October was a scary month for stocks: the worst monthly S&P 500 return in seven years! And November is off to a volatile start as well! We haven’t even seen a real correction yet but apparently, the drop was bad enough for me to got inquiries from friends and former colleagues asking how I’m doing with our portfolio and if (and when?) I’m going to come back to the office again! Sorry, not anytime soon! As I detailed in the post two weeks ago, we are not too concerned about one month of bad returns early in retirement.
Some friends and readers of this blog were specifically concerned that my options trading strategy might have been hit badly by the wild swings. After all, I’m doing this with a little bit more than 2x leverage and with the market down about 7% does that mean we lost more than 14%? Of course not! To all the rubbernecks out there who suspect we had a bad car wreck in our portfolio last month, I’m happy to report that we actually made a small profit with this strategy in October! And continued to do so in November! How awesome is that!? Well, there were a few close calls but I was able to escape any major damage. It took some HoudiniSkills (or luck???), hence the title image of escape artist Harry Houdini (Picture Credit: Lomography).
Unless your internet was out or you’ve been living under a rock for a few weeks you must have heard about the earthquake created by the Suze Orman interview on Paula Pant’s Afford Anything podcast. Lots of people have weighed in already. I participated in a few discussions here and there on Twitter and on other blogs but I also have a few things to say that can’t be distilled into a short tweet or blog comment. So here’s a short blog post with my thoughts.
Well, you can’t blame her for beating around the bush; Suze started the podcast proclaiming that she hates the FIRE movement. And the reaction in our community was swift. And brutal! Suze Orman was called a buffoon and worse names. She just doesn’t get what we are all about in the FIRE movement! OK, let’s congratulate ourselves on what the royal smackdown we gave the Matriarch of Money… Are we done patting ourselves on the back? Great, so let’s face reality again. Sorry to tell you all, but we merely convinced the folks who need no more convincing, i.e., other members in the FIRE community. And I have the concern that, wait for it…
…to a neutral observer, Suze Orman won the argument!
The average reader/viewer who’s never heard about the FIRE movement walks away with the impression that the great money expert Suze Orman just schooled a bunch of uneducated financial clowns. Sadly, people might get the false impression that early retirement requires such an insurmountable large pile of cash that it’s not even worth trying to pursue FIRE. I’m not saying that this is true because nothing could be farther from the truth but it might be the perception to a lot of people unfamiliar with FIRE. To me, it sounded like Suze wanted to ruffle some feathers and that’s why she approached Paula and volunteered to go on the podcast! Did she use us to get herself into the spotlight and sell her strange “work until you’re 70” narrative again?
So, we got a lot of work ahead of us dealing with the Suzes of the world! Notice I’m using the plural here. Most of us are probably not famous enough to talk to Suze in person. But we are still going to encounter a lot Suze lookalikes in our lives; relatives, friends, neighbors, colleagues etc. who have an equally unrealistic and bombastic “you need at least a gazillion dollars to retire early” mentality. Here are a few suggestions on how to discuss FIRE when encountering a skeptic like Suze…
Whole Life Insurance has a bad reputation in the FIRE community! Does anyone here have a Whole Life Insurance (WLI) policy? Anyone? It seems so toxic that even if anyone had a WLI policy they’d be afraid to admit it for fear of ridicule. I only recently “came out of the closet” when I was chatting with folks at the April CampFI over lunch and the topic came up. People were astonished: Huh? Big ERN has a WLI policy? And his wife, too? Isn’t WLI only for naïve and unsophisticated folks that fall for the insurance salespeople’s pitches? Sometimes! But just like many all other issues in personal finance, there’s rarely a simple, clear-cut and universally applicable recommendation. I would argue that WLI is not a bad option if certain conditions are satisfied! And it’s a loooong laundry list of issues to consider and conditions to satisfy. I came up with no less than ten things to consider and in an absolutely shameful, “clickbaity” kind of way, I call them the Ten Commandments of Whole Life Insurance.
Eight weeks of retirement already! Actually, a little bit more by the time this goes online, but it was exactly eight weeks when I started writing this. Early retirement is a lot more than number crunching and safe withdrawal simulations, so today it’s time to reflect on the first two months of Early Retirement. Everybody’s experience will be different and here’s what have I learned, what surprised me and what didn’t surprise me…
Welcome back! It’s time to add another piece to the Safe Withdrawal Rate Series (see here for Part 1). After churning out over 20 parts in this series so far I wanted to sit back and reflect on some of the things I’ve learned from my research. And something occurred to me: Withdrawal strategies in retirement aren’t easy! Contrast that with Mr. Money Mustache’s Shockingly Simple Math of Early Retirement post and Jim Collins’ Equity Series that was rewritten into a book The Simple Path to Wealth. Very influential posts and they are among my favorites, too! So, naturally, I agree 100% that saving for retirement is relatively simple!
Saving for Early/traditional retirement: three simple ingredients!
Disclaimer: Saving for retirement with a savings rate of 50% or more as is common in the FIRE crowd requires a great deal of discipline. Especially over a 10+ year time span. It’s not easy! Only the math behind it is simple! It’s a bit like dieting; conceptually very simple – healthy diet plus exercise – but it’s not that easy to implement and stick to the plan!
