October 26, 2020
A few weeks ago I wrote the post “Do we really have to lower our Safe Withdrawal Rate to 0.5% now?” about the pretty ridiculous claim that the Safe Withdrawal Rate should go all the way down to just 0.5%, in light of today’s ultra-low interest rates. The claim was transparently false and it was great fun to debunk it. But recently I came across another proclamation of the type “We have to rethink the Safe Withdrawal Rate” – this time proposing to raise it all the way up to 5% and even 5.5%! Well, count me a skeptic on this one, too. Though I’d have to tread a bit more cautiously here because the 5.5% SWR claim doesn’t come from some random internet troll but from the “Father of the 4% Rule” himself, Bill Bengen. He’s been doing the rounds recently advocating for a 5% and even 5.5% Safe Withdrawal Rate:
- In September in a piece he wrote for FA-mag with a recommendation to raise the SWR to 5%.
- On October 1, the same article, reprinted almost verbatim under a different title in the same magazine: “Choosing The Highest Safe Withdrawal Rate At Retirement”
- On October 13 on Michael Kitces’ podcast, Bengen made another explicit SWR recommendation: “[I]n a very low inflation environment like we have now, if we had modest stocks, I wouldn’t be recommending 4.5%, I’d probably be recommending 5.25%, 5.5%” It’s not clear what made him raise the SWR by another 0.25-0.50%, though.
And the whole discussion was quickly picked up in the personal finance and FIRE community:
- On Ben Carlson’s blog a few days ago: “What If The 4% Rule For Retirement Withdrawals is Now the 5% Rule?”
- On the “My Own Advisor” blog: “Weekend Reading – Biggest stocks and ETFs, OAS, 4% or 5% rules”
- Retire by 40: Did FIRE Just Get Much Easier?
- And in a recent article on MarketWatch, even though in that article, Bengen took down the SWR to 5.0% again.
The main rationale for increasing the SWR: inflation has been really tame recently and will stay subdued over the coming years and even decades. That’s his forecast, not mine! Hence, Bengen makes the case that we’d have to make smaller “cost-of-living adjustments” (COLA) to our withdrawals. Smaller future aggregate withdrawals afford you larger initial withdrawals, according to Bengen. But as you might have guessed, the calculations that justify the significantly higher withdrawal rate don’t appear so convincing once look at the details…
Continue reading “Can we raise our Safe Withdrawal Rate when inflation is low? – SWR Series Part 41”