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Discussing Retirement Bucket Strategies with Fritz Gilbert – SWR Series Part 55

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January 25, 2023 – Welcome to another part of my Safe Withdrawal Rate Series. Today’s topic: Bucket Strategies in retirement. As you know, my blogging buddy Fritz Gilbert has written extensively on this topic at his Retirement Manifesto blog, for example:

And likewise, I have written about my skepticism of bucket strategies in Part 48 of the series: “Retirement Bucket Strategies: Cheap Gimmick or the Solution to Sequence Risk?”

Fritz’s most recent post on the Bucket Strategy started a lively back-and-forth on Twitter, and it seemed appropriate to pursue a more detailed discussion with more than 280 characters per answer in a “fight of the titans” blog post. So if you haven’t done so already, please check out our awesome discussion over on Fritz’s blog:

Is The Bucket Strategy A Cheap Gimmick?

The response was overwhelmingly positive, and we decided to craft a follow-up post here on my blog. We came up with two new questions, and we also need to address two major themes from the comments section in Part 1, specifically, the role of simplicity and behavioral biases in retirement planning.

So, let’s take a look…

1: How important is simplicity in retirement planning?

Fritz: 

Let’s start with “how important is retirement planning?”, to which I’m sure we’ll all agree the answer is “Very.”  The transition from the Accumulation Phase to the Withdrawal Phase is, perhaps, the largest transition you’ll make in your financial life, and it’s far too complex to jump into it without a plan.  (See “Our Retirement Investment Drawdown Strategy” for our master plan, with links to 23 other bloggers’ drawdown strategies, including Big ERN’s as the #10 link). 

That said, retirement planning is complex.  What should your Safe Withdrawal Rate be?  What should you target for your Asset Allocation? Should you do Roth conversions?  Which accounts should you draw from first? How do you cover health insurance?  Etc. etc. etc.

Therefore, any simplification that can be done brings significant value.  My goal has always been to simplify wherever possible without losing the critical elements of the plan.  Finding ways to simplify the implementation of a strategy increases the likelihood that the strategy will be followed.  A sound strategy, implemented poorly, equates to a poor strategy.  Secondly, the ability to explain a complex strategy in simplified language can be extremely helpful when communicating your plan to the ones you love.  Typically, most marriages include one partner who loves the financial detail and one who doesn’t want to be bothered with the details.  Being able to simply communicate your plan increases the odds of alignment with the strategy.

Bottom Line:  Simplification matters, primarily in the fact that it increases the probability that the strategy will be properly implemented when it matters the most.

Karsten: 

One issue that came up in the comments section in Part 1 is that readers prefer the method that’s simpler to manage. I certainly have sympathy for that. If we assume for now that both methods are about equally useful but also equally susceptible to Sequence Risk, then who wouldn’t want to pick the simpler of the two? Intriguingly, most commenters on Fritz’s blog preferred the Bucket approach. Like this one:

I was puzzled because I was under the impression that a simple Strategic Asset Allocation (SAA) seems to have far fewer moving parts than a bucket strategy, where you must constantly decide what bucket flows where and when to replenish and rebalance the cash bucket; effectively a form of market timing that is anything but simple. So, SAA is the equivalent of “remove old bulb, install new bulb” when the bucket strategy needlessly complicates the whole process.

Then how can readers claim that my method is too complicated even though it’s objectively much simpler than a Bucket Strategy? I came up with an analogy. Imagine there are two teams of portfolio managers, one working for an actively managed fund and one running the VTSAX at Vanguard, a passively managed total US stock market index fund. The active managers claim that they can outperform the index fund. The index fund managers take on that challenge and provide many pages of research results showing how active managers have trouble consistently beating an index fund. And they thought that would settle the argument, right? Boy, were they wrong because you know what happened? Readers of this exchange now say that they prefer the simplicity of the active managers because index fund investing seems way too complicated. And the index fund managers wonder what the heck just happened here! That’s how I felt after reading the comment from “Jeff in MN.” When comparing the two approaches, people got sidetracked by the necessary quantitative and analytical considerations. But the average retiree should focus on what method is simpler in practice. You don’t have to replicate the analytical work on my blog to run a simple SAA strategy. I do the work here, so you don’t have to! It’s like driving a car; you don’t have to understand all the mechanical and engineering details. The mechanics and engineers did that for you, so you can enjoy the simplicity of driving your car.

