I recently went down to Florida to see my folks and found something disturbing as I talked to their friends.
We all know that many people who have been on fixed incomes lost 50% of more of their virtual portfolios during the crash but what I hadn't realized is how deeply this was impacting those retirees because their fund/pension managers have, for the most part, done nothing to adjust their investing strategies at the market bottom.
The average American has just $88,000 when they retire but we're not talking about them - we are talking about the retirees we aspire to be - the upper percentile Seniors in like the ones in West Palm Beach and Boca Raton, Florida. The average couple there had closer to $1M in portflio assets before the crash and closer to $600,000 now. Even so, that can cause quite an income adjustment for a retired couple.
Fortunately most of these people own their homes and get free government health care (Medicare) so they are not as devastated as younger Americans who are still paying off their homes and just working on saving for retirement while trying to provide health care and education for their children. With Social Security (another thing that is iffy for us younger Baby Boomers down the road) adding $2,000 a month, the average 6% rate of return on a balanced virtual portfolio of $1M was $5,000 a month plus $2,000 from SS = $7,000 a month, generally enough to pay taxes and bills for the house, eat out once in a while, support 2 cars, do a bit of traveling and even belong to a golf club (dues in the average high-end development are $15,000 a year).
The idea, of course, is to do all this WITHOUT dipping into the $1M principal that's invested in stocks and bonds.
