October 14, 2020
Welcome to a new installment of the Safe Withdrawal Rate Series! 40 Parts already! If this is the first time you encounter this series, I recommend you check out the landing page here to find your way around.
Today’s post is about a question I’ve encountered quite a few times recently. If Sequence of Return Risk means that you face the danger of retirement ruin from liquidating (equity) shares during a down market early during retirement, why not avoid touching your principal altogether and simply live off the dividends only in retirement? Sounds reasonable, right?
But by solving the “running out of money” problem we create a bunch of new questions, such as:
- Will the principal keep up with inflation over a typical retirement horizon?
- Will your dividend payments keep up with inflation over time?
- How much volatility in the dividend payments would you have to expect?
So, in other words, the “dividend only” strategy – simple as it may seem – is somewhat more complicated than your good old Trinity-style 4% Rule simulations. In the Trinity Study, failure means you run out of money before the end of the retirement horizon – simple as that. With the dividend-only approach, failure can come in many different shapes. For example, you may not run out of money but the volatility of dividends could be too high and/or you face deep and multi-year (or even multi-decade!) long drawdowns in dividend income and/or you have to live like a miser early on because the dividend yield is so low. All those are failures of sorts, too. Then, how good or how bad is this dividend-only approach? Let’s take a look…