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Volatility is an inevitable part of investing, and financial advisors say most people shouldn’t make any major changes to their portfolio solely because President Donald Trump’s military campaign in Iran is rattling markets. However, it may be a different story for those hoping to retire in the near future.
“The conventional wisdom is, ‘Everybody freeze, no one do anything,'” said Christine Benz, director of personal finance and retirement planning at Morningstar and the author of “How to Retire.”
“But the cohort of people who are quite close to retirement may actually need to take action,” Benz said.
The S&P 500 has see-sawed in recent days as the war expanded in the Middle East and investors feared a spike in oil prices and inflation. Stocks appeared to stabilize on Wednesday, before dropping again in early trading on Thursday.
Volatility could continue as investors continue to digest news from the front lines. Market jumpiness can serve as a good moment for those nearing the end of their career to make sure their nest egg is prepared for a downturn, Benz said.
Evaluate your risk
One way to protect your retirement savings, especially if you’ll need to live on that money soon, is to maintain a healthy exposure to safer assets, like cash and bonds, Benz said. But many older investors likely haven’t recently evaluated their allocation to see whether they need to rebalance, she added.
The S&P 500 has averaged an annual return of 11.64% since 1950, according to Morningstar Direct. If an investor allocated 50% of their portfolio into the S&P 500 and the other 50% into the Bloomberg U.S. Aggregate Bond Index in 2020, without rebalancing, that allocation would now be more than 68% in stocks and around 31% in bonds.
“The easy path has been to just let stocks take up a bigger and bigger share of your portfolio,” Benz said.
“If you’re on the precipice of retirement, it is smart to take a look at that portfolio and think about taking some risk out of it,” Benz said.
Many older workers have also been holding on to their company’s stock for a long time, and “there may be significant concentration risks to address,” said certified financial planner K.C. Smith, managing associate at Henssler Financial in Kennesaw, Georgia. The firm ranked No. 46 on CNBC’s Financial Advisor 100 list for 2025.
“Oftentimes those positions are the last ones investors want to touch, either because of taxes on gains or emotional attachment,” Smith said.
Have enough safe assets to ride out a downturn
To be sure, most older investors still need a part of their portfolio in the market, said John Mullen, president and CEO at Parsons Capital Management in Providence, Rhode Island.
“People approaching retirement could still have decades of living ahead of them,” said Mullen, whose firm ranked No. 1 on CNBC’s Financial Advisor 100 list for 2025. He’s a member of CNBC’s Financial Advisor Council.
“Being overly cautious of market volatility could leave investors with a portfolio unable to grow enough to meet their spending needs through retirement,” he added.
The goal for investors nearing the end of their careers is to ensure they have enough in safe assets to get through a downturn without needing to sell their stocks at a discount.
To do so, Benz recommends having at least five years’ worth of portfolio spending in cash or short-term bonds.
If that goal feels daunting, Mullen said, building up even a two-year liquidity cushion can also avoid a forced sell-off.
Indeed, a “garden variety” bear market — one in which stocks drop between 20% and 40% from recent highs — tends to fully recover within 13 months, on average, said Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at investment research firm CFRA.
Get a grasp on annual spending needs
To make sure you have that cash cushion — be it for two years or five — you’ll need to sit down and figure out what your annual expenses will be in retirement, Benz said.
Your annual expenses may not be the same as what you’ll need to pull from your nest egg, she pointed out. Try to get a sense of what you’ll need to draw down from your portfolio each year by subtracting other possible sources of income, like a part-time job or Social Security, she said. This will also require estimating health care costs, travel expenses, family assistance and more.
As you can see your retirement on the horizon, taking these steps now will allow you to tune out the market noise later, Smith said.
“If you’ve done your planning and covered your liquidity, the short-term volatility doesn’t affect your ability to live the lifestyle you planned for,” he said.