What Retirement Planning Gets Wrong, with Jamie Hopkins

About this episode

Jamie Hopkins discusses the misconceptions in retirement planning, emphasizing the importance of income generation over a fixed savings target.

#701: Forget the idea that you need a magic number to retire. Jamie Hopkins is a certified financial planner, professor of taxation at the American College of Financial Services, director of the New York Life Center for Retirement Income, and Top 40 Under 40 financial services professionals from InvestmentNews. His take on retirement planning will make you rethink a few things. We start with the "no magic number" concept. Hopkins explains that fixating on a savings target - whether it's $1 million or $10 million - misses the point. What matters is what income you can generate relative to the lifestyle you want. And that lifestyle shifts. Research shows retirees often spend more than 100 percent of their pre-retirement income in the first few years, then gradually spend less as they age. From there, we get into sequence of returns risk, which Hopkins calls one of the biggest threats to any retirement plan. A market downturn in the first few years of retirement can be nearly impossible to recover from, since you're withdrawing money while your portfolio is declining. We also dig into the well-known "4 percent rule" - which Hopkins prefers to call a "4 percent finding" - and why it…

People in this episode

Guest: Jamie Hopkins

Topics covered

• retirement planning
• financial independence
• sequence of returns risk
• 4 percent rule
• silver divorce

Keywords

• financial planner
• taxation
• retirement income
• lifestyle changes
• market downturn

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Top 40 Under 40

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