What Is Asset/Liability Matching? (2024)

As your net worth begins to blossom and you start to accumulate wealth, you may encounter a concept known as asset/liability matching in the context of managing your portfolio.

Asset/liability matching can be a powerful tool for investors. They use this strategy to convert the capital they've amassed into lump sums of cash or passive income from sources like dividends, interest, and rent to meet expected needs.

Definition and Examples of Asset/Liability Matching

Asset/liability matching is taking assets you may have and turning them into more liquid investments when you have a liability coming due. The simplest example of asset/liability matching is selling an automobile to pay a bill. Appropriately planned, you attempt to project the specific timing of cash needs, particularly outflows, by an investor.

The investor allocates capital (moves funds from one type of investment to another) so that the portfolio's assets can be sold or liquidated in the future, producing cash when needed. An investor may also allocate portions of their portfolio to income-producing assets like real estate.

Alternate names: Surplus optimization, liability-driven investing

How Asset/Liability Matching Works

The key to matching assets and liabilities is to rearrange your portfolio so that you're able to convert assets to cash when you need them. You could decide to take some of your stocks and place them into cash equivalent investments, like a short-term government bond or zero-coupon bond that mature around the dates you'll need the money.

When you convert your assets, you may be subject to capital gains tax or other fees applicable to the investment types you've chosen. Be sure to understand how much you'll be hit with before you convert any assets so that you can anticipate how much total capital you'll need to end up with the amount you want.

As an example, imagine you're a successful entrepreneur. You have a 5-year-old son and a 2-year-old daughter. You want to set aside a portion of your profits to pay for your children's college educations. What you need is a series of lump-sum cash amounts available at specific dates, and at specific times, in the future.

For your son, you need a lump sum available in 14 years to cover his freshman year of college, a lump sum in 15 years to cover his sophom*ore year of college, and so on. In year 17, you also need the first lump sum for your daughter to cover her freshman year of college. In year 18, your son should have graduated.

He may no longer be as reliant on you for financial support, so the only expected outflow should be your daughter's sophom*ore year of college (although you may want to set aside some funds for your son to be on the safe side). In years 19 and 20, you'll primarily fund your daughter's college education.

An asset/liability matching program would build a portfolio that could handle this liquidity timing. For example, a fair analysis of historical stock market behavior tells you that any individual stock, or group of stocks, can quickly decline in market value over a very short time even if the underlying business is thriving.

The Benefits of Asset/Liability Matching

The most significant advantage of using an asset/liability matching approach in portfolio management is that it allows you to significantly reduce many of the risks you might face as an investor if the program is designed and implemented wisely.

Reinvestment risk refers to the risk that you won't be able to reinvest the cash flow from an investment at the same or higher rate of return as the initial investment, resulting in a lower overall compounding rate than you projected. With an asset/liability matching approach, you might choose something like a zero-coupon bond rather than a traditional bond.

By introducing a hard deadline on when funds must be available, an asset/liability matching strategy tends to emphasize the safety of principal (sometimes called capital preservation) more than an open-ended investment mandate might. This can help the investor or portfolio manager better determine which types of securities, maturities, and other features of a given security or asset class are most appropriate.

Liability-driven investing isn't always foolproof. For example, many investors found themselves holding auction-rate securities during the Great Recession collapse of 2007-2009. Some lost millions of dollars in what they erroneously believed to be a highly liquid cash equivalent.

Once you have developed and implemented a plan that involves asset/liability matching, it's easier to emotionally handle market volatility because your eyes are fixed on the end date. You avoid mistakes using this method when the economic storm clouds gather, which is a critical factor that many investors discount.

When to Use Asset/Liability Matching

Here are a few situations where you might consider developing and implementing an asset/liability matching strategy.

• Planning for retirement.
• Funding a college education for your children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, or other heirs or beneficiaries.
• Planning for the purchase of a home, second home, or investment property.
• Planning for the maturity of a mortgage or other debt with a balloon payment component in the promissory note.
• Making regular tax-free gifts up to the gift tax limits as part of a multi-year or multi-decade estate tax mitigation strategy intended to lower the value of your estate.
• Funding potential payouts for lawsuits or other liability exposures that might take years to resolve.
• Setting aside funds to pay for a child's wedding.
• Creating a pool of capital that will eventually fund the start-up of a business or an expected investment.
• Setting up a reserve of capital to cash out a partner in a limited partnership, a member in a limited liability company or a stockholder in a corporation.
• Setting aside money to be used to pay an expected tax bill.