was well-rewarded.

Since reaching the highs of 31K + i have pared back a bit but I'm still probably ~80% stocks widely diversified

----------------------------

It was hold through the pandemic. They didn't expect the bear market as it happened. I was considering cashing out in Mid Feb at the high for my holdings outside their portfolio but decided otherwise as they said the market had already priced in the Covid at the time.

If you look at their strategy as I described it, it's not like they're trying to beat the market by a mile. There's that phenomena called regression towards the mean anyway. Their aim is to beat the benchmark by under or overweighing different sectors or countries.

My goal in joining them was 1) to get someone following a disciplined approach 2) have someone to blame.

If I had listened to them in November and left my mix as is, I would have gotten most of the 16% gain that occurred in the second half of November.

No matter who you go with it's important to be invested carefully once you are in retirement mode. By that I mean once in retirement you have to be able to withstand the inevitable hits the market will sustain from time to time. When the market is strong you won't make as much as you could if invested aggresively but you also won't take as great a "beating" in a market down turn. It's a fine line and a good money mgr. can be worth his cost in the long run no matter which company he represents.

We looked into Fisher about 5 years ago when I decided to get more serious about our investments and just decided it wasn’t a good fit for us. We have been with Fidelity since the 80’s and have done fairly well. I sold off our meager holdings on Black Friday” and it taught me a valuable lesson...never again. Since I retired 2 years ago I have made our investments my part time job, reading up on various things that may affect our portfolio etc. but for the most part I am a buy and hold kind of investor and rebalance my portfolio about once a year or so. Doing this has worked out well for us. As an example we averaged over 30% return last year and that included about 25% of our portfolio being professionally managed by Fidelity’s Private Client Group which is more conservative than I am.

I subscribe to a third party investment newsletter called Fidelity Monitor and Insight which gives me several investment models to choose from and although I don’t follow their models exclusively they do provide a benchmark to gauge my investments by. I’m sure there is probably something similar to this for Vangaurd etc.

https://www.fmandi.com/index.php

I have never been a fan of bonds although my professionally managed sub account has some. It’s just that their returns suck..If you think, like I do that interest rates will rise over the next year or so then the bond returns will really take a turn for the worse.

Annuities are also something we are looking at but I’m having a hard time swallowing the meager return rates that you have to swallow to get their guarantees. As an example most of the mutual funds I invest with in Fidelity have a stellar long term track record. Most AVERAGE over 11% since inception which is usually over 25 years. That sounds like pretty good returns to me. Yes they may actually loose money in any given year but the cold hard fact of that kind of average return is hard to deny.

Your health and potential longevity will also come into play in deciding your investment mix but one thing I don’t plan on doing is running out of money before I die so I tend to take a longer view of things...

quote:

Originally posted by smlsig:
I have never been a fan of bonds although my professionally managed sub account has some. It’s just that their returns suck..

^^^
This.

and their upside sucks...

and their actually bearing default risk sucks.....

and their value being negatively affected by increases in market interest rate sucks (particularly given market is at historically low interest rates) sucks......

and their being at significant risk during inflation sucks (USG printing money -> higher interest rates ---> see above)

Other that that, bonds are just ducky.

If I recall as of August 2020 there were 40% more dollars in circulation than there were in January 2020. And (shock) the stock market went up.

IMO the stock market is going up mainly because of this effect. With the change to the new Administration, and with the GA runoff removing any control of the borrow-tax-and-spenders, I don't see any reduction in this effect.

TL: DR Fisher's idea of mostly-equities makes complete sense to me at this time.

Regards to the op's situation I do not think this is wise advise. But that is just my feelings on the subject.

Sorry I haven’t responded before now. Thanks all.
I’ve read the comments several times, needed to digest.
I definitely need a manager. Especially after learning about taxes and the need for a strategy to save money.
Any thoughts on “mega Roth IRAs”? I’ve never heard of them before. I may back off on my 401k and pound this for the next couple of years. We don’t have much in our Roth.

I’m a Vanguard fanboy, & have done some reading over the years. Everyone is different, how much if any ‘help’ they think they need.

Yes, most any 12 year period of stocks will be up, even if you bought at the peak. There are many tools one can use to save, starting with 401k’s, IRA’s, & getting into health savings accounts & 529 plans for younger kids, etc..

I don’t think an average health, 65 year old retiree needs to get out of stocks. There are many individual particulars with different people. With some cash reserves or a small inflow with a pension or PT job, lass need to cash in stocks with a down market.

I have 5+ years to go, heavily in diversified equities. I try not to do big swings, but in 2021 new 401k $$ is going 50% cash at these levels.

Bonds, CD's leave a lot to be desired right now and that's being kind. T-Bills are a joke.

Several Stocks essentially function as Bonds given the circumstances we find ourselves in IMHO e.g., VZ, KO, T, DUK so they are an example alternative to just sitting in cash.

We often lump ‘stocks’ into one group. There can be a very big difference between say small-cap growth stocks over those of a utility company.

My younger son likes to dabble. A portion of what he has is in a ‘triple leverage fund’. It’s kinda like it sounds, multiplies gains on the way up, higher losses when down.