The largest chunk by far of our investments have been in TRAIX/PRWCX for the past ~16-17 years, so the recent move to reduce some of those holdings was a bit difficult because of the emotional attachment as well as the FOMO on future equity gains. We are now roughly 50/50 equity/fixed income---still sufficient equity exposure for growth and nice dividend income from the MM/bond side. Our equity exposure had already been down the past 1 1/2 years as some money my wife inherited had been placed in fixed income rather than TRAIX/PRWCX.
Would be interested to know at what age many of you started reducing equity exposure as you neared retirement? I am 60 very soon.

Back in the 1970s, Arthur Okun, an economist who had been a policy adviser to Lyndon Johnson, suggested a quick-and-dirty way to assess the nation’s economic condition: the “misery index,” the sum of inflation and unemployment. It was and is a crude, easily criticized measure. The measurable economic harm from unemployment, for instance, is much higher than that from inflation. Yet the index has historically done a quite good job of predicting overall economic sentiment.
So it seems worth noting that the misery index — which soared along with inflation during 2021 and the first half of 2022 — has plunged over the past year. It is now all the way back to its level when President Biden took office.
This remarkable turnaround raises several questions. First, is it real? (Yes.) Second, will ordinary Americans notice? (They already have.) Third, will they give Biden credit? (That’s a lot less clear.)
The plunge in the misery index reflects both what didn’t happen and what did. What didn’t happen, despite a drumbeat of dire warnings in the news media, was a recession. The U.S. economy added four million jobs over the past year, and the unemployment rate has remained near a 50-year low.
What did happen was a rapid decline in inflation. But is this decline sustainable? You may have seen news reports pointing out that “core” inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, has been “sticky,” suggesting that improvement on the inflation front will be only a temporary phenomenon.
But just about every economist paying attention to the data knows that the traditional measure of core inflation has gone rotten, because it’s being driven largely by the delayed effects of a surge in rents that ended in mid-2022. This surge, by the way, was probably caused by the rise in remote work triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic rather than by any Biden administration policy.
Alternative measures of core inflation that exclude shelter by and large show a clear pattern of disinflation; inflation is still running higher than it was before the pandemic, but it has come down a lot. If you really work at it, it’s still possible to be pessimistic about the inflation outlook, but it’s getting harder and harder. The good news about inflation, and about the economy as a whole, does look real.
But are people noticing this improvement? Traditional measures of economic sentiment have become problematic in recent years: Ask people how the economy is doing, and their response is strongly affected both by partisanship and, I believe, by the narratives conveyed by the news media. That is, what people say about the economy is, all too often, what they think they’re supposed to say.
But if you ask Americans more specific questions, such as whether now is a good time to find a quality job, they typically say yes. At the same time, their expectations about future inflation have declined substantially.

@Roy, think you are doing the right thing by reduce equity risk as you approach retirement. Five years out is not far away. Shifting more to balanced/allocation funds is another way to increase bond allocation. My high yield and bank loan funds have done well this year; YTD is about 5%. Likely these funds will have a solid year by year end. The rest of short term high quality bond funds are moving along well yielding 5%.
Watching if the market will broaden out more to smaller caps and cyclicals. If the recession strikes this year, bonds will serve as a ballast when stocks will fall.

It’s not just “stuff” that has risen in price. Services also. Car towing to the repair shop was more than double what I paid 3-4 years ago, to say nothing of the big check I just wrote to the septic tank pumper, 40-50% higher than five years ago. I am, however, grateful to have someone to haul my s#&t away!