Tag: personal finance

Social Security Timing – SWR Series Part 59

September 5, 2023 – Welcome back to a new blog post in the Safe Withdrawal Rate Series! It’s been a while! So long that some folks were wondering already if I’m all right. Nothing to worry about; we just had a busy travel schedule, spending most of our summer in Europe. First Italy, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany. Then, a cruise through the Baltic Sea from Sweden to Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Germany again, and Denmark. But I’m back in business now with a fascinating retirement topic dealing with Social Security timing: What are the pros and cons of deferring Social Security? If we set aside the ignorant drivel like “you get an 8% return by delaying benefits for a year” and look for more serious research, we can find a lot of exciting work studying this tradeoff. Earlier this year, in Part 56, I proposed my actuarial tool for measuring the pros and cons of different Social Security strategies, factoring in the NPV/time-value of money consideration and survival probabilities. A fellow blogger, Engineering Your FI, has done exciting work studying this tradeoff using net present value (NPV) calculations. And Open Social Security is a neat toolkit for optimizing joint benefits-claiming strategies.

But those calculations are all outside of a comprehensive Safe Withdrawal Rate analysis. How does Social Security timing interact with Sequence Risk? For example, can it be optimal to claim as early as possible to prevent withdrawing too much from your equity portfolio during a downturn early in retirement? In other words, if you’re interested in maximizing your failsafe withdrawal rate, you may feel tempted to pick a potentially suboptimal strategy from an NPV point of view. Sure, you underperform in an NPV sense on average if you claim early. But hedging against the worst-case scenarios may be worth that sacrifice.

Let’s take a look…

Continue reading “Social Security Timing – SWR Series Part 59” →

Flexibility is Overrated – SWR Series Part 58

June 16, 2023 – I wonder if I’ll ever run out of material for the Safe Withdrawal Series. Fifty-eight parts now, and the new ideas come faster than I can write posts these days. This month, I initially planned to write about the effects of timing Social Security in the context of safe withdrawal simulations. But one issue keeps coming up. It’s almost like a personal finance “zombie” topic that, after I thought I put it to rest once and for all, always comes back when you least expect it. It’s flexibility. If we are flexible – so we are told – we don’t have to worry much about sequence risk. We can throw out the 4% Rule and make it the 5.5% Rule. Or the 7% Rule or whatever you like.

Only it’s not that easy. In today’s post, I like to accomplish three things:

  1. Provide a simple chart and a few back-of-the-envelope calculations to demonstrate the flexibility folly.
  2. Comment on a recent post by two fellow personal finance bloggers and showcase some of the weaknesses of their approach.
  3. Propose a better method for modeling flexibility and gauging its impact on safe withdrawal amounts. Hint: it uses my SWR Simulation tool!

Let’s take a look…

Continue reading “Flexibility is Overrated – SWR Series Part 58” →

May 2023 Macro and Market Musings: Monetary Policy and Inflation

May 17, 2023 – Since early 2022, the Federal Reserve has been raising its policy interest rate at breakneck speed by a full five percentage points. Inflation has indeed subsided a bit, but both price levels and percentage changes remain stubbornly high. When will inflation finally go back to normal? What’s the path forward for monetary policy? Will there be a recession? So many questions! Let’s take a look…

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Accounting for Homeownership in (Early) Retirement – SWR Series Part 57

April 14, 2023 – Welcome to a new installment of the Safe Withdrawal Rate Series. Please check out the SWR landing page for a summary of and a link to the other posts.

Today’s topic is homeownership. I’ve already made the case that not just rental properties but even homeownership can be a great tool in building assets (“See that house over there? It’s an investment!“). But what if you are already retired? What are some of the benefits of homeownership in the context of (early) retirement? Does homeownership reduce Sequence Risk? Do homeowners enjoy a lower inflation rate in retirement? If so, by how much can homeowners raise their safe withdrawal rate? How do we properly account for homeownership (with and without a mortgage) in the SWR simulation toolkit?

Lots of questions! Let’s take a look…

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March 2023 Market and Moral Hazard Musings

March 16, 2023 – After the tumultuous year 2022, it looked like 2023 was off to a great start. But banks threw a monkey wrench into the machine, with the S&P almost erasing the impressive YTD gains, several bank failures, and the prospect of a worldwide banking crisis that all changed. So folks contacted me and asked me if I could weigh in on this and some other issues.

