This (OK, Retirees, What’s Your Plan for Dealing with the Upcoming Bear Stock Market? Ken Steiner) is an incredibly useful point of view. I had a post on something like this in the past once. Most financial planning at the retail level has lots of charts and numbers and discussion of asset allocations and fund choices but it, the planning exercise, also (not always, there are good planners out there) sometimes fundamentally violates some of the core principles of basic strategic planning. If the future is envisioned as a portfolio of some set of possible future scenarios, and then if scenario A or B or C or D... unfolds, then specifically, what are you going to do?* What signal triggers an action, what have you pre-identified on the income statement or balance sheet for cuts and change, how fast and when, what is the material impact, etc etc. I have a developing idea about some post that could make the case that the batrillion dollar financial services industry sometimes misses the boat on almost everything when it comes to retirement. We perseverate so much on asset allocation and the subtleties of esoteric strategies and products but we ignore the big things that will dwarf all that in the impact on real lives: real strategic planning, spending in all its complex random chaotic glory, longevity risk in its real form, the lifetime utility value of risk shifting via insured solutions...
* I do this at least twice a year. I stress test to see how bad it can get and then look closely at what, precisely, I would do where the precise to-do might actually be to ignore it all and do nothing.
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