September 14, 2021 – Welcome to a new installment of the Safe Withdrawal Rate Series, dealing with Bucket Strategies. This is one approach that’s often considered a viable solution to the dreaded Sequence Risk Problem. Simply keep buckets of assets with different risk characteristics designated to cover expenses during different time windows of your retirement. Specifically, keep one or more buckets with low-risk assets to hedge the first few years of retirement. And – poof – Sequence Risk evaporates, just like that! Sounds too good to be true, right? And it likely is. Long story short, while there are certain parts of the bucket strategy that can indeed partially alleviate the risk of retirement bust, bucket strategies are by no means a solution to Sequence Risk. Let’s take a look at the details…
A favor to ask
Before I get started today, I wanted to direct you to my buddy Victor Vulpescu’s podcast. He interviewed me recently on safe withdrawal strategies, sequence risk, glidepaths in retirement, and much more. I was really impressed with the preparation he put into his Q&A session with me. Very thoughtful and challenging questions – one of the most finance-savvy podcasters I have ever encountered. I would really like to drive some traffic to his content because it’s a true undiscovered gem:
- Podcast: https://victorvulpescu.ro/podcast/
- My episodes directly on Youtube, chopped into 3 parts because we chatted for much longer than planned!
His podcast is obviously a smaller, less-known one, but he has been able to land a lot of heavy-hitters and some of my favorite speakers in the industry:
- Rick Ferri
- Paul Merriman
- Meb Faber
- Larry Swedroe
- Lars Kroijer, and more
Enjoy!
Now, back to today’s topic. Let me start by looking at one form of the bucket strategy that will certainly eliminate Sequence Risk. Though, it comes at a cost…
LDI: The Ultimate Bucket Strategy! And why it’s likely not suitable for today’s early retirees
If you wanted to take the bucket strategy to its extreme, you could certainly just build a CD or bond or TIPS ladder and thus keep one bucket for each retirement year (or quarter or month) to target a mostly risk-free payout on that specific date. Well, it depends on what you call risk-free. If the ladder is implemented with CDs or nominal bonds then you guarantee nominal payouts only but leave yourself exposed to inflation shocks. If you like to hedge inflation risk as well, you would be better served with TIPS.
This matching of assets to specific future expected liabilities at specific times is also appropriately called Liabilities-Driven Investing, or LDI. That’s what some pension funds are doing. You allocate your assets so as to exactly offset your future liabilities, year-by-year; sometimes by investing in bonds that mature at the time you need to service your future liabilities. Sometimes it’s sufficient to simply calculate the average duration of your liabilities and target that same duration in your bond portfolio.
One major headache with this approach right now: To guarantee stable and predictable payouts immune from any Sequence Risk we might have to reduce our retirement budget quite substantially because yields on safe, inflation-adjusted bonds are so low right now! Pushing -2% for shorter-term TIPS, around -1% for 10-year TIPS, and still negative at -0.36% for the 30-year TIPS bonds as of 9/9/2021, see the screenshot from the Federal Reserve below.
Does that mean we have a negative safe withdrawal rate? Not really. We can translate real interest rates into Safe Withdrawal Rates using the Excel PMT function. For example, over a 30-year retirement horizon, with a real rate of -0.5%, and the final value target of 25% of the initial, we compute our safe withdrawal rate as:
=PMT(-0.005 , 30 , -1 , 0.25 , 1)The inputs in the Excel PMT function are:
- -0.005 for a -0.5% real rate per annum
- 30 for the horizon (years)
- -1 for the inital portfolio value (modeled here as a -1 cash flow to indicate we pay $1 into the portfolio today)
- 0.25 for the final value target (what we take out of the portfolio)
- 1 to indicate that we withdraw at the beginning of the year, as is usual in the safe withdrawal context (Trinity Study, my own simulations, etc.)
Since bond rates are so low we get some spectacularly low withdrawal rates. Only 2.2% in the numerical example above! That’s substantially lower than all of the historical retirement cohorts, even those that retired right before the worst Sequence Risk episodes, e.g., the Great Depression or the 1970s. Protection from Sequence Risk comes at a steep price!
How about other assumptions? In the chart below I plot the (real) withdrawal rates (assuming CPI-adjustments in withdrawals) as a function of the Real Rate (x-axis) and for different retirement horizons and final portfolio targets. For the current range in real rates, somewhere in the -1% to +/-0% region, we get Safe Withdrawal Rates of around 3% for a 30-year horizon when completely exhausting the portfolio, 2-2.5% when planning to leave a 25% bequest, around 1.5% for a 60-year horizon when depleting the money and well below 1% to slightly above 1% when planning a 60-year retirement and a 25% bequest target. Ouch, that’s getting close to the 0.5% number that Financial Sumotroll, or whatever his name was, “calculated”. I’d rather just try my luck with a Stock/Bond portfolio and a 3.25-3.50% safe withdrawal rate that would hedge even against a repeat of the Great Depression!
But don’t get me wrong! If we ever move back to an environment like the late 1990s when real bond rates were well above 3%, we could easily push the 30-year withdrawal rates to 5% or even above! Not sure we will ever reach that point again during my lifetime, but I wouldn’t discard the idea completely.
Some further related reading: check out a post I wrote in 2019 on some of the other challenges of translating pension fund mechanics to personal retirement: Part 32: You are a Pension Fund of One (or Two). In a lot of ways, personal retirement is often more complicated than running a pension fund for thousands of beneficiaries.
OK, of course, this is not the Bucket Strategy that most people in the retirement community have in mind. This brings me to the next idea…
Using a bucket approach to design a strategic asset allocation in retirement
Unless you are a successful internet entrepreneur and/or retirement blogger who can afford to keep 100% of his/her/their portfolio in stocks, most retirees will need to design a less adventurous retirement portfolio with some diversifying assets. And then find a way to stick with that allocation. How do you design the portfolio weights then? Well, a bucket approach isn’t a bad idea to start. Maybe keep 3-4 years in cash (money market accounts, short-term CDs, etc.), another 6-7 years in intermediate bonds (10-year maturity), and the rest in stocks. Nice! That gets you an allocation of around 60% stocks, 25% bonds, and 15% cash.
Imagine now that you start with a $1,000,000 portfolio, $40,000 annual withdrawals, and a 60%/25%/15% Stocks/Bonds/Cash allocation. You take out $40k from the cash bucket at the beginning of year 1. You get income/returns of $300, $4,000, and $36,000 in the three respective buckets, which means that at the beginning of Year 2, your portfolio is completely out of whack compared to the 60/25/15 target asset allocation. If we rebalance, we’d need to take roughly 36k and 4k out of the stock and bond bucket, respectively, and transfer that into the cash bucket to bring the portfolio back to the 60/25/15 target.
In the second year, if you now take out $40k from the cash bucket again you may think that it came out of the cash bucket, but effectively the money came out of your stock and bond bucket! Money is fungible! Just like in the bucket strategies diagram below, you may think that you took money out of the cash bucket, but of course, the bond bucket continuously spills into the cash bucket and the equity bucket continuously spills into the bond bucket. So, in this sense, the bucket strategy is largely window dressing if you rebalance regularly. The rebalancing will continuously take money out of the Sequence-Risk-sensitive buckets, invalidating the alleged benefits of the bucket strategy! Sorry to pop your bucket, uhm, bubble!
Just to be sure, what I still like about the bucket strategy is the fact that it might give retirees more confidence. Personally, I’d prefer to build up my confidence with my own approach: Play with different asset allocations and see how they would have performed in historical simulations. At least I can study and quantify the pros and cons of different asset allocations and see what performs best during past Sequence Risk events. But, whatever floats your boat; if a bucket strategy makes you sleep better at night, go ahead!
