Tag: investing

Timing Leverage in Retirement – SWR Series Part 52

March 21, 2022

Last year in Part 49 of the Safe Withdrawal Series, I wrote a post about using leverage in retirement, and in today’s post, I like to explore some additional issues. 

A quick recap, the appeal of using leverage in retirement is that we would borrow against the portfolio instead of liquidating assets. Nice! That might help with Sequence Risk if we avoid liquidating assets at temporarily depressed prices. There could also be a tax advantage in that we keep deferring the realization of taxable capital gains, potentially until we bequeath our assets to our daughter who can then use the “step-up basis” for complete forgiveness of all of our accumulated capital gains. That’s the famous “buy, borrow, die” approach popular with high-net-worth folks.

The gist of the post last year: Not so fast! Leverage could potentially even exacerbate Sequence Risk if you are unlucky and retire right before a bad market event that’s deep enough (like the Great Depression) or long enough (like the 1965-1982 stagflation episode) to compromise the portfolio so badly that the margin loan becomes unsustainable relative to the underwater portfolio.

One solution proposed by several readers: instead of always borrowing against the portfolio, maybe we should carefully time when we use leverage. For example, borrow only when the stock market is down “far enough” and use withdrawals from the portfolio otherwise. And if the market is doing well again, potentially pay back the loan again! Sounds like a reasonable and intuitive plan. But I want to put that to the test with some real simulations. Let’s take a look at the details… 

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Retirement in a High-Inflation Environment – SWR Series Part 51

February 28, 2022

What a difference a year makes! In late 2020, only about 16 months ago, I felt the urge to comment on the then-fashionable discussion of how low inflation would impact retirees. See Part 41 – Can we raise our Safe Withdrawal Rate when inflation is low? of my SWR Series. Feels like a lifetime ago, doesn’t it?

The takeaway back then: don’t get distracted by high-frequency economic fluctuations. Low inflation doesn’t necessarily mean we can all raise our safe withdrawal rates. Certainly not one-for-one. There is neither empirical nor theoretical economic backing for materially changing your retirement strategy.

Only a little more than a year later the tide has turned. We’re now facing the highest inflation readings in about 40 years. 7.5% CPI and potentially 8% year-over-year once the BLS releases the February figure in mid-March. So, people asked me if my inflation views are symmetric, i.e., high inflation is also a non-event? As I signaled in my inflation post last month, I’m not too worried. Here’s why…

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Inflation at 7%! Here’s why I’m not running for the hills (yet)!

January 13, 2022

According to the most recent inflation numbers that came out yesterday (1/13), CPI inflation is now running at 7% year-over-year. From September to December we saw a 2.2% increase, which is a 9.1% annualized rate. And it’s not all energy and food inflation. The core CPI is also elevated at 5.5% year-over-year.

What do I make of this? How persistent or transitory is this inflation bump? Should we adjust our portfolio? Or our safe withdrawal rate? Here’s a short note with my thoughts…

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Ten things the “Makers” of the FIRE movement don’t want you to know – SWR Series Part 50

January 3, 2022

Happy New Year, everybody. I hope you had a relaxing and healthy Christmas and a good start to the New Year!

Last month was the 5th anniversary of the Safe Withdrawal Rate Series! In December 2016, I published the first part of that series. I had material for maybe four or five parts but one thing led to another and with new ideas, most of them due to reader feedback, the series took off. It’s been running for 5 years and I obviously opened a bottle of bubbly last month to celebrate.

So, what’s the deal with the title then? Very simple: Blogging 101. You need a catchy title! I might have called the post “What I’ve learned in 5 years and 50 posts” or something along those lines. But to shake things up and get everybody’s attention, this is the title I went with. Think of this post as a natural extension of Part 26 “Ten things the “Makers” of the 4% Rule don’t want you to know” or the equally “tongue-in-cheek” posts “How to ‘Lie’ with Personal Finance” – Part 1 and Part 2.

