Tag: investing

Can a Rising Equity Glidepath Save the 4% Safe Withdrawal Rate Over a 60 Year Retirement? (Guest Post by Dr. David Graham)

Welcome back to another guest post. Dr. David Graham, over at FIPhysician has been on a roll. His spike in productivity has been the perfect “hedge” against my drop in productivity while traveling this summer, so when he offered me to write a follow-up on his very well-received guest post a few weeks ago, I was all for it. This current post is about adding a “glidepath” to your retirement portfolio and how and why this would change the success prospects over a 60-year retirement horizon. Over to you, Dr. Graham…

In my last post, I show a 4% Safe Withdrawal Rate (SWR) is actually NOT safe over 60-years (assumptions, assumptions). A more conservative 3.25% SWR does ok. On the other hand, if the asset allocation is increased from 60/40 to 90/10 stock to bond ratio, a 4% SWR thrives again. ERN advises, however, that a 90/10 portfolio sets you up for even more Sequence of Return Risk (SORR). SORR describes the long-term detrimental effects initial negative market returns have on overall portfolio success. Even if the stock market eventually recovers, selling part of your equity portfolio at rock-bottom prices can lead to premature failure of the withdrawal strategy.

What protects from SORR yet permits a higher SWR? A rising equity glidepath is one possibility. Let’s look at the details…

Continue reading “Can a Rising Equity Glidepath Save the 4% Safe Withdrawal Rate Over a 60 Year Retirement? (Guest Post by Dr. David Graham)” →

A Different Way to Plan Retirement – Guest Post on “Monte Carlo” Simulations by “Gasem”

Today we have another guest post, this time by our long-time reader “Gasem.” I’m sure most of you who have looked through the comments section here and at a number of other blogs would have noticed his comments. They are always highly insightful. He’s also a prolific writer on his own blog MD on FIRE, which I highly recommend. And if you’re not a Gasem-fan yet, I suggest you check out the What’s Up Next? podcast episode earlier this year where he was featured together with Susan from FIIdeas and VagabondMD. 

In any case, we had a discussion about using Monte Carlo Simulations to gauge safe withdrawal rates following David Graham’s guest post two weeks ago. And Gasem volunteered to write a guest post here detailing his approach measuring retirement risks. So without further ado, Dr. “Gasem,” please take over…

David Graham recently wrote a great post on this site regarding the 4% rule. What is the 4% rule really? You save 25x your yearly need and put it at some risk in a portfolio and then try to extract 30 years of value from the portfolio by extracting 4%/yr. 25x is the target (initial) principal. You have to inflation-adjust the withdrawal, and then you risk the principal at some interest rate above inflation. Let’s say you have 1M, you pull out 4% above inflation (and SORR doesn’t eat your lunch) you will preserve your capital and thus still have 1M 25 years later. You can re-retire for another 25 years on that 1M (capital preservation!) and still pull out 4%. So if inflation is 2% you need to make 6% on your money to run this money machine. 6% is the leverage on your future, That’s the “math” behind the 4% projection.

What’s the problem you say? The problem is volatility. The problem is the market can not guarantee 6% return and 2% inflation. Return is all over the map as is inflation. One year you may make 12%, the next year lose 20%. One year inflation maybe 2% and 5 years later 13% (1979). If you’re lucky it’ll work out you tell yourself, probably will work out, I read it on the internet! So what’s the probability? That’s where “Monte Carlo Simulations” come in. Let’s take a look… Continue reading “A Different Way to Plan Retirement – Guest Post on “Monte Carlo” Simulations by “Gasem”” →

Does A 4% Withdrawal Rate Survive a 60-Year Retirement? (Guest Post by Dr. David Graham)