So, in a nutshell, the initial step, figuring out the target asset allocation, is the same for both methods. But the simple SAA approach requires no additional tactical asset allocation and market timing; therefore, it is simpler to implement than the Bucket Strategy. It’s another reason I prefer my approach.

A casual reader might wonder now whether my philosophy has changed. Isn’t Big ERN supposed to be the math wizard who overthinks and overcomplicates everything? Not at all. I want simplicity when that’s all we need. If you recall my 2021 post “When to Worry, When to Wing It,” I go through a laundry list of possible complications to my simulation setup. Some of them we can safely ignore because, in the grand scheme, they make very little difference in historical simulations.

As Fritz states above, very correctly, some financial planning challenges are more complex in retirement than in the accumulation phase. I have spent years researching safe withdrawal rates. The asset allocation in retirement, especially the tactical deviations from the SAA, would be one part of retirement planning that we can and should keep simple. Focus instead on the withdrawal rate and how we need to adjust it in response to idiosyncratic parameters and market valuations.

2: How should retirement planning address behavioral biases?

Karsten: 

Another common thread in the comments section on Fritz’s blog was the issue of behavioral biases in personal finance. I’m the first to admit that most people, myself included, are inflicted with behavioral biases that often draw us away from making optimal financial decisions.

Several commenters pointed out that the presence of such behavioral biases justifies applying the bucket strategy to get jittery retirees over their fear of withdrawing money in retirement. I was intrigued that two of the proponents of the bucket strategy are financial planners (see the comments from “Liz” and “Eric“).

The bucket strategy falls into the behavioral bias called “mental accounting.” I wrote a post in 2016 about the topic, and back then, I defined this bias as follows:

Mental Accounting: Intentionally or unintentionally creating different buckets of money and ignoring the fact that money is fungible; displaying different degrees of risk aversion and/or different propensities to consume out of different buckets.

It’s almost like I knew in 2016 that I would have this discussion with Fritz in 2023! In any case, my response to folks who justify the bucket strategy to address behavioral biases is that if you’re a financial planner, it’s your job to explain to your clients what you’re doing. Why resort to crutches like the bucket strategy, then? The truth is liberating, so please repeat after me…

… A balanced stock/bond portfolio, regularly rebalanced, would have withstood all the past market volatility, including the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Inflation of the 1970s/80s, and will likely survive whatever the future will bring.

There you go; with those 37 words, you can explain to the client that the simple SAA is really all you need. Maybe add a few charts and tables to enforce the massage.

In fact, if I were malicious, I would believe that the reason for the popularity of the bucket approach among financial planners is slightly sinister. Is it possible that the industry needs a selling point for its services to distinguish itself from DIY investors? Is it possible that CFPs falsely insinuate that they can do the tactical asset allocation timing better than the average Joe investor with an SAA approach? I would find it much more ethical if the industry tried to educate people about the dangers of mental accounting instead of reinforcing this potentially dangerous behavioral bias.

The discussion reminds me of my old post, “Good Advice vs. Feel-Good Advice.” Sometimes financial planners and financial celebrities on TV or the internet market feel-good advice that may not be as good as it sounds and feels. Granted, at least the bucket approach is just hit-or-miss with zero average impact, while some of the behavioral biases highlighted in my old post are certifiably stupid and mathematically inferior. So, I’m not going to lambast the DIY investors using a bucket approach if they feel that’s the right thing to do. Fritz and his fans are totally on the safe side. But it’s my job as an educator of sorts to point out that a simple SAA works just as well, on average. Apparently, I’m doing a job that the average financial planner can’t or doesn’t want to offer.