So, after 5 years, 50 posts, what have I learned? What do I think others in the FIRE community are missing? What can you learn from my series that you may not have seen elsewhere? Let’s take a look…

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Low-Cost Leverage: The “Box Spread” Trade

December 9, 2021

Last month, I published Part 49 of my Safe Withdrawal Rate Series, dealing with leverage in retirement. In that post, I surmised that the cheapest form of leverage likely comes in the form of a margin loan in an Interactive Brokers (IB) account. If you have the IB Pro account you have access to loan rates tied to the Federal Funds Rate plus a tiered spread ranging from 0.3% to 1.5%. Though, the really low rates don’t start until your loan reaches at least $3,000,000. For more manageable loan amounts that the average retail investor would use, we’re looking at a higher spread: 1.50% spread for the first $100,000 and 1.00% over the Fed Funds Rate for the next $900k. With the current effective Fed Funds Rate at around between 0.08% and 0.10%, that’s a very competitive rate. Certainly better than a Home Equity Line Of Credit (HELOC).

In the comments section, though, a reader brought up an idea for an even lower-cost method for borrowing against your assets: an exotic options trade called a “box spread”. I had heard of this trade before but never put much thought into it. And I certainly didn’t put any money into that idea. But just for fun, I researched this trade some more and even initiated one box spread trade on Monday, essentially issuing a synthetic $20,000 zero-coupon bond maturing in December 2026 at a very competitive interest rate, significantly lower what you’d get from IB.

So, in today’s post, I like to go through the basics of the Box Spread, how to implement it and how this trade could in fact give us a cheaper form of leverage than even the rock-bottom rates from IB. Let’s take a look at the details…

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Using Leverage in Retirement – SWR Series Part 49

November 16, 2021

My Safe Withdrawal Series has grown to almost 50 parts. After nearly 5 years of researching this topic and writing and speaking about it, a comprehensive solution to Sequence Risk is still elusive. So today I like to write about another potential “fix” of Sequence Risk headache: Instead of selling assets in retirement, why not simply borrow against your portfolio? And pay back the loan when the market eventually recovers, 30 years down the road! You see, if Sequence Risk is the result of selling assets at depressed values during an extended bear market, then leverage could be the potential solution because you delay the liquidation of assets until you find a more opportune time. And since the market has always gone up over a long enough investing window (e.g., 30+ years), you might be able to avoid running out of money. Sweet!

Using margin loans to fund your cash flow needs certainly sounds scary, but it’s quite common among high-net-worth households. In July, the Wall Street Journal featured this widely-cited article: Buy, Borrow, Die: How Rich Americans Live Off Their Paper Wealth. It details how high-net-worth folks borrow against their highly appreciated assets. This approach has tax and estate-planning benefits; you defer capital gains taxes and potentially even eliminate them altogether by either deferring the tax event indefinitely or by using the step-up basis when your heirs inherit the assets. Sweet!

So, is leverage a panacea then? Using leverage cautiously and sparingly, you may indeed hedge a portion of your Sequence Risk and thus increase your safe withdrawal rate. But too much leverage might backfire and will even exacerbate Sequence Risk. Let’s take a look at the details…

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Retirement Bucket Strategies: Cheap Gimmick or the Solution to Sequence Risk? – SWR Series Part 48

September 14, 2021

Welcome to a new installment of the Safe Withdrawal Rate Series, dealing with Bucket Strategies. This is one approach that’s often considered a viable solution to the dreaded Sequence Risk Problem. Simply keep buckets of assets with different risk characteristics designated to cover expenses during different time windows of your retirement. Specifically, keep one or more buckets with low-risk assets to hedge the first few years of retirement. And – poof – Sequence Risk evaporates, just like that! Sounds too good to be true, right? And it likely is. Long story short, while there are certain parts of the bucket strategy that can indeed partially alleviate the risk of retirement bust, bucket strategies are by no means a solution to Sequence Risk. Let’s take a look at the details…

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When to Worry, When to Wing It: Withdrawal Rate Case Studies – SWR Series Part 47

August 18, 2021

In my post two weeks ago I outlined my approach to retirement planning: In light of significant uncertainty in retirement, I like to do a more careful, robust, and scientific analysis. Not because I could ever undo any of the existing uncertainties but because I don’t want to add even more uncertainties through “winging it” in retirement.