But the bucket approach doesn’t really give you much guidance in how to design your exact bucket sizes. Should your cash bucket be 1 year or 5 years’ worth of living expenses? Should the bond allocation be 5 years or 10 years or 20 years? The bucket approach looks more like a cheap sales gimmick from the Financial Planner industry and/or a “sexy” topic to write about for retirement bloggers. A financial beauty contest, really. But I can’t learn much from looks. Show me the numbers! Show me the simulations!
So, if regular rebalancing just amounts to a fixed asset allocation and the buckets do not really protect you from Sequence Risk at all, should we then just deplete the buckets? This brings me to the next section…
Buckets without rebalancing
What would happen if we exhausted the short-term buckets without rebalancing? Now we can indeed claim that the bucket strategy will leave the high-risk/long-term bucket shielded from withdrawals and thus Sequence Risk. This however brings up one additional headache. If we start with the bucket strategy like the one introduced above and we subsequently exhaust the $150,000 in the cash bucket after about 3.75 years and then the $250,000 in the bond bucket after another roughly 6.25 years, will the average retiree be comfortable with a 100% stock portfolio after 10 years? Your average CFP financial planner would get a heart attack when they hear that. Traditionally, financial planners tend to shift the equity portion down not up during retirement. The same is true for all target-date fund families I am aware of, including Fidelity and Vanguard.
But then again, research has shown that glidepaths in retirement that shift up the equity portion over time can alleviate Sequence Risk. Not eliminate, just alleviate! Michael Kitces wrote about it. Part 19 and Part 20 in my SWR Series deal with this issue. So, I like to present some additional simulations to study the efficacy of a strategy involving a bucket of safe assets, which brings me to the next section…
Bucket Strategy Simulations: ERN-style
To be sure, I looked at the topic briefly in Part 25, and I showed some simulation results. But I never published any dedicated post about this important topic. Which is one of the purposes of today’s post. Let’s assume we use the following baseline model assumptions:
- A retiree with a 30-year horizon.
- A 25% bequest target. As mentioned earlier, I like this parameterization because it applies both to a traditional retiree with a modest bequest target, but also an early retiree who wants to bridge the first 30 years of retirement until other cash flows kick in, e.g., Social Security, Pensions, inheritance, etc.
- A 75% Stock, 25% Bond portfolio
- No other supplemental cash flows along the way
- The exact Dollar amount in the portfolio doesn’t really matter because we can scale this up/down to any initial value. But to make this more relatable, I assume that the initial portfolio is $2,000,000.
- No cash bucket in this baseline scenario!
This parameterization is pretty straightforward to implement in the Safe Withdrawal Rate Google Sheet (see Part 28 for details). Add the asset allocation in the main parameter sheet, set all the supplemental cash flows to zero, and check the results.
Inputs:
The main results are the failsafe withdrawal rates and $ amounts (scaled to a $2,000,000 initial portfolio). I like to distinguish those failsafe numbers by decade as well, to get an understanding of when those historical worst-case cohorts faced an ugly Sequence Risk problem. Quite intriguingly, the 1920s, including September 1929 was not the worst-case scenario. The failsafe rate was even lower in the 1960s due to the protracted bad performance during the 60s, 70s, and early 80s in both stocks and bonds. This was a worse episode than the Great Depression, from a Sequence Risk perspective because a) it took longer to recover and b) bonds were not very good in diversifying the equity bear market, due to the inflation shock and extreme interest rate hikes under Fed Chairman Volcker.
Next, let’s implement the safe cash bucket. I assume that our retiree sets aside a lump sum of money to guarantee a $5k/month or $60k a year, inflation-adjusted cash flow. I was debating whether I should set that cash flow to $6k, just above the $71,683 annual failsafe, but I decided to round that number down to $5k/month. So, we cover almost the entire worst-case monthly retirement budget for a number of years. This lump-sum amount of money we have to set aside is a function of the monthly cash flow ($5k), the length of time we want to cover with the cash bucket, and the prevailing real interest rate (using the PV function in Excel!). I use cash buckets worth 1 through 25 years in 1-year steps and real interest rates of -1%, 0%, and +1%.
Let’s look at how the failsafe withdrawal amount would have changed if you had deployed this cash bucket approach right before the Great Depression. That failsafe cohort was pretty much consistently the September 1929 retirement date. I plot the results in the chart below. Specifically, the safe withdrawal amounts as a function of the number of years worth of expenses in the cash bucket (x-axis), normalized to 0% at the baseline, i.e., without the cash bucket. And each line corresponds to a different real interest rate.
Even with a -1% real rate for the safe, inflation-adjusted cash bucket, we would have significantly benefited from the bucket strategy. You could have increased the withdrawal amounts by about 10%. Say, from 3.6% ($72,000 p.a.) to almost 4.0% ($80,000 p.a. in a $2m portfolio). Pretty impressive! The peak performance was at 6 years’ worth of expenses. But even larger cash buckets, even all the way to 18 years you’d still benefit from the cash bucket (i.e., the blue line is above 0%). Astonishing, because that would involve setting aside almost $1.2m or almost 60% of the portfolio! If we find ourselves with higher real rates than today, 0% or 1%, cash bucket allocations become even more attractive.
One word of caution about these simulations: We are indeed doing a little bit of financial simulation “sausage-making”: I model the cash bucket using today’s real interest rates, while the stock and bond returns are the historical numbers from the 1920s and 1930s. Could I have used the interest rates prevailing in 1929? Sure, but keep in mind that back then we didn’t even have TIPS. I could have used the 1929 interest landscape (both short-term and long-term rates far above today’s). Using the higher past short-term interest rates to study the efficacy of the cash bucket seems inappropriate when you get essentially 0% in a money market account today – before inflation! I found my approach the more intuitive way of implementing the cash bucket: use past real stock and bond returns but factor in the cash bucket through a preset real interest rate. But just to be sure, later I also include some simulations using the actual historical short-term interest rates.
On to the next Sequence Risk cohorts. The 1960s had an even slightly lower safe withdrawal rate in the baseline. The bad news is that with a real interest rate too low (-1%), the cash bucket is useless. Even for higher real rates, the bucket would have been ineffective unless you pile at least 10, or better 15 to 20 years’ worth of expenses into your cash bucket. The reason is that the bad sequence risk cohorts during the mid-1960s didn’t see any noticeable bear market until 8-17 years into their retirement (1973, 1980, 1982). To cover the entire bad market event you’d need enough cash to cover your expenses until at least the mid-1980s when the market had swiftly recovered from its 1982 bear market bottom. But that big chunk of the portfolio sitting around and earning negative interest rates drags the blue line below zero. Even for the 0% or +1% real rate, who would have planned for a cash bucket that large in the 1960s? Who would do this today?
Next, let’s take a look at the 1970s, which also had some gnarly bad retirement cohorts right before the 1973-75 recession and bear market. See the chart below. Here we find a positive impact from all three interest rate assumptions and the maximum boost in the failsafe between 11 and 13 years, depending on the real interest rate. The 1973 cohort, right before that bear market had a slightly easier job than the mid-1960s retirees because the overall length of the sequence risk event was shorter. Also, the bear market was bad enough and swift enough, that even with a -1% real yield, you would have greatly benefitted from the cash bucket.
To summarize so far: the cash bucket certainly works both in a deflationary recession (Great Depression) and an inflationary recession (the 1970s) if you keep around 6 to maybe 10+ years worth of safe assets even with a negative real yield. The cash bucket poses more of a challenge when the stock market moves sideways for a number of years and then crashes 10+ years into retirement. If real rates are too low, as they are today, there will be no amount of money in the cash bucket that can ever significantly shield you from Sequence Risk.