Fritz: 

All of us will face a bear market during our retirement years, most likely several. It’s just the nature of the beast (pun intended).  Having a pre-determined plan for how you’ll handle the emotional response to “losing” 20% of your net worth when you’re dependent on those assets to fund your retirement lifestyle is critical. It must be addressed in your retirement plan.  The worst thing a retiree can do is liquidate stocks after a major downturn due to panic, which turns Sequence of Return Risk from a concept into a reality.  

By highlighting the importance of maintaining short-term liquidity to fund your next three years of retirement spending, The Bucket Strategy forces the retiree to think about the reason “Why,” and highlights the genuine prospect of having to live several years without selling stocks during a downturn.  By forcing a decision on the size of Bucket 1 (1 year?  3 years? 5 years?), the strategy requires a retiree to consider their risk tolerance and pre-determine their defense against an inevitable bear market and the resulting SORR.  

Further, many retirees fail to rebalance and, in a Bull Market, could see their risk exposure unintentionally increase beyond their preferred tolerance.  Getting caught up in the euphoria of a Bull Market is another behavioral bias that must be addressed with an effective plan.  Again, the Bucket Strategy, with its emphasis on systematic “refilling” of Bucket 1 based on Asset Allocation movement, provides some protection by automating a “Sell The Winners” approach. It’s also important to note that these rebalancing moves are not driven by market timing, but by a systemic review of asset allocation during the quarterly refill process.

Importantly, The Bucket Strategy also provides a simple means to explain to a spouse what you’re doing with your investment portfolio given the current market dynamics, and why you’re doing it.  It’s not only the behavioral bias of the one managing the investments that matters but also the biases of other people in the relationship who may have anxiety when they see the news headlines and worry if they’ll run out of money. In my case, my wife takes comfort in understanding the broader strategy and my simplified explanation of actions we’re taking in our portfolio.  I’ve heard the same from many of my readers.

Another behavioral factor is the reality that many retirees struggle with giving themselves the freedom to spend in retirement.  After a lifetime of diligently saving, it is a difficult adjustment to change one’s habit and learn to spend in retirement (within your SWR limits).  By establishing an “automated paycheck,” many find it comforting to know they can spend whatever is flowing into their checking account.  In the event of under-spending the checking account balance grows, which is a helpful reminder that the retiree is “safe” in increasing their spending to consume the surplus (or, perhaps, to donate it to a cause they believe in).  Also, the annual review process allows a simple methodology to implement flexible spending rules in conjunction with the bucket strategy, which has been proven the most effective means to ensure you don’t outlive your money.

The Bucket Strategy provides a simple solution that protects against many of the common behavioral biases using an easy-to-understand methodology.

3: How Do You Effectively Manage The Bucket Strategy?

Fritz:  

I’ve written two posts on how I manage The Bucket Strategy, one written in a Bull market and one in a Bear Market.  I’ll summarize the key elements of managing the buckets below but would encourage you to read those posts for more details. 

First, it’s important to touch on the starting point, as discussed in Post 1 of this discussion with Big ERN and in the first post of The Bucket Strategy Series on my site. The starting point dictates the Asset Allocation, as determined by the size of each bucket.  From Post 1:

For the sake of an example, let’s assume you hold 3 years of cash (Bucket 1), 6 years of bonds (Bucket 2), and everything else in stocks (Bucket 3).   If your portfolio equals 30 years of spending, the asset allocation becomes:

I maintain Bucket 1 cash in a stand-alone CapitalOne360 money market account and set up an automated ACH transfer every month (my “Retirement Paycheck”).  By simply comparing my balance over time, I can quickly determine my spending level.  For example, I can subtract the 3/31/22 balance from the starting position on 1/1/22 to determine my retirement spending in Q1 22.  As part of my refill process, I also check my current Asset Allocation using Personal Capital and incorporate rebalancing considerations into my refill decision.

