An allocation plan for my retirement portfolio

I've been retired since 2009. My pension was inadequate and I needed dividend income from my investments to live. Sadly, I don't have enough invested, or so the bank tells me. I've got a problem and yet I've lived well for the past nine years. How? I've put my money to work in solid companies paying decent dividends.

A TD Waterhouse estimate of my dividend income for next 12 months. Click on image to enlarge.

It has been easy being an investor during the past nine years. The market has been very forgiving. According to one trusted source, the present party should continue until 2020. Then we may see a correction. That's a market drop of ten percent. If we see a bear market, that means a drop of twenty percent or more. And a bear is always a possibility.

So, I've decided to get my financial house in order, to batten down the financial hatches so to speak. I'm using the intervening months to assemble a solid portfolio of resilient companies plus some decent ETFs to take my wife and me through the coming downturn and there will be a downturn. There always is. On the bright side, they don't tend to last long. Eight months would be normal and two years would be an exceedingly long lasting bear market.

I thought of going the Couch Potato route but for a number of reasons I have decided to borrow some Couch Potato ideas but not anywhere near all. You might feel differently. I highly advise checking out the Couch Potato. You could do much worse.

In my next post, I will talk about one of the sectors I am putting front and centre in my retirement portfolio: Utilities.