You might have noticed that I haven’t published any guest posts for a while. I even explicitly state on my contact page that I’m no longer interested in publishing any guest posts. But every once in a while you make an exception to the rule. David Graham, actually, Dr. David Graham (FIPhysician), has been on a roll with a bunch of top-notch guest posts on other personal finance blogs; first writing for the White Coat Investor blog on Roth Conversions, then two guest posts on Physician on FIRE, first on Asset Location in Retirement, and then on Buffer Stock and Bucket Strategies to alleviate Sequence Risk in retirement. All really important topics! And after sending a few emails back and forth with the good Dr. Graham we agreed on a topic for him to publish a guest post here on the ERN blog, Instead of using backward-looking historical return windows, as I would normally do in my SWR Series, why not check the sustainability of the 4% Rule with forward-looking return projections? Vanguard and a lot of financial companies publish those every year. Sounds like an interesting exercise! So, without further ado, please take over Dr. Graham…

As we all know, ERN is the man when it comes to Safe Withdrawal Rate (SWR) and FIRE. Reading between the lines, he has a different opinion on SWRs for a 60-year retirement vs. a more traditional 30-year plan. Obviously, using only historical data, it is more difficult to study SWR with rolling 60-year stock and bond returns than 30-year periods. Nevertheless, FIRE often subscribes to the 4% rule despite a prolonged period of income demands on the accumulated nest egg. In order to further understanding of the 4% rule over a longer than usual planned retirement, let’s visualize the 4% rule over a 60-year period and see what we can learn. Continue reading “Does A 4% Withdrawal Rate Survive a 60-Year Retirement? (Guest Post by Dr. David Graham)” →

My thoughts on Small-Cap and Value Stocks

People have often asked me what I think about value and small-cap equity portfolios. So, this is a post I always wanted to write but kept postponing because I never knew how to best frame it. But now I have the perfect excuse to write it; last week, I listened to the ChooseFI podcast and they had Paul Merriman as a guest in episode 130. Paul Merriman is one of the big proponents of small-cap and value stocks. Of course, they talked about a variety of topics and I thoroughly enjoyed most of the discussion. I’m completely on the same page with Paul, Jonathan and Brad on a wide range of issues. For example:

  • Choose index funds over actively managed funds
  • Take emotions, especially fear and greed out of investment decisions
  • Young investors benefit from Dollar Cost Averaging. Specifically, a market crash early in your investing life can even be beneficial, at least under specific assumptions, as I wrote earlier this year in “How can a drop in the stock market possibly be good for investors?“
  • Young investors shouldn’t even think about bonds in the portfolio when starting out. Use 100% equities, use as much risk as possible.

But there’s one thing I vehemently disagreed with! Paul Merriman seems to suggest that by using a “better” or “smarter” equity allocation, specifically, overweighting the value and small-cap styles – both domestically and internationally – we can increase our expected return by two full percentage points a year. And just to be sure, this is not stock picking but simply asset class/style picking, all implemented with passive ETFs. Two percentage points of extra return? Let that sink in! 2% a year can compound to a large sum over the years and then you retire and you get extra 50% of withdrawals when you add 2 percentage points to your 4% safe withdrawal rate. Pretty impressive! There’s only one problem: Merriman’s recommended portfolio didn’t return those two extra percentage points over the past few decades. And there are good reasons to believe that you will not gather those 2% extra returns going forward either. Let me explain why… Continue reading “My thoughts on Small-Cap and Value Stocks” →

How To “Lie” With Personal Finance

“Lies, damned lies and statistics” (Mark Twain)

“Do not trust any statistic you did not fake yourself” (Winston Churchill)

There is a classic book called “How to lie with Statistics” that I read many, many years ago (actually decades ago!) as a college student. If you’re ever looking for an inexpensive but fun and impactful present for a young student/graduate with the hidden agenda of getting that person interested in math and statistics, this is the one! The book taught me to take with a grain of salt pretty much anything and everything number-related. Anywhere! Whether it’s in the news or in the Personal Finance blogging world and even (particularly?!) in academia. I’m not sure if I was already a severely suspicious (paranoid?) person before reading this or the book turned me into the person I’m today. So, inspired by that book, I thought it would be a nice idea to write a blog post about the different ways numbers are misrepresented in the FIRE/Personal Finance arena. And just to be sure, this post is not to be understood as a manual for fudging numbers, but – in the spirit of the “How to Lie With Statistics” classic – serves as a manual on how to spot the personal finance “lies” out there!