Modeling the Bucket Strategy through a Glidepath
The idea of phasing out a component of the portfolio over a certain timeframe should sound familiar. It’s a glidepath! Well, it’s not exactly identical to the glidepath because with a strict bucket strategy there would be no rebalancing between the cash/bond buckets and the equity bucket(s) along the way. On the other hand, the glidepath would stoically rebalance to the (changing) weights along the path every month. Depending on the relative bucket returns this will almost certainly create flows across buckets. Specifically, if the equity market drop is swift and deep enough, you will likely shift funds from the cash/bond allocation into stocks throughout the Bear Market. This form of Dollar-Cost Averaging is in contrast to the strict bucket approach where you withdraw from the short-term bucket and leave the long-term buckets untouched.
Unfortunately, the Google Sheet is not yet set up for studying this glidepath approach over the entire long list of possible retirement cohorts (1,700+ cohorts!). Rather, the current version only allows me to study glidepaths as part of the “Case Study” for one specific retirement cohort at a time. It’s OK for our purposes because I really need to look at the three different cases in the 1920s, 1960s, and 1970s that generated their respective failsafe withdrawal rates: September 1929, November 1965, and January 1973. In each case, I study three different glidepath assumptions:
- Move 30% into cash/MM, and keep the remaining 70% in a 75/25 portfolio. Transition this 52.5/17.5/30.0 portfolio back to a 75/25/0 portfolio over 10 years. And again, the 30% shift into cash correscponds to $60k p.a. times 10 years.
- Same as above, but don’t bother about cash or money market. Simply start with a 52.5% stock and 47.5% bond portfolio and shift that back to a 75/25 portfolio again over 10 years.
- In line with the simulations from Parts 19 and 20 of the series, start with 60/40 and shift that into a 100/0 portfolio over 10 years.
- For comparison, I also include the results for the 10-year cash bucket, $5,000/month, 0% real rate cash bucket.
In the table below are the final portfolio values, adjusted for CPI, after 30 years of withdrawals. Notice that in the 1929 and 1965 case study I use the 3.60% withdrawal rate, i.e., $72k p.a. out of a $2m portfolio. In 1973 I raise that initial withdrawal rate to 4% or $80k p.a. because in that cohort the 4% Rule not just preserved money but even left you with $670,844 after 30 years.
We can just quickly check that with our 0% real interest rate and a 10-year cash bucket we would have done substantially better than in the base case. Instead of assuming a 0% real cash rate, if we apply actual cash returns during that time we would have done even better in 1929 and 1965, no doubt because actual average real interest rates from short-term bonds were quite a bit higher than 0%. For the 1965 cohort, the 52.5/17.5/30.0 glidepath did slightly worse than the 10Y cash cushion with 0% real interest rates. And that makes sense, too, because cash yields didn’t keep up with rising inflation rates in the mid-70s, and thus the actual real returns of a cash bucket would have been negative. Nevertheless, the glidepath with cash was a success even for the 1973 cohort because the final value at $1.4m+ was more than twice that in the baseline.
Also, it comes as no surprise that during the Great Depression, you would have done even better by just using 10-year Treasury Bonds instead of cash and you would have done spectacularly well with the 60/40/0 to 100/0/0 glidepath. On the other hand, the 1960s and 1970s retirees would have lagged behind the glidepath utilizing 30% cash. But they would have still done better with the bond glidepaths than with the static 75/25 allocation. So the bond-only glidepaths still worked, relative to the static 75/25 baseline. Just not as well as the cash glidepath.
What about the Type 1 Error: Have a cash bucket when it wasn’t even necessary?
Finally, I also like to study how much money we leave on the table if we implement the cash bucket at the wrong time. When after the fact it turns out that it wasn’t even necessary. Imagine someone had started retirement a year before the worst-case scenario in September 1928 or January 1972 or two years before the 1965 episode in November 1963. (I didn’t use November 1964 because that looked almost like November 1965). So these are all retirement cohorts with elevated equity valuations, but the market still had 1-2 years to run.
It turns out, all cohorts would have easily met and even substantially exceeded their $500,000 final value target. Quite intriguingly, the 60/40->100/0 glidepaths do quite well. In 1928 and 1972 even better than the static asset allocation (so not even a Type 1 error, after all). In 1963, you lag behind the static allocation a little bit (~$1.27m vs. $1.39m), but that’s small compared to the outsized outperformance for the other cohorts. The 60/40 glidepath would have also significantly outperformed the glidepath starting with 30% cash in all three cases.
What about Fritz Gilbert’s Bucket Strategy?
This post wouldn’t be complete without mentioning my buddy Fritz’s blog The Retirement Manifesto because he has written extensively on the bucket strategy approach. Here are the links to his excellent posts on this topic:
- How to Build A Retirement Paycheck From Your Investments
- InfoGraphic – The Bucket Strategy
- Your Bucket Strategy Questions, Answered!
Fritz and I don’t disagree at all. In essence, Fritz will end up with a 63/27/10 allocation which would roughly correspond to my simulations with roughly 4-5 years of a safe asset bucket and the remaining part of the portfolio in the 75/25 bucket. (a slight mismatch of the weights but close enough).
Fritz also insists that his plan involves rebalancing for as long as the market cooperates and using the cash bucket drawdown only when the market tanks. This will line up exactly with my simulations if you study the historical failsafe cohorts. And even the pre-market peak cohorts that regularly rebalance the portfolio will exactly end up at the market peak before the drawdown with their 63/27/10 intact and then start the cash bucket drawdown when the market retreats in 1929 or 1965 or 1973. So, to answer Fritz’s question below “Not sure if you’d be able to model that, but I’d be interested.”: I did model this approach (or a close-enough variation of it) for the 3 cohorts that retired at their respective market peaks. And just to be sure, the approach “works” if you define “works” as slightly reducing sequence risk. We can never eliminate Sequence Risk. Fritz’s bucket approach and my glidepath approach are not really that different. In fact, his 27% bond and 10% cash drawn down will be very close to my 40% bonds drawn down over time.
Hope this helps clarify Fritz’s question and the questions from the many readers of my blog that also follow his content! 🙂
Conclusion
There you go, finally, I finished the post. After teasing everybody and getting folks excited about the bucket strategy post, I hope that it was worth waiting for another 5 days! 🙂
What I’ve learned from today’s post is that a cash bucket faces challenges when interest rates are low but it certainly works if you deploy it right at the peak of the market. Depending on what kind of bear market we go through, though, the cash bucket might work better or worse than diversifying with a bond portfolio. If you fear an upcoming inflation spike the cash pile will be the better option. If we face another demand-side recession where the Federal Reserve will try to push down the bond term structure again, then government bonds will be better.
I must say that I still like the 60/40 to 100/0 glidepath the best. It wasn’t too far behind the cash glidepath in an inflationary environment, but it does a lot better in a deflationary setting and/or in the Type 1 error scenario where we still have a few years to go in the current bull market.
This is something I have been thinking about it for a while so thanks for posting at just the right time!
It would be good to check my understanding on one aspect of the glidepath at the end. Am I right in saying that the pot that you choose to live off during that period should simply be the most tax efficient (based on income tax rates, transactions cost etc) as long as you are adjusting the portfolio to meet the glidepath at the end of each year?
Also I guess it goes without saying that having a larger cash / bond pot in the beginning reduces the potential upside to your final pot given you miss out on scenarios where the first X number of years was an equity bull market. But that’s the price for the risk aversion.
Thanks.
“you choose to live off during that period should simply be the most tax efficient ”
Not likely. Stocks are the most tax-efficient investment among the three S/B/C assets.
If you live off the cash bucket that would be the least tax-efficient asset.
But I agree with your second point: To hedge the downside with the cash bucket you also give up some of the upside potential.
There can be situations where an individual has a lot of stock appreciation, and has high absolute withdrawal needs. Someone in CA could easily get to a 25%-29% marginal rate or more, and lose out on Obamacare subsidies by using stock gains instead of high-basis options
I’ve been trying to “build up” my bond/cash allocation over time through my work income and charitable giving of appreciated stock (effectively giving me cash back by reducing tax owed). It’s been challenging to me to model this out with your great tools since it’s a glidepath along with custom cashflow… So I’m not sure if the tax tail is wagging the dog here
Very true. Everything depends on the personal tax situation. The whole bond location issue (taxable or tax-deferred) is complicated. Can go either way, see Part 35.
