The theme this week on the One Minute Retirement Tip podcast is should I invest in bonds now?

Today, I’m focusing on how to find the right balance of bonds in your portfolio. 

It’s a delicate balance - too much in bonds could snuff out the growth potential of your investments because you don’t have enough in stocks, and then on the other side of that coin... if you don’t have enough in bonds and too much of your portfolio is invested in stocks, you’re not protected from major market downturns, you have a 40% drop in your portfolio in the first few years of retirement and now you’re faced with some tough choices about going back to work or cutting back on your lifestyle permanently while your portfolio limps back to it’s previous high water mark over a period of several years. 

Owning bonds is like the story of Goldilocks and the 3 bears - not too much, not too little. We want a bond portfolio that is just right. 

The % in bonds that I typically recommend for clients in retirement is anywhere from 40% in bonds to 70% in bonds.

If you want to know the mix of bonds that we recommend for our clients by age, you can email me and I will send you our age-based asset allocation cheat sheet. It’s a guide to what your stock and bond mix should be for your age in 5 year increments, and it’s the foundation that we use to determine stock and bond percentages for our clients. There are other factors to consider other than age, but this guide gives you some specific guidelines and is a great place to start. 

Just shoot me an email - [email protected]. That’s [email protected] and I’ll send you your free age-based asset allocation cheat sheet, to help you determine the right mix of stocks and bonds for your portfolio. 

That’s it for today! Thanks for listening. My name is Ashley Micciche and this is the One Minute Retirement Tip. 

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