In a Bull Market, I will refill the amount of spending each quarter, selecting either stocks or bonds based on which has outperformed in the quarter (using Asset Allocation as the guide). For the sake of simplicity, I’ll provide examples assuming refills are conducted only on 12/31 of each year.  Here is an example of how I would refill in a Bull Market:

In this example, you can see Bucket 1 has been refilled to 3 years of spending (+$40K), but the cash allocation declines to 9% given the overall portfolio’s growth from 30 years to 33.5 years of spending. Stocks have been rebalanced from 75.2% to 70% ($70k rebalanced, with $30k to bonds and $40k to cash), and bonds have been increased from 18.8% to 21.0%.  

In essence, maintaining Bucket 1 at the 3 years of spending in a Bull Market results in a reverse glide path approach, with the cash bucket falling as a % of the AA and the bond/equity portion increasing over time.  Assuming the growth of the portfolio exceeds the rate of inflation, this phenomenon would also be exhibited if spending increases at the rate of inflation, though at a slower rate than shown in the example above.

In a Bear Market, I will review my portfolio to see if there are any holdings that have had a positive return from the date of the last refill.  I compare Asset Allocation vs. target, but allow actual allocation %’s to float in a range with a “floor/ceiling” approach. Depending on the results, I’m content to skip the quarterly refill and draw down the cash in Bucket 1.  This avoids selling positions in a bear market and provides some protection against SORR.  The following is an example. 

In this case, since both stocks and bonds have declined but remain near the targeted AA %’s, Bucket 1 is not refilled and cash is drawn down from 10% to 8.4%.  The entire portfolio has declined from 30 years to 23.9 years of spending, but no stocks or bonds have been sold to fund retirement spending (providing some SORR protection).

To complete the example, following is what Year 3 would look like assuming a market recovery (Stocks up 15%, Bonds up 5%).  For comparison, I’ve included in the right-hand columns an example using a strict SAA approach (assumes the same starting point, but maintaining 70/20/10 allocation throughout, as I believe Karsten would recommend)

By comparing the two approaches, you can see The Bucket Strategy actually results in a slightly higher balance over the three-year period ($1,027,000 vs. $1,025,940), given that no stocks or bonds were sold during the downturn with The Bucket Strategy approach.

In reality, there is very little difference between the two approaches. In my mind, it simply comes down to the preference of the retiree and which concept is more easily understood in their mind, along with the comfort of knowing you can target whatever size cash bucket best suits your risk tolerance.  I find it easy to explain the bucket concept to my wife (as do my readers, based on comments received), and that’s a yardstick that matters to me.  In essence, The Bucket Strategy is simply a modified SAA approach, with an increased focus on the management of the cash balance in Bucket 1.

On a side note:  starting in mid-2022, I also redirected any interest/dividend payments to be automatically transferred into cash (instead of automatically reinvesting) in my After-Tax accounts, which reduces the amount of selling required to refill the bucket at quarter-end.  I continue to automatically reinvest dividends in my Roth and IRA’s.

Karsten:

I don’t use a bucket strategy, so I have little to manage. In fact, I firmly believe that you can’t effectively manage a mostly ineffective strategy. Thus, I like to take the opportunity to rephrase the question into this:

“Why is the Bucket Strategy Mostly Ineffective?”

The answer to that question is that in historical safe withdrawal simulations, a bucket strategy would not systematically hedge against Sequence Risk. For some historical cohorts, a bucket strategy indeed outperforms a simple fixed weights SAA. But in other cohorts, a bucket strategy would lag the SAA. Thus, the bucket strategy can potentially even exacerbate Sequence Risk.

I also found that the bucket strategy’s relative performance is often susceptible to small parameter settings changes. Also noteworthy, a glidepath systematically outperforms both the SAA and the bucket strategy.