Here are some of my musings about bank failures, government failures, moral hazard, and why the FDIC should eliminate the $250k limit and simply insure all deposits…

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The Basics of FIRE

March 10, 2023 – After seven years of blogging in the personal finance and FIRE community, I realize that there’s one type of post I’ve always avoided: How to explain FIRE to a complete newbie. Until now, I’ve outsourced that task and simply referred to the Links Page. But where’s a good overview, all in a simple and comprehensive post to give a one-stop overview of what FIRE is and how one can pull it off? I’ve come across a lot of good information, but it’s all in bits and pieces and here and there. I’m not going to dump a reading/listening list of 20 different posts/shows on 18 different blogs/podcasts on someone new to the community. And my Safe Withdrawal Rate Series? Great stuff. But it’s also the deep end of the pool, and I would likely scare away any new recruits. That series is targeted at folks already retired or nearing early retirement.

So how would I explain or even pitch FIRE to someone new to the community? Let’s take a look…

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Evaluating Annuities, Pensions, and Social Security – SWR Series Part 56

February 6, 2023 – Welcome to another installment of my Safe Withdrawal Rate Series. See the landing page of this series here for an intro and a summary of all the posts I’ve written so far. On the menu today is an issue that will impact most retirees: we all likely receive supplemental cash flows in retirement, such as corporate or government pensions, Social Security, etc. Some retirees opt for an annuity, i.e., transform part of their assets into a guaranteed, lifelong cash flow.

Of course, if you are a long-time reader of my blog and my SWR series you may wonder why I would write a new post about this. In my SWR simulation toolkit (see Part 28), there is a feature that allows you to model those supplemental cash flows and study how they would impact your safe withdrawal rate calculations. True, but there are still plenty of unanswered questions. For example, how do I evaluate and weigh the pros and cons of different options, like starting Social Security at age 62 vs. 67 vs. 70 or receiving a pension vs. a lump sum?

Also, you might want to perform those calculations separately from the safe withdrawal rate analysis, from a purely actuarial point of view. For example, we may want to calculate net present values (NPVs) and/or internal rates of returns (IRRs) of the different options before us. Clearly, NPV and IRR calculations are relatively simple, especially with the help of Excel and its built-in functions (NPV, PV, RATE, IRR, XIRR etc.). However, the uncertain lifespan over which you will receive benefits complicates the NPV and IRR calculations. How do we factor an uncertain lifespan into the NPV calculations? Should I just calculate the NPV of the cash flows up to an estimate of my life expectancy? Unfortunately, the actuarially correct way is more complicated. But Big ERN to the rescue, I have another Google Sheet to help with that, and I share that free tool with you.

Let’s take a look…

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Discussing Retirement Bucket Strategies with Fritz Gilbert – SWR Series Part 55

January 25, 2023 – Welcome to another part of my Safe Withdrawal Rate Series. Today’s topic: Bucket Strategies in retirement. As you know, my blogging buddy Fritz Gilbert has written extensively on this topic at his Retirement Manifesto blog, for example:

And likewise, I have written about my skepticism of bucket strategies in Part 48 of the series: “Retirement Bucket Strategies: Cheap Gimmick or the Solution to Sequence Risk?”

Fritz’s most recent post on the Bucket Strategy started a lively back-and-forth on Twitter, and it seemed appropriate to pursue a more detailed discussion with more than 280 characters per answer in a “fight of the titans” blog post. So if you haven’t done so already, please check out our awesome discussion over on Fritz’s blog:

Is The Bucket Strategy A Cheap Gimmick?

The response was overwhelmingly positive, and we decided to craft a follow-up post here on my blog. We came up with two new questions, and we also need to address two major themes from the comments section in Part 1, specifically, the role of simplicity and behavioral biases in retirement planning.

So, let’s take a look…

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Passive income through option writing: Part 10 – Year 2022 Review

January 9, 2023 – Happy New Year, everyone! I haven’t written any updates on my put-writing strategy in a while, so I thought this is an excellent opportunity to review the year 2022 performance and some of the changes I have made since my last write-up in late 2021.

Let’s take a look…

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A Post-Mortem for a Crypto Exchange: Is FTX worse than Bernie Madoff?

December 7, 2022 – The number one story in the crypto world this year (or decade? or century?) must be the FTX crypto platform collapse. It’s mindblowing how quickly FTX went from one of the largest crypto exchanges with a 150-second Superbowl commercial in February 2022, naming rights to sports arenas, numerous A-list celebrity endorsements, etc., to becoming the pariah of the financial world in just one short week in November 2022.

Likewise, FTX’s founder, Sam Bankman Fried (SBF), went from a modern-day J.P. Morgan to Bernie Madoff 2.0. Is it even appropriate to compare SBF with Bernie Madoff? Isn’t that a bit of an insult? You bet! It’s an insult to the late Bernie Madoff! Along several dimensions, the FTX collapse is actually more outrageous than Bernie’s decadelong Ponzi Scheme. Let’s take a look at why…

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