Retire Wise | March 2025

Managing cash flow in retirement is critical for ensuring your essential and nonessential expenses are met throughout your lifetime. Yet, events outside of your control, such as a change in health status, sudden market downturn, increase in inflation, or a recession can quickly upend your plans. While you can’t prevent the unexpected, the steps listed below can help you protect your retirement income from unforeseen events.

1. Shore up your safety net. Maintaining three to six months of essential expenses in liquid assets like bank savings or money market accounts is especially beneficial during periods of increased market volatility or economic instability. Adequate emergency savings can help you avoid driving up credit card or other debt when faced with an unanticipated expense. Having emergency savings to draw down on during periods of extreme market volatility may also help you to avoid cementing losses in your long-term investment accounts, allowing those assets time to recover.
2. Evaluate your lifetime income options. For most people, income in retirement is derived from a combination of Social Security benefits, retirement accounts, such as a 401(k), 403(b), and/or individual retirement accounts (IRAs), a pension, and personal savings or investments. Social Security and pensions are considered guaranteed income sources because they pay a monthly benefit for life. Ideally, you want enough guaranteed income to cover your essential expenses, including housing, food, clothing, healthcare, and transportation. That can be difficult to manage with Social Security alone. However, even if you don’t have a pension, there may be ways to structure a portion of your assets to help create inflation-adjusted income for life through a strategy that allocates assets based on different time segments to address risk and enable long-term assets to grow untouched to generate future income.
3. Leverage technology. While no one can predict the future, your financial professional has access to sophisticated financial software that can model different scenarios and provide highly customized retirement cash flow projections. This can help take the guesswork out of your spending and withdrawal strategies as you’re able to see exactly how your assets are working to generate the income you need throughout your life in retirement.
4. Stick to a spending plan. No strategy can compensate for chronic overspending in retirement. If you regularly spend more than you’ve budgeted for monthly expenses, you’ll need to make up the difference by withdrawing more money than planned from long-term investments, which leads to depleting assets needed to fuel growth and generate future income. A monthly budget or spending plan will help you manage spending and keep your short and long-term retirement goals on track.

If you’d like to learn more about tax-smart strategies that seek to create predictable, inflation-adjusted income tailored to your needs, call the office to schedule a time to meet.

5 Tips for Finding Balance as a Caregiver

Unpaid caregivers form the backbone of our long-term care system of services and supports, with much of that burden falling on women in or nearing retirement. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, women aged 55 or older account for more than one-third of all people providing unpaid eldercare, and one-fourth of those providing any form of unpaid adult care. They also account for about eight percent of people providing unpaid childcare.¹

Whether you’re caring for a spouse, parent, or child, caregiving can take a toll on your health and well-being. Yet, caregivers often place their own needs last, putting them at increased risk of stress, burnout, depression, and loneliness due to isolation. That can have a detrimental effect on caregivers as well as the loved ones they care for on a regular basis. To help caregivers find much needed balance, the Caregiver Action Network recommends the following:²

1. Seek support by connecting with others in similar situations. Sharing experiences with fellow caregivers through online communities and support groups can provide emotional relief and practical tips for managing caregiving challenges.
2. Accept help when offered. Delegating responsibilities can ease your workload and reduce stress. Make a list of specific tasks or errands that others can assist with so you’re ready when offers of assistance come your way.
3. Take respite breaks. Caregiving can be overwhelming and lead to depression and stress-related illnesses. Regular breaks can help prevent burnout and give you time to recharge.
4. Make sure that all legal documents are current, including healthcare and durable powers of attorney, living wills, and other estate planning documents. This will help to ensure you’re prepared, especially in the event of a loved one’s incapacity.
5. Give yourself credit. Recognize the hard work and dedication you put into caregiving and take time to appreciate your positive impact on your loved one’s life.

^{1)Livingston, Gretchen, “Older Women and Unpaid Caregiving in the U.S.”  Dol.gov, NOV 2023, https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/WB/WBIssueBrief-OlderWomenAndUnpaidCaregiving.pdf.
2)“10 Tips for Family Caregivers.” Caregiveraction.org,  https://www.caregiveraction.org/10-tips-family-caregivers/. Accessed 28 FEB 2025.}