Showing all my detailed simulations would go beyond the scope of this Fritz vs. ERN discussion because it would involve a lot of charts and a minimum of 3,000 words on its own. Watch out for a detailed future post in this SWR Series. So, in today’s post, let me give you the 30,000-foot view. Let me outline the intuition for why the bucket strategy would have had such inconsistent performance in simulations. 

Here’s a numerical example that’s rich enough to convey the intuition but simple enough to handle and not lose the forest for the trees:

And that’s it. There are no other bells and whistles like shuffling around dividends or interest payments. That is all just a gimmick, anyway. And in the worst case, it may even hurt the investor – more on that in a future post.

In any case, there’s your Bucket Strategy. And we can now check if and how this approach would help us during a bear market and the subsequent recovery.

Let’s assume that the safe asset gives us a 3% return every year, and the risky investment goes through a 3-year bear market and 5-year recovery, as in the numerical example below. If you think the bucket strategy would perfectly hedge against this Sequence Risk, you’d be very much mistaken. Quite the opposite, after eight years, the bucket strategy lags the SAA fixed weight asset allocation by over $3,000. Not a significant difference, but considering that a bucket strategy is often misleadingly marketed as the panacea against Sequence Risk, even a “SoRR Insurance,” this is very disappointing. Let’s see in detail why the Bucket Strategy performs so poorly:

Update 2/5/2023: As requested by a reader below, I posted the Excel Spreadsheet here in case people want to check the underlying math and play around with their own return assumptions.

The outperformance of the Bucket strategy relative to SAA is all tied to how future returns correlate with your current asset weight deviations from the fixed 70/30 SAA. And your current tactical asset weight correlates with past asset returns. Does that sound familiar? The bucket strategy functions like a momentum strategy. As I outlined above, that’s a form of TAA. And TAA based on such a naïve, crude, and purely backward-looking rule, i.e., scaling back the risky asset weight after an extended drawdown, is always hit-or-miss.

Sometimes you get it right, and the stock market continues to fall, so the momentum strategy pays off. But if the market recovers quickly, like after the Great Depression bottom in 1932, the 1987 meltdown, or the GFC bottom in March 2009, you got caught on the wrong foot; the Bucket Strategy vastly underperforms during the recovery period.

It’s nice to see that the intuition and mechanics of this simple numerical thought experiment are also present in my more complicated simulations with three assets (stocks, bonds, money market) and all the other bells and whistles, like monthly vs. quarterly. vs. annual withdrawals, occasional rebalancing, “buying the dip,” upper and lower bands on the asset weights, transfers of dividends and interest income, etc. (stay tuned for a future post on my blog). All those other ingredients are just clutter and distract from the essential mechanism of the Bucket Strategy: asset return momentum. Sometimes it works, and sometimes, it backfires. It’s the main reason why the Bucket Strategy cannot consistently beat the simple SAA assumption of fixed asset weights.

And I want to stress when I say that the Bucket Strategy is ineffective, I don’t mean that it is so bad that you shall never employ it. I could have reshuffled some of the annual returns to construct an example where the BS outperforms SAA by $1,000, like in Fritz’s example above. The bucket approach is unable to beat the SAA reliably and consistently. You can still use it, but don’t expect miraculous results in hedging against Sequence Risk. And absolutely don’t expect the Bucket Strategy to offer full SoRR Insurance.

The entire discussion reminds me of the misleadingly labeled “Yield Shield.” Raise your dividend yield to about 4%, and you now have a perfect “shield” against Sequence Risk. Only you don’t. It’s a hit-or-miss strategy, too. Sometimes you do better than a plain old index fund strategy. Sometimes you do worse, most recently during the Global Financial Crisis and in 2020. I pointed out that issue in Parts 29, 30, and 31 of my series. I’m not saying that you consistently underperform the passive index fund approach with either the Yield Shield or the Bucket Strategy. But you cannot consistently beat the passive approach with such gimmicks, either. And even in the cases when momentum works in your favor, the impact on your portfolio is so minor (e.g. just $1,000 in Fritz’s example) that you can’t really claim victory over Sequence Risk. This goes back to the point I made in Part 1 about how the sizing of the TAA bets is insufficient to make a difference in your safe withdrawal rate, even if you generate a little bit of TAA momentum alpha.