Then, shouldn’t retirement be just as simple? Why am I making everything so complicated? I’m approaching 30 parts in this series, many of them with heavy-duty math and simulations and still a few topics on my to-do list! Am I making everything more complicated than necessary? Am I just trying to show off my math skills? Of course not! Just because saving for retirement is relatively simple it doesn’t mean we can just extrapolate that simplicity to the withdrawals during retirement. And that’s what today’s post is about: I like to go through some of the fundamental factors that make withdrawing money more complicated than saving for retirement. Think of this as an introduction to the SWR Series that I would have written back then if I had known what I know now! 🙂 Ironically, some of the issues that make saving for retirement so simple are the very reason that withdrawing during retirement is more challenging! So, let’s take a closer look…
Welcome back! I hope everyone had a great 4th of July Holiday (U.S. Independence Day for non-U.S. readers)! Before we get started I have a small favor to ask: At the upcoming FinCon in Orlando in September, it’s time again for the Annual Plutus Awards. As you may recall, last year, my small blog was one of the finalists in the “Blog of the Year” category, thanks to the support of the many faithful readers. If you like what I’m doing here on the blog please nominate the ERN blog again in the relevant categories! Please head to the Plutus Award Nomination site and enter your ballot! You can nominate up to three choices per category and you don’t even have to fill out all categories. Only one submission per IP address, please! Thanks in advance for your support!
Today I have a case study about whole life insurance. Not the most popular investment vehicle among the FIRE enthusiasts, see, for example, an excellent summary of the disadvantages of Whole Life by White Coat Investor (though, for full disclosure, I don’t agree with all of his claims and calculations). But let’s face it: a lot of folks have policies and now wonder what to do about them. Here’s a case study about the tradeoffs when considering either cashing out the policy or keeping it intact. Let’s look at the numbers…
For today’s post, I thought it was time to add another installment to the Safe Withdrawal Rate Series. 25 posts already! What have I learned after so many posts? Well, I started out as a skeptic about the so-called “4% Rule” and I thought it might be the time to poke a little bit of fun at the “makers of the 4% Rule.” Just to be clear, this post and the title are a bit tongue-in-cheek. Obviously, the “makers” of the 4% Rule, the academics, financial planners and bloggers that have popularized the rule aren’t part of any conspiracy to keep us in the dark. Sometimes I have the feeling they are still in the dark themselves! So here are my top ten things the Makers of the 4% Rule don’t want you to know… Continue reading “Ten things the “Makers” of the 4% Rule don’t want you to know (SWR Series Part 26)”→
Hi everybody! I’m back from a two-week blogging hiatus! Things got busy at the office right before I left and we also had to prepare for our road trip and ERN Family World Tour, currently in beautiful New Mexico and moving on to Texas soon! I was amazed at how little work I got done while traveling! Early retirement is a lot more work than I thought!
In any case, today’s topic has been on my mind for a while: What would be reasons to hold individual stocks? Not all but the majority of folks in the FIRE community apparently favor just plain passive index investing and I have been an index investor myself for the longest time. But occasionally we should definitely question our assumptions. Especially those that sound like the good old “We’ve always done it this way!” And one “excuse” to look into this topic is the ChooseFI podcast featuring Brian Feroldi a few weeks ago. Brian talked about his adventures as a stock picker! I thought it was a great episode, though, of course, I didn’t agree with everything. But it got me thinking about what would be good reasons and what would be not so good reasons for me to abandon my index-only approach. Let’s look at my favorite eight…
Actually, not one ETF, but two! Or more! How can there be a need for a new ETF? Aren’t there enough already? Earlier this year, Motley Fool argued there are too many ETFs (1,929 at that time, probably over 2,000 by now) and they are covering pretty much every thinkable (and unthinkable) benchmark. Soon we might have more ETFs than publicly traded equities in the U.S., how crazy is that??? Why would I propose a new ETF that doesn’t already exist?
Here’s some background. I’m an index investor at heart and I like tax optimization. For so many years now, I’ve held equity index ETFs and Mutual Funds in both taxable accounts and tax-deferred accounts (both retirement and deferred compensation at work). It’s so painful to see the dividend payments in the taxable accounts getting taxed every year. Sure, it’s only about 1.9% dividend yield in the S&P500 right now but for us, that’s taxed at 15% federal, 10+% state (California!) and 3.8% Obamacare tax, for a total of almost 30% marginal tax! Isn’t there a better way? Sure! Simply put the taxable equity allocation into stocks that pay zero (or close to zero) dividends and keep the high-dividend stocks in the tax-deferred account where they can compound in peace and be taxed only once upon withdrawal rather than every year along the way! So, the two ETFs that I wish existed would exactly replicate the S&P500 if held in equal shares. But individually they’d have non-index weights and one would hold the equities with the lowest dividend yield and the other with the high-yield equities!
Notice that most folks already do this tax optimization across asset classes: Hold the tax-inefficient asset classes (bonds, REITs, etc.) in tax-deferred accounts and equities in taxable accounts. So, why not do this within the equity asset class as well for additional tax efficiency? How much extra after-tax return would we get out of this? Let’s look at the numbers…
