Forest Hill's Jeff Judge in Yahoo Finance: Why your target-date fund doesn't know your full financial picture

By Jeff Judge, CFP®, AEP®, ChFC®, CLU®, Managing Partner, Chesapeake Financial Planners, Forest Hill, MD.

Target-date funds now hold $4.8 trillion, and most 401(k) plans put new savers into one automatically. That is a real upgrade for anyone who never touches their allocation. But it is not the whole story for people getting close to retirement.

When Yahoo Finance asked me about this, my point was that a target-date fund only knows your target year. It does not know if you have a pension, if your house is paid off, or what else is sitting in a taxable account. Two people retiring the same year can need very different amounts of risk, and the fund treats them identically.

That mismatch shows up here in Bel Air and across Harford County as much as anywhere. Retirees in Cockeysville with a paid-off home and a pension often get de-risked at the same pace as someone in Towson with nothing else to fall back on. A saver who goes heavily conservative at 65 may be locking in lower returns for a retirement that is nowhere near over.

The takeaway is not to abandon target-date funds. It is to check whether the glide path actually fits your situation once you are five to seven years out, not just your target year.

This piece builds on "Target-date funds are booming. But are they still right for your retirement?" in Yahoo Finance (August 2026).

Jeff Judge, CFP®, AEP®, ChFC®, CLU®, is Managing Partner at Chesapeake Financial Planners in Forest Hill, MD. Book an intro call.