How to Maximize Your Assets before Retirement with Tactical Investing

Risk tolerance, time horizon, and asset allocation - you've dealt with these factors for a good part of your life, but now, in the face of retirement, they take on a more urgent and significant role. These factors - particularly tactical asset allocation - are vital to maximizing your assets before your retire in a few years' time.

A Different Take on Risk Tolerance and Time Horizon

As your time horizon shrinks rapidly while you progress towards your retirement, your risk tolerance lowers accordingly. These two factors dictate not only your plans for each asset you own, but also your portfolio in general. Use risk tolerance and time horizon as principal factors to readdress your portfolio because it's time to tip the balance.

Leverage Tactical Asset Allocation

It's time to ramp up percentages of income-generating assets and minimize the number of growth-inducing ones.

Let's say you have five years to retirement; income assets can be maximized during this time horizon by assessing short term investment opportunities and tactically investing heavily in assets that are sure to be influenced by macro- and microeconomic factors during your time horizon.

Now is also the time to reassess which of your growth assets you should retain beyond retirement. Retirement will ideally afford you more time to enjoy life's pleasures, like playing golf and traveling, so you'll want to make sure you're setup to actually afford them. Probably want to be a lot less busy in your retirement than you were when you actively worked. Choosing only a couple of your best growth investments allows you to do just that. This move also frees more space for more income investments and more tactical asset allocation to maximize the time horizon you have remaining.

Going from strategic to tactical is a shift of long term planning to short term thinking - what economic or financial factors during your time horizon would affect which assets? Invest more heavily in them while you still have time. Free up more long term assets to focus on the short term time horizon and rebalance your portfolio after retirement. If the generated return of each tactical allocation increase by a few double digit percentages, you'll have a more prosperous retirement to look forward to.

Gearing Up for the Tactical Shift

Tactical asset allocation requires a semi-active approach - especially when your time horizon starts to dwindle. A passive style of strategic portfolio management protects itself from excited market shifts by gaining justifiable long-term returns instead of tolerating more risk, which might result in more loss a decade or two down the line.
When shifting to an active style of portfolio management during the short time horizon you may have closer towards retirement, changing your passive, strategic mind set may prove more taxing than you imagined.

Even for successful professionals, the notion of finality that retirement brings can be daunting. You wind up second guessing if you have enough in your portfolio, if you've done enough in your investment strategy, and if you need to do more. Tactical asset allocation is a savvy move if you want to maximize your assets just before retirement, and best of all, it requires only a change of mind set and investing patterns that doesn't change your personal overarching style - it merely speeds it up to counteract the shortened time horizon.