Also, just like the Yield Shield proponents, Fritz declares that his strategy is “working.” But Fritz is vague about what he means by “working.” If “working” means he hasn’t run out of money yet, that’s a very low bar. That’s not what our discussion was about. We need to set the bar much higher: the comparison should be, is the bucket strategy better than a simple SAA approach? Fritz didn’t provide any simulations to present how he would have personally fared with the much simpler SAA approach since 2018. And granted, I presented only one numerical example and had to defer the detailed simulations to a later post.

But if you are a regular reader of my blog, you will remember Part 39 of my SWR Series; I performed very detailed simulations to study a related issue: how changing the rebalancing frequency would have changed the experience of historical retirement cohorts. It’s the same hit-or-miss experience: sometimes, the asset weight drift helps you when you can milk that asset return momentum. Sometimes the drift hurts you when asset returns go through extreme whipsaws. This lack of reliable alpha relative to SAA is true in “made-up” numerical examples and historical cohorts. And I will show in a future post that the same holds for the bucket strategy.

4: If The Bucket Strategy is a gimmick, what’s the better strategy, and how do you manage it?

Karsten:

The way to manage Sequence Risk is to a) acknowledge that it exists and b) understand when Sequence Risk is more likely and less likely. If you retire while equities have been in a long bull market, you likely want to start with a lower initial safe withdrawal rate. But on the flip side, if equities have already fallen by enough, for example, in 2022, we can also afford to raise that safe withdrawal rate; see my recent post in the SWR Series on this topic.

But of course, there is relatively little we can do to insure against Sequence Risk fully. The best we can hope for is to hedge against Sequence Risk partially. The one method I’ve mentioned in our exchange that appears to be consistently beneficial during all past bear markets is the glidepath model. And indeed, I have marginally raised my risky asset share over the last four years. Post-retirement, I now have two bear markets under my belt. Knock on wood; those downturns were mild enough not to threaten my finances. Quite the opposite, our portfolio is up significantly despite the market volatility. We can now afford to take slightly more risk. But to new retirees, I still recommend using caution right around the retirement date. Start with a somewhat larger safe asset bucket and ease yourself back into risky assets as time progresses.

Another route to enhance retirement success is to think outside the box, i.e., employ asset classes outside the spectrum of assets in your standard retirement calculators. Real estate would be one option. But it’s not for everyone. I certainly don’t want the hassle of managing the day-to-day operations of a rental property portfolio. So, we have shifted about 12% of our investments into private equity real estate funds. If interested, please get in touch with Reliant Capital – accredited investors only, $250k minimum investment. We have less control over the investments, but we also don’t have to waste time dealing with tenants and plumbing problems on Christmas Eve. I also like the broad diversification over different regions and multiple properties. Moreover, these large multi-family properties offer enough diversification over idiosyncratic tenant risk. So far, we are happy with our investments and will likely shift more of our portfolio into this asset class.

Another approach involves an “alpha strategy” with a better prospect for adding excess returns than an unreliable TAA momentum approach. I have been running an options trading strategy with a neat track record. The strategy involves selling put options on the S&P 500 index. You trade derivatives on margin; thus, my strategy doesn’t require me to shift any of my existing assets; rather, I trade the options strategy on top of my current portfolio. The idea is to enhance the returns of my existing 75/25 portfolio and add about 1.5-2.0% additional returns with only small correlations to my existing asset classes; see the efficient frontier diagram below. The details of the strategy would go beyond the scope of today’s post, but here’s a link to my most recent write-up about this strategy.