And there’s a lot of material! Probably enough for at least one more followup post, so for today’s post, I look at just four different way of how quantitative financial issues are frequently fudged in the personal finance world. And a side note about the slightly attention-grabbing title I used here: Well, I put the word “Lie” in quotation marks to show to the faint-hearted that this is a bit tongue-in-cheek. I could have written, “fudge the numbers” or “Enron-accounting” or “How we delude ourselves in personal finance,” or something like that. Also, Hanlon’s Razor (“don’t attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence”) comes to mind here, but I’m not sure if those faint-hearted folks feel that incompetence is a significantly more benign explanation than malice.

So, let’s look at some of my favorite examples of how people lie to themselves (and others) in the realm of personal finance…

Continue reading “How To “Lie” With Personal Finance” →

Where are they now? A Case Study Update with “Captain Ron”

From 2017 until early 2018 I ran a series of ten case studies for readers who volunteered to open their books and serve a real-world safe withdrawal rate guineapigs. The second case study in July 2017 was for Captain Ron (not his real name) who was planning to FIRE and enjoy early retirement with his wife on a sailboat! That title picture you see up there, that’s their actual boat! Sounds like a great adventure, not just the financial aspects but also the lifestyle changes are daunting! So, how did that all go? Captain Ron just sent me an update on how life has been, so Ron, please take over the wheel…

***

We retired in September 2017 as planned and are really enjoying life. Financially things are great and we have adjusted to the sailing life, but that first year of cruising was a surprisingly difficult transition. More on that later.

Continue reading “Where are they now? A Case Study Update with “Captain Ron”” →

A Bond/CD Ladder Toolkit

A while ago I created a little toolkit to design my own bond and/or CD ladder. With a bond/CD ladder, by the way, I mean holding a portfolio of bonds and/or CDs so the cash flows comprised of maturing CDs/bonds plus interest income exactly matches a specified time series of target cash flows over time. Of course, if you’re regular readers of this blog you know that I’m not too thrilled about investing in bonds or CDs. Yields are just too low, compliments of my former colleagues at the Federal Reserve. But there are still a few interesting applications for bond/CD ladders. Some of them purely for “academic curiosity” and not because I actually want to implement them. So, here would be a few questions I’d try to answer with this toolkit:

  • If I wanted to build my own little “quasi-annuity” to guarantee a certain cash flow for 30 years or so, how much money would I have to set aside today to guarantee that cash flow? This is obviously not because I actually want to do this. As we will see later, the cash outlay today would be so prohibitively high that I’ll prefer to take my chances with the stock market and the Sequence Risk that comes with it!
  • How much of a difference would it make if I required regular cost-of-living adjustments (COLA) along the way rather than getting one fixed nominal “income” along the way?
  • Related to the issue above, if someone already has a corporate pension without COLA, how much would he or she have to set aside to supplement this pension and guarantee a certain COLA, say, 2% a year?
  • When interest rates were higher only a few decades ago, how feasible would it have been to create a bond ladder for retirement? Could we have gotten rid of Sequence Risk completely?
  • If I wanted to hedge my first 5-10 years of early retirement against Sequence Risk and at least partially fund my retirement expenses through a CD ladder, how much money would I have to set aside?

So, today I’ll share that spreadsheet and some of my sample calculations and results. I hope you’ll find value in playing around with it, too… Continue reading “A Bond/CD Ladder Toolkit” →

Yield Curve Inversion: Eight Reasons Why I’m Not Worried Yet

Update 8/22/2019: The 10Y-2Y spread inverted very briefly during the day on 8/14, but finished the day at +0.01%. Am I worried now? Certainly more worried than in April when I wrote this piece. The ISM-PMI index is around 51 – that’s also weaker but not weak enough to worry; everything above 50 is still called expansionary, only below 45 it’s a serious warning sign. Unemployment claims are still very low, which is a good sign. So, this is still “only” a mixed bag. Consistent with a false alarm a la 1998. But the probability of worse things to come has certainly gone up!