But how much detail is really required? I can already hear objections like “you can never know your future spending month-by-month, so why go through all this careful analysis with a monthly withdrawal frequency?” To which I like to answer: Well, maybe that’s the part where you can indeed use the “wing it” approach! So, today I want to go through a few case studies and learn how much of a difference it would make in my safe withdrawal strategy simulations if we a) carefully model the whole shebang in great detail, or b) just wing it and use a rough average estimate for the spending path. For example…

  • Does the intra-year distribution of withdrawals matter? In other words, how much of a difference does the withdrawal frequency make: monthly vs. quarterly vs. annual?
  • What if there are fluctuations in my annual withdrawals around the baseline average budget, due to home repairs, health expenses, etc.?
  • What if those fluctuations have an upward bias?
  • What if there is a slow (upward) creep in withdrawals?
  • What about nursing home expenses later in retirement?

Where can I safely wing it? And which are the ones I should worry about? Let’s take a look…

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The Need for Precision in an Uncertain World – SWR Series Part 46

August 5, 2021

Welcome back to another post in the Safe Withdrawal Rate Series. For a quick intro and a summary of the series, please refer to the new landing page.

People in the FIRE and personal finance blogging community – readers and fellow bloggers alike – often tell me that while they enjoy my writings here, they wonder if I haven’t gone a little too far into the rabbit hole of quantitative analysis. Why measure safe withdrawal rates down to multiple significant digits? Why do all of this careful analysis if there’s so much uncertainty? Market uncertainty, policy uncertainty, personal uncertainty, model uncertainty! Why not just wing it? I always try to give a short reply to defend my quantitative approach and out of the many different mental and written notes I’ve taken over the years I created this post for your enjoyment and for my convenience to refer to if I get this question again next week.

Specifically, I want to propose at least three reasons for being diligent and precise not despite, but precisely because of retirement uncertainties. And, by the way, I will keep today’s post relatively lean in terms of simulations and calculations, and rather try to make this more of a philosophical exercise. So, if you’re one of the quant-skeptics I hope you keep reading because I can promise you that we don’t have to get too deep into the (quant) weeds. So, let’s take a look at my top three reasons to get the math right…

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A Retirement Tax-Planning Case Study (and Excel Toolkit!) – SWR Series Part 45

April 28, 2021

Welcome back to another installment of the Safe Withdrawal Rate Series. In the previous installment, Part 44, I went through a number of general tax planning ideas, and I promised another post to introduce an Excel Sheet, I created to help me with my tax planning. There were numerous reader requests a long time ago when I ran the withdrawal strategy case studies (2017-2018) to publish not just the Safe Withdrawal Rate calculations but also the tax planning Excel Sheet. Well, I never published those Excel sheets because a) they were custom-tailored to those particular case studies, b) they potentially included personal information of the case study volunteers and c) they were created “for my eyes only” so I couldn’t really publish them without a massive effort to explain and document what exactly I’m doing there.

But now (with a three-year delay!) I’ve finally come around to creating something from scratch I feel comfortable publishing for a broader audience. It’s not a Google Sheet, but an MS Excel Sheet, more on that later. It’s probably still not a universally applicable tool.  And most importantly, it’s a tool that still requires a lot of Excel Spreadsheet mastery. It will not spit out “the” optimal tax strategy, it will only help me (and maybe you) find that optimal tax strategy. A lot of handiwork is still necessary! Much more handiwork than with Safe Withdrawal Sheet (and even that is already a handful!).

So, I like to go through a simple case study to show how this sheet works and showcase how you can “hack” your withdrawal tax optimization strategy in that one specific case. Even aside from tax optimization, the sheet helps me gauge what’s the average effective tax rate throughout retirement, to help me figure out how much of a gross-up I have to apply to translate a net-of-tax retirement budget into a pre-tax withdrawal percentage.

I can’t foresee what exact tax challenges you might face, but with my tool, I would have been able to handle what came across my desk so far, both in my personal finances and the case studies I’ve done so far.

So, let’s take a look…

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