Thanks Karsten for another thought-provoking piece. Greetings from across the pond.
You bet! Greetings back! 🙂
Another excellent post with interesting results.
Re LDI:
I have noticed that some pension funds using LDI also deploy some leverage. Presumably this is to try and juice things up a bit. What are your thoughts on this combined approach?
Not sure which ones that would be. If you can lever up your bond portfolio at a rate *lower* than the bond yield, you can certainly do so. But if you introduce a mismatch again, say borrow short-term to buy long-term bonds, you invalidate the whole LDI idea again.
Thanks for your thoughts.
IMO moving a DB schemes funding regime towards vanilla LDI – for want of a better phrase – could legitimately be called de-risking; but a move towards LDI with even modest leverage looks more like re-risking.
Yeah, that’s true. Throwing out the baby with the bathwater. 🙂
Way to complicated — just take your $1M and put them in a series of dividend stocks yielding 4%.. never have to sell shares. Simpler the better and no spreadsheets needed.
Inflation? Dividends being cut?
Yup! Stock picking usually not working is another. 🙂
Might I respectfully suggest you have a look at ERN’s posts on dividend stocks? Most enlightening.
Thanks! 🙂
How did that work in 2008/9? Oh, oops, it didn’t work. See my series, parts 29, 30, 31.
All great points!
Plus if you stick to the “bucket” strategy you’re probably moving more money around than is needed so you could be triggering more in taxes depending on how your assets are structured.
Possible. Then again, in the extreme bucket strategy without rebalancing you indeed avoid transactions and potential tax surprises. 🙂
Just want to mention that US govt IBonds (aka Series I Bonds) might be a better option that TIPS for inflation-protected govt bonds if you’re building a bond ladder. Personal limits on IBond purchases can be worked around to some degree using tax refunds allocated to IBonds, revocable trusts buying IBonds, and personal businesses buying IBonds (like an LLC). A couple who each have a revocable trust and who share an LLC could purchase up to 55k/yr in IBonds, iirc. (10k per person (20k) + 10k per trust (20k) + 5k from tax refund + 10k in LLC).
Minimum holding period is 1yr, minor interest penalties for cashing in before 5yrs, no penalty for cashing after 5 yrs.
And IBonds never have a negative interest rate. During deflationary periods they simply return 0%.
(note: direct purchase US Govt IBonds are not the same as the “ibond” etfs some companies market. Those etfs are not, in my opinion, suitable substitutes for direct-purchase govt IBonds)
Do you have any sources for reading up on this strategy? Sounds interesting
You buy them directly from the U.S. government at treasurydirect.gov
They currently pay 3%+ but way inflation is currently going, it looks like the interest rate will go up to 6% when the rates reset in November.
They are arguably the best option for safe 1-5 year savings goals right now since the Fed is keeping treasury yields extra low.
Again, the real rate is set. They currently pay a 0% real rate, so you will permanently get the CPI +/-0%.
0% real rate is indeed much better than a 5 year TIPS (-1.7% real) or nominal bonds: 0.7% nominal, which is pathetic.
Finance Buff has more on this. I don’t know the rules here about posting links to other finance bloggers, but I’ll take the risk and drop a couple links here. (I am not affiliated with Finance Buff other than being a regular reader).
How to Buy I-Bonds: https://thefinancebuff.com/how-to-buy-i-bonds.html
Creating Revocable Trusts: https://thefinancebuff.com/simple-living-trust-software-i-bonds.html
Apologies if these links are out of bounds for this blog.
Thanks for the links. Very informative!
Thanks for that.
I knew about the +5k from the tax return but never considered the other +30k.
But keep in mind that right now you can still only only get 0.00% real return on the I Bonds. Seems very lean.
Also, even if you put the entire $55k/year during the last 5 years before retirement you don’t have much in terms of a retirement portfolio. What’s worse, you lose the capital accumulation during the last 5 years of working.
If one bought Series I Bonds as part of the margin to buy unleveraged /ES futures there’s a small potential arbitrage opportunity there right? Recognizing you’d have to hold some cash in the futures account as well. The drawback appears to be tax drag which could be significant.
I Bonds are nice. But they still yield only 0% real right now. Which is better than Treasury bonds or TIPS but still low in absolute terms.
Also, there’s the issue that I can’t easily pile on $1.5m of I Bonds to run my derivatives strategy. The fact that you can only buy small chunks and you have to accumulate the I Bonds over long stretches of time makes this an unworkable approach for most investors.
I’m thinking not about option writing but holding a long /ES position against a collateral of ~200k of I bonds and about $25k cash to hold the position. You’d be implied borrowing at the 3 month rate for the future and buying bonds yielding higher than that rate as they’re going to average something like 5% nominal for the next 12 months. It certainly can’t be an entire portfolio but a married couple can put 65k in per year with the approaches linked on other comments which is multiple /MES contracts worth and only 3-4 years from an /ES. I’d argue that’s not a trivial sum for many investors, especially younger ones seeking moderate leverage early on, or people saving for a down payment seeking a 40/60 type risk portfolio.
In the next year you’d basically be guaranteed to outperform nominal bonds unless yields crater (they could!). Even then the 3 month risk free rate you borrow at is unlikely have much room to fall. You also retain the implied optionality of the I bond in case real rates rise as you could always roll into tips after 11 months at minimal penalty if they do.
I’m not actually doing this, but it’s a thought exercise of interest to further my understanding of assets I do hold. I do use I bonds as part of my physical bond holdings in my risk parity portfolio at the moment during accumulation and sometimes add an MES to get the leverage ratio just right, but I do not use them in my derivatives portfolio.
Yes, all true. But I still prefer just buying Preferreds without any upper limit on the amount I can buy in any year.
But if someone likes to take more risk with their derivatives position and less risk with the margin cash, this would work well!
Extremely interesting quantitative analysis as usual! I am wondering if you’ve ever come across Chris Cole’s dragon portfolio, where the investments are much more widely diversified than just equities+bonds. It aims to add components to make the portfolio more robust to secular inflation and/or deflation (long volatility, commodities trend, gold). Similarly to the great analysis you made on the impact of macro factors, I feel that an investigation of this approach as pertaining to SWR could be very interesting.
The quantitative paper (allegory of the serpent and the hawk) can be found here:
https://www.artemiscm.com/research-market-views
For everyone who’s not interested in reading through the long document (much less give out your email address to get access), here’s the allocation (according to bogleheads, https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=327420), but please confirm:
24% Domestic Equity
18% Fixed Income
21% Active Long Volatility
18% Commodity Trend Following
19% Physical Gold
Considering that this portfolio currently has 24% in assets with ~3-4% expected real return, 18% fixed income (negative expected real return) and 19% gold (0-1% real return expectation), I don’t quite see how you can survive a 50+-year retirement with with such a low expected return.
You’d hope that the “active long vol” and “commodity trend following” will make up for that and give you a more significantly positive return.
I wouldn’t get my hopes up too high. Passive Long Vol has a negative expected return, so you really, really have to rely on on some asset managers saving your butt and pushing the average return positive. It would have to rely on highly proprietary, potentially over-fitted rules that worked in the past. Not sure how this will work in the future.
Same with commodity momentum strategies.
Back when I was still working at BNY Mellon, we had an active commodity strategy and I had a (minor) involvement in the strategy. Momentum alone will not give you much. Worked well in the backtest. But now that everyone is doing it, it’s useless. You need a much more complicated strategy to get any kind of noticeable alpha.
You are exactly right about the asset allocation. Some implementations also include leverage to adjust volatility.
My understanding of the strategy is that the anti-correlation between the different asset classes improves the average risk-adjusted return, sort of like a multi-dimensional efficient frontier.
