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Here's what to do with your retirement savings in a market sell-off
The stock market hates surprising economic news.
To prove it, stocks plummeted on Monday following a worse-than-expected July jobs report and a rise in the unemployment rate, spinning fears that the US economy is edging toward a recession — whether that’s the case or not.
Markets were also apparently rocked by economic news from Japan. Meanwhile, online trading platforms operated by Charles Schwab, Fidelity, and Vanguard experienced service interruptions around the same time, according to users who had trouble logging on and Downdetector, which tracks service disruptions. Some investors felt, well, powerless.
I was even tempted to call my financial adviser for some hand-holding.
“We are definitely busy today,” Laura LaTourette, a certified financial planner with Family Wealth Management Group in Dahlonega, Ga., told Yahoo Finance.
“I remind clients that chaos is normal,” she said. “We have seen the market go down every year at least 10% — sometimes for a day, sometimes for a period of time like during the pandemic. We all stay focused on what we can control like expenses and savings … and to continue to focus on [our] goals.”
I talked to several other experts about the best moves to make with your retirement savings when the markets are shaky.
Focus on long-term goals
The truth is that retirement savers can’t afford to be rash. Building wealth is a long-term process.
“In times of stock market volatility, I tell my clients that it's crucial to remember that such fluctuations are a natural part of investing,” Ryan Haiss, a certified financial planner at Flynn Zito Capital Management in Garden City, N.Y., told Yahoo Finance.
“This is completely normal and can even be a healthy correction after significant market run-ups, as we've seen in 2023 and 2024,” he said.
No big moves
If you're tempted to do something major, though, tap the brakes.
It’s pretty tough to find the best time to sell and to buy stocks. If you get out when markets dip, you might very well miss out on the upside when they get rolling again.
The bigger issue right now is not what goes down this week, but what happened in the last year. The reality is that stocks do have market risk, but even those of you close to retirement or retired should stay invested in stocks to some degree in order to benefit from the upside over time.
If you’re 65, you could have two decades or more of living ahead of you and you’ll want that potential boost.
“Stay calm is my mantra,” Justin Smith, a certified financial planner with Savant Wealth Management in Phoenix, Ariz., told Yahoo Finance. Right now, Smith is soothing clients who are calling or emailing, telling them “to focus on what we can control, such as their retirement plan and cash holdings, and acknowledge that much of this is out of our control.”
Automatic retirement savings and target funds to the rescue
If you’re setting money aside automatically in your employer-sponsored retirement plan, or you’re making automatic contributions to a Roth IRA or a traditional IRA and are years from retirement, take a breath.
You’re constantly investing in your retirement accounts when the market is soaring and when it’s fallen, and that means the return on your investments evens out over the long run, especially when you have decades of runway ahead.
And if you’re like many retirement savers, you have bought into the simplicity of target-date retirement funds so your account is automatically adjusting for market gyrations.
With a target-date retirement fund, you select the year you’d like to retire and buy a mutual fund with that year in its name (like Target 2044). The fund manager then splits up your investment between stocks and bonds, changing that division to a more conservative blend as the target date looms, or soon after.
Fine-tune your asset allocation
It’s fine for younger savers with decades until retirement to sit tight and wait it out. In fact, stop looking at your account balances right now until things quiet down again.
But for those closer to retirement age, that might not be best.
“The mantra to do nothing when the market drops isn’t necessarily great advice for people approaching retirement,” Christine Benz, Morningstar’s director of personal finance, told Yahoo Finance
“It has been very easy to let stocks ride during their extended run over the past decade, and people’s portfolios are the better for it,” she said. “But if they haven’t rebalanced and taken risk out of their portfolio by lightening up on stocks, it’s still reasonable to do that, even though stocks have dropped a bit.”
Her advice: Pre-retirees and retirees should hold five to 10 years’ worth of anticipated portfolio withdrawals in a combination of cash and high-quality bonds.
“Those assets provide a bulwark against having to withdraw from stock assets if stocks encounter a sustained downturn,” she said. “And the good news is that yields on bonds and cash, while they’ve declined a bit recently in expectation of Fed rate cuts, are still quite decent relative to where they were a few years ago.”
In fact, some certificates of deposit and high-yield savings accounts are paying more than 5%. The most appealing CD rates — offered mostly by online banks — were recently hovering above 5.3% for a one-year certificate.
Many retirees want a more conservative asset mix as they age so they don’t have to get that anxious feeling when the stock market slides. That’s why near-retirees and retirees, in particular, who haven't revisited their asset allocations for a while should consider doing so, Benz said.
Financial advisers generally suggest rebalancing (adjusting the mix of your stocks and bonds) whenever your portfolio gets more than 7% to 10% away from your original asset allocation, which was constructed to match your time horizon, risk tolerance, and financial goals. To roughly determine what percentage of your portfolio should be in stocks, subtract your age from 110. So, a 60-year-old would have 50% in stocks and the rest in bonds and cash.
Time for your annual checkup
This is an opportune time to step back and look at your overall retirement account investments and how they are allocated and consider some fine-tuning. If having too big a chunk of your savings invested in stocks makes you a hot mess when markets swing, then you might consider paring those holdings back a bit.
“If this decline has you feeling your investments are too aggressive, it's a good time to revisit your portfolio allocation," Haiss said. “However, you may want to hold off on making any changes until the market recovers.”
While I held off on bothering my adviser this time, I make it a point to meet with her throughout the year to review allocations and revisit my overall retirement outlook and risk tolerance. In our last meeting, in fact, we both marveled at how the S&P 500 has nearly doubled since the spring of 2020.
I highly recommend you do the same with your financial planner. It can be as simple as steady as she goes, or a very minor tweak, so when things go haywire in the market — and they will from time to time — you’ll feel less fearful. This is something within your control.
Kerry Hannon is a Senior Columnist at Yahoo Finance. She is a career and retirement strategist, and the author of 14 books, including "In Control at 50+: How to Succeed in The New World of Work" and "Never Too Old To Get Rich." Follow her on X @kerryhannon.
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