Avoid The Market Timing Trap in Retirement
After decades of adding to your retirement accounts, making the mental switch to withdrawal mode can be a challenge. It may be tempting to try to time the market to mitigate the risk of any sudden drops or ongoing turbulence. However, market timing is almost unequivocally a bad idea, especially when you no longer have the ability to financially recover from major mistakes. Learn how creating a financial plan for your retirement can help you avoid any sudden, costly moves. Why Market Timing Doesn’t Work It can be painful to watch your hard-earned money evaporate during a particularly rocky period in the stock market. This makes it tempting to sell when values start dropping, then buy back in once they’re on the rebound. However, successful market timing requires investors to be right not once but twice—selling near the top and buying back in at the bottom. Predicting both the market high and low can be a challenge even for the most experienced investors, and many of the top-performing days in the stock market are interspersed among some of the most poorly-performing days. In fact, someone who found themselves sitting on the sidelines during the best 10 market days between 1998 and 2019 had their total investment return cut in half.1 Missing less than two weeks over two decades may seem like a blip in the grand scheme of things, but this shows that even a short stint of poor market timing can have lifelong consequences. Instead, it’s important to find an asset allocation you’re comfortable with, and then stick with it through times of turbulence and prosperity. How a Financial Plan Can Help One way to avoid fiddling with your