From his backtesting data, from 1929 to 2019:
nominal annual returns:
dragon portfolio: 5.4%
US equities: 7.5%
classic 60/40: 6.1%
max drawdowns
dragon portfolio: -34%
US equities: -79%
classic 60/40: -74%
Seems to be similar as well for shorter time-periods.
I am mostly intrigued by the overall downside risk that appears to be significantly lower with this strategy, and I had a feeling that it could have an impact on sequence of return risk, which might compensate for a lower average return. Otherwise, I see the main advantage as a potential hedge against unexpected idiosyncratic tail risks like a complete change of the financial or geopolitical system. Still, I very much agree that some assets used in his strategy are very difficult to replicate for retail investors. It would have been great to have access to his raw time series data in order to simulate with your SWR platform.
Thank you for your detailed answer 🙂
When did the 60/40 portfolio have a 74% draw-down? I’m guessing that that should be ~54%. Also it was only for 2 months in 1932, if you exclude those two months, the next biggest draw-down was 46%.
From what I gather in the paper, in order to compare the portfolios, he normalized them to have a volatility (stdev, I presume) of 15. These drawdown percentages correspond to the normalized (i.e. leveraged) portfolios. Sorry for the confusion.
However, the nominal returns I provided in previous comment are non-normalized. For normalized to 15 vol, he gives:
nominal annual returns:
dragon portfolio: 14.4%
US equities: 6.4%
classic 60/40: 7.9%
for inflation adjusted values:
annual returns:
dragon portfolio: 10.1%
US equities: 2.3%
classic 60/40: 3.9%
max drawdowns
dragon portfolio: -49%
US equities: -82%
classic 60/40: -78%
That doesn’t make sense either. The initial values (unscaled) were wrong. And scaling them to 15% doesn’t make them any better.
So, I would not want to put much trust into that study. If they can’t simulate a simple S&P500 or 60/40 portfolio, I have no idea what else they messed up.
Yup! Good point! Something is wrong with that calculation.
Not sure anymore if I would trust them. Here are the returns I get. There is some ambiguity as to what they use as a starting date: 12/31/1928, the monthly market peak 8/31/1929 or 12/31/1929. I computed all 3 versions, but get vastly different results:
SPX-TR
12/1928-12/2019 9.49%
8/1929-12/2019 9.22%
12/1929-12/2019 9.71%
60/40
12/1928-12/2019 8.26%
8/1929-12/2019 8.11%
12/1929-12/2019 8.38%
Worst drawdowns is indeed -79.35% for the S&P 500, but -52.80% for the 60/40. Not -74%!
Sorry, I’m afraid if they can’t cobble together a simple return calculation, I don’t trust their backtests of the two “active” portfolios for the long-vol and commodity momentum strategies.
Besides, inflation was about 3% during that time, so their dragon portfolio had only a 2.4% real return. But still 34% drawdown. That’s pretty bad!
Mystery solved: Don’t use the Dragon Portfolio! 🙂
For the backtest period, I see that they mention “1928 to August 19, 2019” so the end date might explain the discrepancy in returns. Sorry for the omission.
I agree that the -74% drawdown for the 60/40 portfolio doesn’t seem to make sense. I think that max DD values given are for the vol-adjusted portfolios, hence is it possible that the unscaled US equity already had a volatility of about 15 whereas the unscaled 60/40 had perhaps a volatility of about 11, which might explain these values?
“Besides, inflation was about 3% during that time, so their dragon portfolio had only a 2.4% real return. But still 34% drawdown. That’s pretty bad!”
I’m not sure if I understand this one. Scaled dragon portfolio purportedly had a 10.1% real return and 49% max drawdown (ignoring borrowing costs). Some leverage does indeed appear to be necessary with this approach (a bit like a risk parity approach), but I wouldn’t call those results bad (if they are correct, of course!)?
Thanks!
OK, if their strategy is easily scalable, then sure, you want to scale up the low-risk, high-Shapre Ratio strategy. Did they mention how many times you have to lever this up? And what rate they use for borrowing/leverage? That’s because the average cash-rate was 3.5% over this horizon. How can you take a 5.4% gross return strategy and scale it up to 14.4%?
That’s a lot of leverage. And it’s not 14.4/5.4=2.67.
You need to solve: 5.4 + X (5.4-3.5)=14.4. Hence X=4.73.
That’s too much leverage, my friend!
Long story short, we are adding more and more uncertainties and ways for this to fail: 1) the uncertainties of the two alpha strategies and the 2) the prospect of leverage constraints and margin calls when you run this at multiple times leverage.
This strategy looks more and more like a gimmick. And the fact that they proclaim they have a 14%+ leveraged return “ignoring borrowing costs” shows that they might not know what they are doing. I’d stay away from this strategy and particularly that firm.
Everybody’s in search of this uncorrelated or negative correlated asset. They’re called put options.
You can certianly buy put options. But the premium you pay will eat up too much of your equity return. Duhhh, who would expected that?!
Of course, what real smart people do is to *sell* put options and do it in a way to lower the correlation with the market.
https://earlyretirementnow.com/2020/06/10/passive-income-through-option-writing-part-4/
Why do you hate me so much? Wink.
One relevant clarification on how I’m using the Bucket Strategy (which, to me, is really just a name game to help visualize my asset allocation strategy). I keep Bucket 1 “full” (3 years of cash) when the markets are doing well, selling enough of whatever is up the most to “refill” what I’ve spent each quarter. So yes, it’s a rebalancing play. If/when the market drops, I’ll draw down the cash in Bucket 1 instead of selling stock for my quarterly refills. If Bucket 1 gets to <1 year of cash (e.g., a 2-year bear), I'll sell whatever has declined the least to cover the next year's spending (likely bonds from Bucket 2 in a long-term bear scenario).
Hope that helps define how I'm using it. Not sure if you'd be able to model that, but I'd be interested. It's easy to manage, and yes, it helps me sleep well at night.
Haha, sorry, Fritz! I was debating if I should mention you by name. Now that you’re already “offended” I might as well link to your site! I will add an update and a comment to address your market timing suggestion. 🙂
I added a short section before the Conclusion to answer your question! 🙂
I was about to ask then, if bucket doesn’t work, what works in the same area? I’m 50/50 right now and will glide to 75/25 on the next crash.
That sounds like a good plan. I found that 50% bonds in the beginning feels a bit low, but if you have a plan and stick with it, that should work.
Financial Sumotroll. Excellent.
I’m bad with names. 😉
Interesting read.
I wonder if investing only in less volatile sectors (Consumer Staples, Utilities, Health Care) would result in better outcome.
Yes. If you know what sectors are going to be the low-vol ones next time around.
Also, 2020 was really good for IT, a low-dividend and high-volatility sector. While some of the more brick-and-mortar and ostensible stable sectors are lagging. It’s not easy to time the business cycle through sector rotation.
No timing of the business cycle, just investing all the time in those sectors, which are less cyclical.
2020 is an interesting case study because of the quick, V shaped recovery. I think it was the quickest recovery in history.
If we look just at the crisis side (2-3 2020), IT fell 30% top to bottom while CS fell 23%.
But top-to-bottom is just one feature. The speed of recovery is also important. Remember: Sequence Risk is determined not just by the depth but also the length of the drawdown.
But generally, yes, why not invest in low-risk stocks? There is some evidence that low-beta stocks have better risk-adjusted returns. The same will also likely translate into low-beta sectors being attractive.
Thank you for your post. I am struggling with this issue for a while, trying to set apart the technical (mathematical) and the behavioural (mental accounting) aspects of the bucket approach.
I though I had made my mind on the technical part after reading this study from J Estrada with extensive simulations, but your simulations seem to point to a different conclusion
https://blog.iese.edu/jestrada/files/2019/01/BucketApproach.pdf
Haven’t read through the entire thing. But different assumptions. I looked at mostly the worst-case scenarios. If you optimize more of an average retiree’s utility function you may get different recommendations.
