If financial advisors have ever needed evidence of their worth to clients, this exchange between two readers of a MarketWatch article on how retirees can weather the current market volatility should be it.

READER A: I used to balk at my FA for holding so much cash in my portfolio. I thought it was better used to buy more stock. A good FA is invaluable! I can now ride out this time until it hopefully gets better in a while. What a time I picked to retire—10/21!

READER B: Ride it out... Yeah, right. All the way to the poor house.

Reader A seems to be like a lot of financial planners’ clients, where that swath of cash sitting on the sidelines as he reached retirement last year might represent two to three years of expenses. That’s exactly the kind of planning that would allow his other, invested assets time to rebound from the various market lows recently seen, advisors said.

And if Reader B doesn’t have that cushion, his or her pessimism is understandable.

“If they don’t have the solid plan that takes everything into account, they’re a lot more fearful than they need to be. Inflation, war, market corrections—that’s all very normal. At all client levels you have to have a plan that assumes all these things,” said Jim Pratt-Heaney, a founding partner of Coastal Bridge Advisors in Westport, Conn. “If your clients are freaking out, then whatever plan you have is not a good one, because the sleep-at-night factor should be a part of that plan.”

Christopher Conigliaro, a CFP and president of Seasons of Advice Wealth Management, New York, agreed. “The ones that have recently retired have been our clients for 15 or 20 years,” he said. “We’ve gone through this before and things have steadied, reversed themselves and gone back up. So they’re conditioned to it.”

It’s for these reasons, some advisors report, that they haven’t been receiving any calls from clients second-guessing their retirement plans, even if concerns over not having enough in retirement—or of starting out well but then simply outliving one’s assets—are a common refrain in retirement planning in general.

“I’m calling them to check in, and everyone is grateful for that,” said Heidi Huiskamp-Collins, founder of Huiskamp Collins Investments in Bettendorf, Iowa. She said she does a lot of financial education during her onboarding process so that her clients know how markets work. “But they’re not panicking. If anything, they’re asking me what we should be buying. And that feels really good. It means they heard me. They were listening,” she said.

Holistic financial planners said they are receiving calls, however, from people who are not their clients and who are, in fact, panicking.

“They’ve been to someone who’s maybe managing money but not managing wealth,” Pratt-Heaney differentiated. “That advisor was saying, ‘We like tech, we don’t like international, bonds stink,’ and the like. They were spending all of their time on the investment side, and that’s actually the last thing we look at.”

And then there are the new clients who have never used an advisor before and perhaps misinterpreted the gains of the last decade as skill.

“We’ve been in la-la land for a while, so the only thing they know is they spend money on the market and it comes back,” he continued. “Some of them have never rebalanced, so if they’ve had tech stocks and let them turn, where they should have been at 20% growth, they’re at 40%.”

Most of the time these clients are okay financially, he said. They’re just fearful and that fear comes from not understanding what they’re doing. With these new clients, it’s back to basics.

“Every client’s situation is different. So it’s not the same situation, but it is the same solution,” Pratt-Heaney said. “It always starts with the budget and a spreadsheet with assets.”

Conigliaro said he’s also seen a substantial uptick in new clients calling for help, and he sets up those clients the same way he does his other retirees, with a two- to three-year cushion or surplus to allow for market moves without tapping assets that are priced low, and then two other buckets for years four to seven and then seven and beyond.

“Especially for retirees, we have money in a short-term duration that’s not affected by the market,” he said. “They know the money is there so there’s a place where we can access funds to finance retirement while we wait for more volatile assets to come back. Retirement isn’t five years, it’s 20, 30, 30-plus, so you still need growth instruments, and we’re not selling things that are going down to finance retirement.”

Those short-term vehicles are cash, money market funds, or ultra-short or short-term bond funds, he said. “Since interest rates have been so low, it’s been hard to use CDs,” he said. “But moving forward we would build laddered CDs for a secure cash flow of one to three years.”

And of course part of planning with a new client close to retirement would include determining the most advantageous time to take social security. “If we’re deferring it out, we’ll construct the portfolio to make up the difference between retirement and receiving Social Security,” Conigliaro said. “As a fall back, if we did run into a bigger cash flow crunch and the investment portfolio was really falling short, we’d have the conversation about taking social security earlier.”

Beyond the short term, the bucket for years four to seven includes fixed income, REITs, and some short-term bonds and cash equivalents, while the bucket for years seven-plus remains invested in growth, he said.

Huiskamp-Collins said she has to remain pretty aggressive with her clients’ assets when they first enter retirement, at least for a while, as she plans for life expectancies of 95. Her portfolios for new retirees in their 60s are commonly 60% to 70% stocks, she said.

“Stocks are still the best game in town to fight inflation,” she said. After that, there’s some cash, maybe a fixed annuity, depending on the client. “Some people push back on that 95 saying they won’t live that long, or they don’t want to live that long, but you still have to plan for it.”

Huiskamp-Collins said the closest she’s gotten to having to rethink retirement with a client was one whose assets were in a 401(k), where they had picked positions from what choice they had but the returns were not as stable as Huiskamp-Collins would have liked them to be.

“This person’s 401(k) was down, they were about to retire, and they were nervous. They said ‘How about 100% bonds?’ and I had to remind them of our conversation about when interest rates rise, the price of bonds falls,” she said. “Our talk about investing evolved into a lifestyle conversation. This isn’t someone who can look at four walls all day, so they had plans to do a lot of volunteering, which they were excited about. In the end, they were feeling good about retirement again, so they went ahead with it.”

In a final comment, Pratt-Heaney said he wanted to remind other advisors that there’s a reason conventional wisdom says when the markets are full of bad news, advisors have to touch base with their clients more often.

“It’s all true. Because if your clients are worried and you don’t call them, you’re going to make it worse,” he said. “Your call when you ask them, ‘Are you comfortable?’ is really you asking, ‘Am I doing a good job?’ And that’s an important inflection for the advisor.”