Managing Your Retirement Investments: Is a Bucket Strategy Right for You?

Could a retirement bucket strategy make it easier to manage savings after you retire?

If you think that managing retirement investments is difficult when you are working, we have some bad news: it gets much harder when you actually retire.  Once retired, your investments need to not only grow but also fund your lifestyle and last as long as you do.

In retirement when many retirees rely on their savings, the stakes for getting your investment strategy right are high.

One method for balancing the desire for growth with the need for stability is a bucket approach.  With this retirement investing strategy you establish different “buckets” or accounts for different types of spending.

• Invest some buckets with more risk in the hopes of more reward — for example, in stocks.
• Invest other buckets conservatively — in cash or bonds, depending on your time horizon.

Here are three common ways of setting up a retirement bucket strategy:

Retirement Bucket Strategy Based on Phases of Retirement — Risks and Time Horizons

One way of setting up a bucket strategy is to think about different phases of retirement. You might establish three different accounts to meet your needs as you age.

Near Term: This bucket has funds that are sufficient to meet your spending needs and wants over the first five years of retirement.  You want this money kept in cash or cash equivalents — little or no risk — because you need the money now or in the near future. This is not money that should be put at risk.

Years 6-15+: The second bucket holds monies to be used in years 6 — 15ish of retirement. This bucket is invested in things like fixed-income securities or investments with lower risk than stocks, but with some potential for growth.  You can afford to take some degree of risk with this money, but not too much.

Longer Term: Your third bucket is invested in mostly equities.  While stocks are thought to be a riskier investment, they are probably a good way to grow money that you will not need for a long period of time.  You have time to ride out any volatility that this money experiences.

Retirement Bucket Strategy Based on Needs and Wants

You could also set up a retirement bucket strategy based on figuring out how much money you need, how much you want and how much would be nice to have.

Needs: Money that you have identified as necessary for retirement would be invested conservatively.  These funds should include any baseline spending for all of retirement.  Really think about what you need for food, shelter, healthcare and other necessities.

Nice to Haves: Funds that could be used on nice to haves could be invested with modest risk.  These are day to day expenses that you could potentially live without if you needed to.

Wants: A third account could be invested for growth.  This is money that you have identified as wanting to spend — splurges, luxuries, big trips, helping grandchildren with education, etc…

Retirement Bucket Strategy Based on Types of  Spending

Another way of approaching the retirement investment bucket strategy is to establish buckets based exactly on how the money is going to be used — this is a more detailed version of a bucket strategy based on needs and wants.

The tricky part with this strategy is that you may need buckets within buckets to insure that cash is available for short term spending while trying to grow assets in each bucket for the long term.

Nonetheless, you might want to establish the following types of buckets:

Day to Day Necessities: This is the most critical money — money you must have to fund day to day living.

Healthcare: Out of pocket spending on healthcare in retirement is shockingly high.  Analysis from the Employee Benefit Research Institute (ERBI), Boston College Center for Retirement Research and others suggests that a 65 year old couple will spend around $250,000 on healthcare alone in retirement.

Emergencies: The car needs repairs, the roof leaks, you get a speeding ticket — things happen and you need easily accessible money to pay for them.

Hobbies and Fun: Will you travel? Join clubs?  Need supplies?  This bucket is for fun and leisure.

Inheritance and Charitable Donations: You can probably keep money that you want to bequest in the future invested more aggressively.

Luxury: It is nice to have a bucket designed to spend however you want — completely guilt free indulgences.  You could take more risks with these funds.

What Are the Disadvantages of a Bucket Retirement Investment Strategy

As with any investment strategy, the idea of keeping your retirement savings in various buckets has some drawbacks:

Can Be Difficult to Set Up: As discussed above, there is no one definitive way of setting up a retirement bucket strategy.  And getting the right asset classes for each bucket is another layer of complexity.

Hard to Maintain and Manage: The trickiest part of a bucket strategy is probably maintaining all of the various accounts and keeping the right amounts of money in each of the respective buckets.

For example:

• What happens if you use up the money in one bucket?  How do you replenish?
• How much money do you need in each bucket to begin with and how do those ratios evolve over time?
• If one bucket does very well, should you reinvest your dividends in the same bucket or transfer them elsewhere?
• Should you take profits in one bucket and distribute them to other buckets?

A Bucket Strategy Can Increase Risk Over Time:  Generally speaking, with most bucket strategies, you are spending your safest assets first.  So, over time, a greater percentage of your money is being held in riskier investments.  This is counter to what many finance professionals — especially those involved in target date funds — recommend.

How Can You See if a Bucket Strategy is Right for You?

Lucky for you, you don’t have to actually open accounts and invest all of your money to explore the idea of a bucket strategy for your retirement.

You could speak with a financial advisor about whether one of these strategies would be right for you.

You could also do some what if scenarios on your own. The NewRetirement retirement planner enables you to explore as many of these bucket strategy scenarios as you like — in great detail.

• Start by logging in or creating an account and establishing a baseline retirement plan.
• Once you are in the system, you can change or add a lot of detail — update any aspect related to your retirement finances.
• With regards to your investments, you can model as many different savings accounts — each with their own rate of return — as you like.  So, you can easily try out any bucket strategy described above.  Try different variations and see the overall impact on your retirement security.

The NewRetirement retirement planning calculator is one of the most comprehensive and powerful tools available.  Forbes Magazine calls this system “a new approach to retirement planning” and it was named a best retirement calculator by the American Association of Individual Investor’s (AAII) and CanIRetireYet.

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