Karsten – Wonderful interview with Mr. Vulpescu. I frequently reread posts from your safe withdrawal series (as well as other misc posts), and this podcast provided impetus to reread certain posts that I haven’t touched in a while. Can’t wait for the future parts of the interview to be released!
Thanks also for this current posting. Interesting comments re. bucket strategy (particularly Fritz’s version of it) and diversifying with a bond portfolio. While impossible to know which will fare better, the bucket strategy has a psychological edge, I think, in that “cash under the mattress for a rainy day” is always somehow comforting. In any event, laying out certain guidelines to follow is so superior to mindlessly “winging it”, regardless of the particulars of which time-tested strategy one chooses.Your contributions to are awesome, and so much appreciated.
Thanks Eric! And again, Fritz’ approach is very similar to the bucket approach that can slightly take the edge off the Sequence Risk problem. Not more, not less.
Isn’t it also substantially similar to an emergency savings buffer, which you’ve been lambasting at various occasions? Obviously when drawing it down and not replenishing, that’s a major difference. But speaking as someone who hasn’t followed your advice on emergency savings and still has >0.5y of expenses saved up, that would roll directly into an on-demand “cash bucket” in Fritz’s model.
And if I decide to follow these allocations, I’d have to stock up my cash savings by a few extra years.
I’ve critizcized the EF while accumulating assets. When you decumulate assets you will need about 20-25% in safer assets.
Hi Big ERN,
I listened to the podcast you linked which was very informative. One concern I had in using CAPE for rolling allocation rules was the very issue you mentioned of not having a similarly robust valuation measure for the alternative asset. Are you aware of any measures like this for the alternative asset that at least have a cyclical component inversely correlated with CAPE?
Second, you talked about tactical allocation. I believe it was on some kind of rolling basis. Do these kinds of methods ever work beyond the backtests? Any particular magic rolling period (10Y, 5Y, etc.) of re-estimation that works better than just using the past full data for flat mean/vol estimates?
Thanks,
Clayton
First of all, asset allocators will more likely look at future expected earnings, not rolling past earnings. The problem with that approach. We don’t have EPS expectations going very far back!
I once did a study wondering if we should redo the Shiller calculations and use different weighting on the past 10 years of earnings. Doesn’t need to be 1/10 weight on each right? It turns out that equal-weighting all the ten past earnings years is actually the way to go.
Thanks for the post. I always wondered why those considered so smart, like C. Benz at Morningstar, are always hyping a bucket strategy, when in reality, it’s just window dressing. You said it best: money is fungible. If people hype it as a feel good strategy, they should say so.
Thanks. That’s a good way of putting it! 🙂
Good analysis. It sounds like the 5-10 years of cash that saves you from a market crash within the first 5-10 years comes at the cost of not having enough stocks to have outrun the market crash in years 11+. You have time-shifted SORR, but probably for no net gain in the long run. 2 Thoughts:
1) As an early retiree, I want to know as early as possible if I’m not going to make it. If a SORR is realized in year 3, I can just go back to work as my fallback plan, but this gets harder and harder, pays less and less, and involves less available portfolio recovery time the longer I’m retired. Thus I DO NOT want to time-shift SORR into the distant future. If anything, I want to invest aggressively NOW so that if I happen to be in an early retirement SORR event cohort, I’ll find out while there’s still time, and if not, then my investment returns will outrun a SORR event in the distant future. This is the FIRE person’s case for a 100% stock allocation. Chances are good you outrun any future SORR event within your first few years and never worry again.
2) To sustain a portfolio forever, you’d need a X% long-term real rate of return to support a X% WR. There is nothing like a typical WR available in the world of bonds or cash, and many would argue there’s nothing like that available from stocks. Thus, the extent our portfolios generate 3.5% – 4% real returns in the long run from components that don’t yield that much individually will depend on rebalancing. However, bonds are currently very close to the somewhere-sub-zero boundary. What happens to the plan to rebalance one’s way to a 4% real return when bonds are pinned against the floor, and face increasing pressures preventing the yield from falling beyond a certain point? If rebalancing no longer works like it used to, that calls into question the modern applicability of most historical AA simulations. No past cohort has ever started with rates this low.
3) If options are efficiently priced, the realized value of a wide selection of LEAPS call options sampled over a long period of time will equal zero. That is, the winning options would be expected to exactly pay for the ones that turn out worthless, just like the expected outcome of a coin flip game is expected to break even. If this was not true, there would be risk-free economic profits to be made either buying or selling options. So in other words, if I held 40% of my portfolio in cash plus enough long call options to control stock worth 40% of my portfolio, that portion of my portfolio would have an expected nominal return of 0% just like an all-cash allocation would. I wonder under what circumstances that would be preferable than 40% bonds or 40% straight cash. As an early retiree, I’m interested in the optionality of avoiding damage from an early SORR event while also preserving my ability to outrun later SORR events. Not sure how to optimize this idea, but at least the calls can only lose a tiny fraction of the portfolio’s value in a crash.
All good points.
A few thoughts of my own:
If you’re comfortable with drawing down your assets over time, you can afford to withdraw a little bit more than the LT real return averages. That extra will be very small for long horizons, though.
Of course, you want to know as early as possible if you’re going to make it. But it’s not always in the cards. The 1965 cohort looked OK for the first 8 years, oblivious to the fact that they won’t make it. The 1972/73 cohort thought they would not make it when looking at their portfolio in the late 70s. When in fact they did OK in the end.
There’s no case for 100% equities unless you’re a successful FIRE blogger and/or a working spouse with enough cash flow
Options are largely priced efficiently. But the way you describe the pricing is not how efficient options pricing works in the real world. That said, I like the general idea of long LEAPS, while shorting short-dated puts.
Hi ERN, when you say that you shift 0,4% p.m. from bonds to stocks and you say that you withdraw 3,6% p.a. (broadly equivalent to 0,3% p.m.) from the portfolio this means that you shift 0,1% p.m. from bonds to stocks and use 0,3% p.m. for living. Is that correct? Thank you.
Not necessarily. One number is the withdrawal amount measured in $. The portfolio rebalancing simply reweights the stock/bond/cash allocation. Since the withdrawal amount is set and predetermined but the the portfolio value changes over time due to volatile stock/bond returns the exact amounts you have to shift will vary each month.
Any time someone talks about Type 1 error I know I’m getting some good stuff and not just a bunch of personal opinion! 😉 Great post. Aspiring CFP here and I love how practical and applicable this is.
Thanks! Glad this was useful! 🙂
What do you think about the use of iShares iBonds to fund a ladder of annual pay-outs of estimated annual needs? They aren’t Treasuries, so they introduce a modicum of credit risk. Also, they are ETFs with market prices, which is not to say they can’t be held to maturity, as indeed they are designed for that purpose. Upon maturity, the principal can be consumed, or else it can be rolled over as another rung of the ladder. Thoughts?
I checked the 2030 iShares yields:
2.12% for Corporate Bond Fund IBDV
1.25% for the Treasury fund IBTK
For the Corporate fund you still risk some default events along the way, so there’s not much of a boost you get there.
Lesson here: if interest rates are low like this. All valuations will be extremely stretched!
How about maintaining a bond/cash position equal to N years spending, rather than a percentage of your portfolio?
Every year if the CAPE is higher than a threshold, you withdraw by selling equities. If cape is lower than the threshold, you withdraw by selling the bond/cash position. That way when equities are not doing well, you don’t eat into them.