You cannot shift the efficient frontier that far with a hit-or-miss TAA strategy based on backward-looking momentum signals and applied to just 10% or so of your portfolio. But that said, I don’t recommend any options trading strategy unless you have extensive knowledge in derivatives trading and risk management. It’s probably a bridge too far for most folks in the FIRE community. But I plan to offer this “short-put yield” strategy to a small number of high-net-worth clients at a future date, so stay tuned!

Fritz:

I like and support the concept of the Glidepath model and believe it’s actually a concept that supports The Bucket Strategy being a sound strategy.  As I mentioned, it’s my belief that The Bucket Strategy naturally leads to a Glidepath model, assuming the growth of the portfolio exceeds the SWR over time.  If one keeps Bucket 1 at a maximum of 3 years and the market outperforms the SWR (as it should over time), the retiree’s risk allocation will, by definition, increase.  In fact, the only time the Bucket Strategy would not lead to increased exposure to risk assets is if the market were underperforming, which is the time you would be pleased to not have the additional risk exposure.

It seems to me that The Bucket Strategy is perfectly aligned with the Glidepath strategy, given that it will lead to an increase in risk assets (assuming a rate of return > withdrawal rate).  In a longer-term timeframe in which growth exceeds the SWR, a retiree using The Bucket Strategy would see an increasing risk exposure with time, which is exactly what the Glidepath model dictates.  

An interesting side note:  This phenomenon could lead to drastic changes after the retiree begins drawing Social Security, assuming the buckets were “sized” based on pre-SS figures.  Using the asset allocation example from earlier, and assuming the same portfolio size, let’s assume a retiree now has Social Security income that covers 50% of their spending (and their spending stays the same).  By definition, this would lead to a 50% reduction in the annual portfolio withdrawals.   Theoretically, there could be a huge increase in equity exposure as the portfolio grows from 30 years of spending to 60 years of spending (a simplified example to make a point):

I realize that’s an extreme example (to make a point) and many are already using Social Security and their portfolio to cover their spending.  If they’re already drawing SS and using a SWR of 3.3% (1 year of spending from a 30-year portfolio) to cover their spending, they obviously wouldn’t see the impact shown above.  Rather, I point it out for those retirees who have calculated their Bucket Strategy on their pre-SS scenario and haven’t thought about how the introduction of SS changes the numbers.

The Bottom Line:  The Bucket Strategy is not a cheap gimmick.  It’s a sound strategy, with some defense against SORR, elements of the often-referenced Glidepath strategy, and ease of execution for DIY retirees.  The strategy allows a retiree to cover their retirement spending with a minimal amount of management and stress and will allow them to sleep soundly through all but the worst of the inevitable bear markets we’ll face through our retirement years.

PS – Finally, I should stress that my goal with The Bucket Strategy is not to “achieve Alpha.”  Rather, it’s to have a strategy that allows me to sleep well, enjoy living in my retirement years, and know in advance what changes should be made to my portfolio based on market performance. To me, the Bucket Strategy achieves that goal, and knowing it should also lead to a Glidepath allocation (which has been proven by Big ERN to be the most effective model) gives me the assurance that the returns will be sufficient to support my lifetime spending needs.

5: Final final thoughts?

Karsten and Fritz: 

We hope you enjoyed our exchange. This wasn’t exactly the “celebrity deathmatch” that some readers expected or feared. We really agree on most issues. We are good buddies, and we respect each other’s work. We also frequently refer to and link to each other’s blogs. One of the commenters in Part 1 put it best; see below. Well, ThomH, your comment is a worthy final word that made us warm and fuzzy, too. And we hope to see you and your wife in Ecuador!

Thanks for stopping by today! Please leave your comments and suggestions below! Also, make sure you check out the other parts of the series; see here for a guide to the different parts so far!

Picture credit: pixabay.com

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