Ask the Retirement Expert About Guardrails, Income Planning and Inflation: Jamie Hopkins

Retirees and their advisors face many complex issues today but also have new approaches and solutions at their fingertips, says Jamie Hopkins, senior vice president and director of Private Wealth Management at Bryn Mawr Trust.

In this sixth episode of Ask the Retirement Expert, ThinkAdvisor Editor-in-Chief Janet Levaux, speaks with Hopkins — who also is a finance professor of practice at Creighton University’s Heider College of Business and head of the FinServ Foundation — about the ins and outs of retirement planning today.

Helping clients in retirement, according to Hopkins, can now be viewed as “a change-management process.” This means advisors need to guide clients in acknowledging unknown situations and dynamics at this stage of their lives and work with them on plan adjustments over time, he says.

A related area concerns income planning. New research shows how financial planners can do a better job for their clients by helping them optimize and regularly update their spending plans, Hopkins explains. This involves the use of new metrics that can illustrate the “magnitude of failure” concept, which is often overlooked in traditional Monte Carlo simulations.

To give clients comfort in retirement, consider income-planning guardrails, too, he points out. These strategies, for instance, set predefined thresholds triggering an increase or decrease in retirement spending as needed.

Other topics discussed by Hopkins in the podcast include:

• Retirement-planning challenges like inflation and greater longevity;
• The evolving legislative and regulatory framework impacting retirement, along with estate, tax and related concerns;
• Steps advisors can take around annual income goals, written plans and other measures that help clients sleep at night; and
• The need to work with clients on long-term care costs.

To listen to the first episode in this series, click here.