I’ve done the different variations in my simulations:
Cash cushion (Part 48)
Glidepath with cash (Part 48)
Glidepath with bonds only (Parts 19,20,48)
Cash cushion with a decision rule about whether to withdraw from cash or stocks (Part 25)
All with a slight improvement in the SoRR. There are a myriad of other ways to model this. There will be no magic bullet. I suspect your rule will have the some of the same character. In fact, the CAPE is so high now, above any reasonable CAPE cutoff. It means that your rule will likely look like one of the assumptions already simulated in my series. 🙂
Hi ERN,
I don’t know if it was the 3rd part of interview or 2nd, but you briefly touched on bitcoin. I don’t want to take words out of context since I listened to it last week, but I think you said you were generally against bitcoin or crypto.
1.
The crypto market cap is ~ 2Trillion and I believe the USA equity market cap is ~40 or 50Trillion? Even in the case where you don’t like idea of crypto wouldn’t you want to a 1-5% percentage of your portfolio – at least for someone still working in it? Just to be market weight?
2. Given the return dynamics/upside – even if there isn’t decades of history like stock market to go off of – doesn’t that count for something?
3. Do you feel any of this changes when it comes to staking say Etherium where you can get a 5% yield? Or the fact that there is no wash sale rule in Crypto. For example, I was able to sell bitcoin I bought at 49k and buy back immediately at 42k locking in a loss before immediately buying back. I got the tax benefits of a -15% drop (minus maybe $8 of fees) while not holding my position?
Thanks!
Yes, that was in the 2nd part.
1: The market cap alone means nothing. The Canadian $ money supply is also around $2t. M2 a little bit below and M3 a little bit above. That doesn’t justify putting 1-5% of my money into CAD. Certainly not in CAD currency. Maybe Canadian stocks because they have a share in the low single digits in the MSCI World. But certainly not in cash or cash equivlants.
2: The return history is too short to educate me if crypto is a good alternative to traditional assets.
3: I heard that people can now make ~5% on their crypto balances. THat could certainly make a difference. I recently spoke to folks at BlockFI and that might be a way around the problem of crypto balances just sitting around doing nothing. If they find a way to do something productive with the crypto balances (lending them out to hedge funds, etc.), maybe that’s a good starting point.
Also, if you lose $7k on BTC you still lost $7k times (1-marginal tax rate).
The lack of a washsale rule for crypto would put it at an advantage, for sure. Though, a washsale rule for Crypto will come sooner or later! I think it’s already in one of the proposed tax hike bills. 🙂
1 – I should go back and listen to what you said, but I think way I remember you talking about them or bitcoin at least was a ‘currency’, just like maybe you refer to CAD here as a currency or maybe its a poor example. I think the word crypto-*currency* is misleading to most. Maybe bitcoin, but I think that is a store of value or a digital gold rather than an actual currency. But most I think of as more of a technology. There is also alot of ‘garbage’ coins out there as well more of as a joke, but no different in sizing than what’s seen in the market.
FYI, I used to be extremely anti-crypto, but I’ve bought into it now enough to make bitcoin and etherium about 2.5% of my net worth. I will probably slightly up this over time to 3-4%.
Given that blockchain technology almost certainly is going to play a major role in economy in coming decade, I find it hard to ignore. To me it would be like doing VTI -ex genomics stocks since that is also ‘too new’ or VTI -ex SaaS stocks 15 years ago since internet was also ‘too new’.
I am extremely interested in hearing more negatives, maybes, positives etc!! It just seems like its pretty compelling to me or at least worthy of a small portion in portfolio like I have done.
How much data or time would you consider to be enough? Would your perspective on it change if you had 10-15 years to retirement vs already being in retirement, etc.
3 – Yes, you can get about 8 or 9% on your *cash* in ‘stable coins’ which are redeemable 1:1 with dollars at either Blockfi or Voyager. I use blockfi. I use this in place for a portion of my cash in the short term / in place of bonds.
Major coins like bitcoin or etherium can find 2-5% yields.
“Maybe bitcoin, but I think that is a store of value or a digital gold rather than an actual currency”
From economics 101, the characteristics of money/currency:
1: store of value
2: medium of exchange
3: unit of accounting
(sometimes a #4 is included: an instrument to settle debts)
So, according to this, BTC, ETH and a lot of the crypto coins are money/currency.
Just for the record, I’m also interested in crypto technology and I very much favor a decentralization of government power and the Feds snooping in my financial transactions. So, I like crypto in general.
I merely object to calling crypto currencies an investment. They don’t work for me they don’t generate corporate profits. But my stock portfolio does. In that sense, to shift money out of my Fidelity index funds, I’d maybe look onto crypto-relevant stocks. But not crypto coins themselves.
But of course, that may change with BlockFI and other crypto “banks”. 2-5% yield on BTC doesn’t sound so bad. But it looks like the high yields are mostly for small balances and then the yields shrink. Up to 0.1 BTC you get 4.5%. Above 0.35 BTC you get 0.1% APY. Not that exciting. Or did I misunderstand that?
Hi Carsten,
thank you very much for this blogpost! I was wondering why you keep the real cash-return constant? There is also some sequence risk associated to inflation and real returns. As an idea you could formulate the real cash return as nominal return minus (variable) inflation. If you do this, then the cash bucket strategy will not perform during the inflationary 70s.
I don’t have to. I can also work in the cash returns from the actual historical sample.
But it’s a bit of inappropriate comparison when I simulate historical cash yields that were ~2% real when today we’re facing -2% cash yields.
A fixed nominal yield and then using the historical CPI rates would be even less realistic. Historically, the nominal yields reacted to the rising inflation rates.
The truth is somewhere inbetween. A fixed nominal yiel is very conservative since the relationship between nominal yields and inflation is ignored, while a fixed real yield ignores the sequence risk on the cash side and therefore is too optimistic. Having too choose between these two approaches, I would opt for the more conservative one. Best would be, as you said, to conservatively model the relationship between inflation and nominal rate while taking into account that we are currently in uncharted waters regarding the level of rates.
In your opinion Mr. Big Ern, what SWR can I use with 50% VTI, 40% BND, 10% Cash and Equivalent?
Part 28 has a Google spreadsheet where people can use their own assumptions. I’d suspect that you’d still get a pretty decent SWR but maybe a little bit less than under a 75/25/0 assumption.
Thank you. Yes, 75/25 was my initial thought but with everything that is going on in the world I do think something really bad, almost like a 1929 might happen again so I’ll be more conservative, even though it means a lower SWR.
Being too meek on the equity risk can also backfire if we have a repeat of the 1970s where inflation wipes out your “safe assets”. It’s really a “pick your poison” kinda deal.
That’s why I like the 75/25 approach because that did OK in both a deflatioarny 1930s scenario and an inflationary 1970s scenario.
I’m too afraid to even buy Bond ETFs, can’t think of being fully invested in a VTSAX
Jump in slowly and monitor the progress. Before you know it, you’ll be at 7-figures! 🙂
One crazy thing that I saw some FIREs recommending is to invest 100% in the JEPI ETF. It follows the S&P500 so you get appreciation while also using the option strategy you use to generate a juicy 7% yield paid monthly. You have income and cap gains = total return.
I’d need only 600k invested in it to get 3k a month (more than enough for me) …what do you think?
Not a big fan of that. I like the option writing aspect, but I have a better way of doing this, e.g.,
https://earlyretirementnow.com/2021/10/18/passive-income-through-option-writing-part-8-2021-update/
I have read your entire series, though I must admit that I don’t understand it all. My plan all along has been to wait until I’m 70 to start taking SS for maximum benefit – but after reading about sequence of return risk, I wonder if one hedge to a bear market occurring early on in retirement is to opt to take SS at age 62. While the overall value (ie NPV) will be less, wouldn’t it help reduce chances of “running out of money” (ie chances of failure) during retirement?
If you retire during a long bull market like now, I’d wait for a market crash to start SS and spend down your portfolio first since your SS benefit can increase by ~8% each year you delay. The hardest part of this strategy is you don’t know at the start of a bear market if it will be a long (10+year) or short (<1 year) one though. If you start SS and the market recovers, you can always change your mind and give the money back and delay SS longer.