Well, there you have it: The Yield Curve inverted last month. Finally! Starting on March 22 and throughout much of last week, short-term interest rates (e.g., the 3 months bills) yielded slightly more than the bond market bellwether, the 10-year Treasury bond.

YieldCurveInversion Chart06
The 10-year yield dropped below the 3-month yield for a few days in March!

People in finance and economics view this with some concern because history has told us that an inverted yield curve is a pretty reliable recession indicator. And I made this point in my post in February 2018: The yield curve shape, especially the slope between longer-term yields (10 years) and the short end (e.g., 2-year yields) is one of my three favorite macro indicators:

Retire at Market Peak Chart01
From last year’s post: Yield Curve slope (10Y vs. 2Y Treasury bonds) over time. A powerful recession early warning signal (1970-2018)!

Also notice that I usually look at the 10-year vs. 2-year yield rather than 3-month spread and that made a bit of a difference recently, more on a little bit that later. But in any case, since I went on the record about the importance of the yield curve and now got several reader requests to comment on this issue, here’s an update: in a nutshell, I’m not yet worried and here are eight reasons why…

Continue reading “Yield Curve Inversion: Eight Reasons Why I’m Not Worried Yet” →

Passive income through option writing: Part 3

Back in 2016, I wrote a few posts on trading derivatives, especially options, to generate (mostly) passive income:

I’m still running that same strategy but it definitely evolved quite a bit over time. This might be a good time to write a quick update on what I’m doing and what I’ve changed since then. And for everyone who’s wondering what’s the use of this: I’m planning a future post on how selling options may help with Sequence Risk, so this is all very, very relevant even for folks in the FIRE crowd!

So, let’s take a look…

Continue reading “Passive income through option writing: Part 3” →

How can a drop in the stock market possibly be good for investors?

I hope everybody checked out the ChooseFI Roundup episode in early January, where I talked with Jonathan and Brad about the recent stock market volatility. They invited me for a short appearance on their Friday show after reading my piece from two weeks ago. That post was on how the recent stock market volatility will probably not obliterate the FIRE community. One issue that came up is the potential for people on their FIRE path to actually benefit (!) from the drop in the stock market. How can one possibly benefit from a drop in the stock market? It’s certainly not a guarantee. It depends on the personal circumstances and on the nature of the stock market drop! Generally speaking:

  • How permanent or how transitory is the drop in the market? If your portfolio dropped because one of the equity or bond holdings went bankrupt (or you were a victim of the OptionSellers meltdown) then that’s not something to cheer about. It’s about as permanent as it gets. Not good for the investor! But frequently, the market drops without much of a change in fundamentals. Be it a “flash crash” that reverses within a few hours or even minutes or the (likely) overreaction of the stock market drop in December, one could argue that since nothing (or not much) changed in the fundamentals (GDP growth, earnings growth, etc.) the drop may be only temporary and will eventually revert to the mean. Or even during a recession (the definition of weaker fundamentals!) stocks often overreact on the downside and then stage a strong comeback, i.e., return expectations going forward could be higher than long-term average returns. In other words, that paper loss you see now could be at least cushioned by higher returns on your additional savings going forward. And if this admittedly uncertain advantage of higher expected returns is large enough and over time more than offsets the paper loss then we could be looking at a net gain.
  • How far along are you on your path to FIRE? The further along you are the more damage a bear market will cause even if you can expect a bounce in future expected returns from a transitory shock to the market. On the other hand, if you’re just starting out saving for retirement and all you lost is a few hundred or thousand bucks in your 401k/IRA and you still got 10-15 years ahead of you then you might benefit from the drop!

So, in other words, if the loss in your existing portfolio is offset by enough of a rise in future expected returns, then a drop in the stock market can be a net positive. Seems pretty obvious from a qualitative point of view. But quantitatively? How early is early along the FIRE journey? How much of a rise in expected returns do we need to make this work? Even if there isn’t a net benefit, how much of the paper loss is at least cushioned by higher future returns? These are all inherently quantitative questions. This blog post is an attempt to shine some light on the math behind the tradeoffs…

Continue reading “How can a drop in the stock market possibly be good for investors?” →