If you’re looking to protect your wealth, it’s important to remember that the best strategies for safeguarding your nest egg are often different from those for growing your wealth. Preserving your wealth is much more about reducing risk than it is about amping your potential gains.
Here are nine strategies for protecting your wealth and how they work.
9 strategies for keeping your wealth safe
These strategies cover a variety of ways to keep your money intact, from purely behavioral changes to the finer points on how to invest.
1. Stop spending more than you make
If you spend more than you earn, the excess must come out of your wealth. There’s just no other way around it. So the first, easiest way to protect your wealth is to not overspend your income.
That’s easier to do when you’re employed, since you’re pulling down a regular income. If you’re retired and living primarily on a fixed income, it can be a greater challenge, however. In either case, you’ll want to carefully budget your income so that you’re not eating into your wealth.
2. Don’t forget inflation
Inflation is the silent killer, at least for wealth. Every year inflation chips away at your purchasing power, so if your portfolio is not matching the rate of inflation, at a minimum, then you’re losing buying power. It can be easy for new retirees to forget this fact when they make their first budget.
So you’ll need to budget in inflation on key expenses such as pharmaceuticals, health care and rent, if you’re a retiree. Those still in their earning years have the ability to receive raises to increase their purchasing power, but investing can also help anyone boost their spending power.
3. Ditch your bank account
Many money experts think virtually all of your money should be invested and that a bank account is only a transactional account for paying bills and holding an emergency fund with six months’ worth of expenses. In a bank account you won’t often be able to beat inflation. (See Point 2.)
That said, a high-yield online savings account is the best place for an emergency account. This account helps protect your wealth by ensuring that you needn’t tap your high-return investments in tough times. You hit up your emergency fund and give your investments time to recover.
4. Adjust your asset allocation and get diversified
Asset allocation is the process of dividing your investments into different buckets, depending on their potential return, their risk and your own financial situation. Good asset allocation is attuned to your financial goals and helps you grow your wealth, protect it or go somewhere in between.
For example, many financial advisors recommend that those nearing retirement should invest more in bonds. Bonds tend to be less volatile than stocks and deliver a steady, though lower, return over time. In contrast, those who need more growth should opt for stocks, which have a much higher potential return but offer a much bumpier ride along the way.
Investors looking for something in the middle can have some exposure to stocks and some to bonds, helping smooth the portfolio’s returns and while still enjoying some growth. It’s vital that your investments offer diversification, too — with a wide selection of stocks and bonds.
5. Speak with a financial advisor
A good financial advisor can add a ton of value to your life, helping you see opportunities that you weren’t aware of before and generally offering useful advice that maximizes your wealth. An advisor should have a good overview of the market and what opportunities are available to you.
A good financial advisor should listen to what your needs are and then can craft a financial plan that meets those needs. An advisor can also help you avoid becoming too conservative with your investments or too aggressive, meaning you can strike the balance that works for you.
Bankrate’s financial advisor matching tool can match you with advisors in minutes.
6. Get guaranteed income with an annuity
If you’re looking to protect your wealth, an annuity could help you. An annuity can provide fixed income over a long period of time, even for life, offering the certainty of a guaranteed income. Some annuities can even offer the potential for significant growth in wealth with protection.
Annuities can shift the risk of protecting your wealth onto the insurance company providing the annuity, but that can come at significant cost, too. In essence, you could be trading much greater wealth for the (perceived) safety of income offered by an annuity. But some annuities — such as fixed annuities — may not effectively protect you against inflation over time.
7. Play offense with stock funds
A strong offense is the best defense, as the saying goes. And so it is with investing, too. Investing in stocks with a long-term focus may well be the best way to protect your wealth.
By growing your portfolio to a large size, you’ll have enough even if the market does poorly for a while. And the best way to get there while minimizing risk is with an index fund based on the S&P 500, which contains the stocks of about 500 of America’s best companies. The index has returned about 10 percent on average over long periods. Start early, save a lot and let it compound with stock funds and then don’t sweat the market’s downturns.
Here are the best low-cost S&P 500 index funds and how to buy them.
8. Go with a Roth IRA
A Roth IRA is a great way to roll up a sizable retirement account. You’ll need to contribute with after-tax money, but then your money can grow tax-free and be withdrawn tax-free in retirement. You’ll also be able to purchase high-return investments such as S&P 500 index funds.
The Roth IRA offers another nice benefit if you’re looking to safeguard your wealth for the next generation. Unlike a traditional IRA, a Roth IRA does not have required minimum distributions, meaning that you can hold the account until you pass, compounding your money all the way along. Then you can pass it to your heirs tax-free — and keep the taxman out of your business.
9. Learn how personal finance works
The best strategy for protecting your wealth is knowing what you’re doing. Even if you work with a financial advisor, you need to understand why their recommended strategy makes sense for your financial situation and goals. So knowing how personal finance works protects your wealth.
Many advisors are tasked to be fiduciaries — that is, they’re supposed to operate in your best interest. When you have a better grasp on personal finance, you’ll be able to better judge how their recommendations match your needs — or don’t. Plus, you’ll be able to ask more informed questions and really take charge of your financial world, even if you get help for the tough stuff.
Bottom line
Protecting your wealth requires different strategies from those if you’re looking to grow your wealth, and you’ll want to tailor any strategies to your specific financial needs and situation. Working with a financial advisor or coach can help you find the strategies that work best for you.
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