Another benefit waiting on SS and spending down your portfolio first is you reduce your RMD risk if you have a lot of your portfolio in pre-tax 401k accounts.
Good point. It would be best to take a wait-and-see approach.
Even if the market drops, probably do a NPV analysis on the SS timing. It might still be best to defer, especially when doing the spousal benefit arbitrage with a much younger spouse who has the option of taking my full benefits when I’m gone,
But: the 8% number is deceiving because you get 1 year less of benefits. The IRR of waiting a year is much less than 8%. Don’t compare the 8% to an expected equity return! 🙂
FiGuy has already mentioned this in his answer:
I would use SS as an option. Delay it until the market crashes. If the market indeed crashes, maybe check again if it’s still better to defer if you have a much younger spouse who could cash in on your max benefits after your death.
I focused on sequence of return RISK, in other words the risk portion. I did an analysis and found SOR had a diminishing effect on portfolio performance to about 50% of the total retirement term so in the 30 year case, 15 years, 40 year case 20 years etc. Half the term therefore is SOR sensitive. SOR effect in the sensitive term diminished as you progress into the term, so a BAD SOR is far less dexterous in year 10 that in year 2. This addresses RISK as a variable not a constant. Bucket addresses risk as a constant since the portfolio risk return is pretty much a set point on the efficient frontier.
I split the risk between 2 portfolios, a large portfolio meant to cover the entire retirement, and a lifeboat portfolio meant to cover a period of bad SOR. SOR only becomes real when you are openly withdrawing from the portfolio. When the portfolio is closed it;s value may flux but it’s risk doesn’t change. An example of a closed portfolio is one in the but accumulation phase. By having a small portfolio at a lower risk say 30/70 you will have some growth over time. The small portfolio is to be used as a one shot pool of liquidity in bad times, should cover about 3 years expenses, and would allow you to close the main portfolio to withdrawal and hence protect it from SOR.
As SOR decreases with time excess funds from the small portfolio can be DCA’d into the large portfolio. Let’s say the small is 300K at 70/30 and has a 4% ROR. In 10 years you could expect the small to grow to about 450K which is 150% of projected need so 150K can be DCA’d over time into the higher risk portfolio therefore retaining the small as a life boat and not a competing portfolio to the main. As time goes on eventually the entire small portfolio can be DCA;d into the big, since as time goes on the chances of running out of money before running out of life diminishes.
At some point even in a 50 year retirement SS kicks in and further relieves stress on the monthly cash flow. By doing this you limit SOR risk on your riskiest asset (big portfolio) and allow you lifeboat to supply your yearly allotment of hamburgers. The big is most sensitive to market drawdown and so is closed in bad times when it can least withstand the stress of say RMD, but also is most sensitive to upside in good times when you can afford to pay yourself a little more.
To that end say you have 2M IRA in the big with a 75/25 risk and 300K in a 30/70 small. In a crash assuming the assets remain non correlated the big may drop 50% but the small only 15%. When you calculate RMD it’s on all the IRA assets each year, so the biggest drop in the 70% portfolio modifies the RMD in this case in year 2 of a retirement on 2,3M the RMD is 96k. If 2M drops 50% and 300K drops 15% you now RMD on 1M + 150K. –, and the RMD on that is only 48K all of which can be taken from the small portfolio significantly reducing the hit on the big. When the money in the small is gone it’s gone, no need to refill any bucket. The life boat will have done it’s job by giving you an alternate risk to turn to in bad times. Risk changes throughout retirement and needs to be analyzed in epochs not in the aggregate. If your 50 and living off your nut and your life is leveraged to an 8% return that epoch is much different that the guy who is 75 has 10 more years to live and still has 2M in the bank
That’s the difference between a 30-year and a 50+-year retirement horizon (my wife was 35 when we retired).
15 years into FIR we still have a long way to cover.
As I mentioned in Part 38 (https://earlyretirementnow.com/2020/07/15/when-can-we-stop-worrying-about-sequence-risk-swr-series-part-38/), the retiremet SoRR issue is always an issue. After the first 10 years have passed, then the subsequent 10 years will pose the SoRR headache:
https://i2.wp.com/earlyretirementnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/SWR-Part38-Table02.png?w=562&ssl=1
But overall, yes, I agree: In the end a glidepath or something like a bucket strategy that mimcs a GP will reduce the SoRR a little bit.
Take a look at ERN’s posts on prime harvesting, your high/low risk buckets are pretty similar.
That’s a good point! Thanks!
A retired person with a 30 year horizon has 32 Stock/ 68 Cash and withdraws 2.5% a year, which provides an adequate annual income stream. He would prefer a 75 Stock/25 Cash/Bond allocation, but considering CAPE and current bond yields, would you favor incremental annual purchases of equities following a glide path (passive or active), or instead wait for a fall in CAPE which could be a long wait?
32% Stocks, 68% Cash seems overly conservative. But it wouldn’t be bad to slowly shift into equities again. The wait and see approach can be risk, too. People have been waiting for years for a correction. And when it comes, like in 2020, they are too scared to follow through. Would be best to automate a glidepath.
Thanks for your reply. I have read most of your posts and I appreciate the time and work you have invested in your study, and the findings which we can all apply profitably. Your suggestions make sense, and automating can lessen emotional interference. As for my eventual desired non-equity allocation, would you favor start purchasing bonds via a glide path too, or stay in cash for now until bond prices drop?
To avoid mistiming the shift, I’d always use a glidepath, both going into bonds and shifting back to equities.
Makes sense to me. How aggressive or conservative I perceive myself to be may not match my investment behavior. As you have already said, while CAPE levels indeed are very high, what is important is how they compare with the low yields from alternatives, bonds and cash. I focussed more on the risk of buying equities and bonds at high prices, but not enough on the long term risks of an overly conservative portfolio. Thanks again for sharing your wisdom and experience.
Big Ern,
When you mention 10 year treasuries in your SWR series, are you actually going to treasury direct and buying 10-year treasury notes? Are you buying from a broker, or perhaps using an intermediate term treasury fund like VGIT? Apologies for the “simple” question, but I have been a simple index fund investor for the past 15 years, and I don’t know the first thing about buying treasuries. It seems to me that someone setting up a glide path over the next few years might get “stuck” with lower rate t-notes, and so I assume that you are rebalancing in/out as needed and just taking whatever rate is available at the time?
Never-mind. I see you discussing IEF in part 37 of the SWR. Maybe I should read them in order. 🙂
Haha! You got it! 🙂
You’d implement that through an ETF. Like IEF or VGIT.
Hey, a late comment, I’m trying to find if you have an article on “one bear market glidepath sorta thing” bucket strategies.
Basically, what I’ve seen on the forums (I don’t think I’ve seen it coherently defined anywhere, but this is what I deduced :))
You start with a cash/held-to-maturity-treasury bucket that is 2-5 years of expenses. You don’t spend from it unless there’s a bear market… when one happens – in 1 year, 3 years, 10 years doesn’t matter, you spend down the treasury bucket while your main portfolio rides out the bear market. After that the bucket is never replenished. I guess if any is left, you can use it in another bear market? In any case, it should help ride out one full market cycle in most cases, and reduce sequence of return risk.
I wonder if in your numerous very helpful articles you have one about this? 🙂
It works like a glidepath described in Parts 19+20. One where you shift out of bonds only if equities are down. (active GP, as opposed to passive GP)
That clearly does not eliminate Sequence Risk because you will notice that this procedure only raises you worst-case scenario SWR by a few hundredths of a %.
Also note: 2-5 years of expenses would still wipe out your cash bucket in the worst case bear markets where the stock market was down for 10+ years before reaching a new all-time high again. You need a cash bucket large enough for the portfolio to reach a CPI-adjusted new high. But that’s way too large of an opportunity cost.
If anyone offers this cash bucket approach as the solution to Sequence Risk, they obviously never ran a single SWR simulation in their life.