Tag: personal finance

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…

Continue reading “Low-Cost Leverage: The “Box Spread” Trade” →

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…

Continue reading “Using Leverage in Retirement – SWR Series Part 49” →

Passive income through option writing: Part 9 – 2016-2021 backtest: Guest Post by “Spintwig”

November 10, 2021

Welcome to a new post in the Put Option Writing Series. My blogging buddy Spintwig volunteered to perform another backtest simulation. If you remember from Part 5, he simulated selling 5-delta and 10-delta put options going back to 2018. He now added 18 more months of returns to go back to September 2016. In the end, I will also compare my live results with the simulated returns and point out why my live trading achieved even slightly better results.

Mr. Spintwig, please take over…

* * *

Thank you BigERN (can I call you Dr. K?) for another opportunity to collaborate and add to the body of research that supports what is colloquially known as the “BigERN strategy.”

Part 8 of the options trading series is a 2021 update that discusses, among other things, premium capture, annualized return and the idea of lowering leverage while increasing delta.

Let’s throw some data at the idea of trading a higher delta at a lower leverage target and see how metrics like premium capture, CAGR, and max drawdown are impacted. As an added bonus, I’ve obtained SPX data that can facilitate a Sept 2016 start date for this strategy. This gives us an additional 18 months of history vs the SPY data that was used in Part 5.

For the benchmark, we’ll use total return (i.e. dividends reinvested) buy/hold SPY (S&P 500) and IEF (10Y US Treasuries), rebalanced annually, in the following configurations:

  • 100 SPY / 0 IEF
  • 80 SPY / 20 IEF
  • 60 SPY / 40 IEF

Let’s dive in…

Continue reading “Passive income through option writing: Part 9 – 2016-2021 backtest: Guest Post by “Spintwig”” →

2022 FI Chautauqua in Ecuador

1/22/2022 Update: The 2022 Chautauqua is a go! The event sold out within a week (though there is a waiting list). I have bought my plane ticket and so have the other presenters. See you in June!

October 27, 2021

Hi Everybody! Not a big blog post today, just a quick announcement: I will be heading to the 2022 Chautauqua in Ecuador as one of the invited speakers. The event will span an entire week: June 18-25 in 2022. So, if you want to spend a fun-filled week in a beautiful location with an opportunity to interact with like-minded FI and FIRE enthusiasts and four awesome FIRE thought leaders please consider joining us there!

Here are more details…

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Passive income through option writing: Part 8 – A 2021 Update

October 18, 2021

After three posts in a row about safe withdrawal rates, parts 46, 47, and 48 of the series, let’s make sure we have the right level of diversity here. Welcome to a new installment of the option writing series! I wanted to give a brief update on several different fronts:

  1. A quick YTD performance update.
  2. How does the option selling strategy fit into my overall portfolio? Is this a 100% fixed income strategy because that’s where I hold the margin cash? Or a 100% equity strategy because I trade puts on margin on top of that? Or maybe even a 200+% equity strategy because I use somewhere around 2x to 2.5x leverage?
  3. By popular demand: Big ERN’s “super-secret sauce” for accounting for the intra-day adjustments of the Options Greeks. This is a timely topic because the Interactive Brokers values for the SPX Put Options seem to be wildly off the mark, especially for options close to expiration. So, you have to get your hands dirty and calculate your own options Greeks, especially the Delta estimates.
  4. There’s one slight change in the strategy I recently made: I trade fewer contracts but with a higher Delta thus reducing my leverage and the possibility of extreme tail-risk events.

Let’s dive right in…

Continue reading “Passive income through option writing: Part 8 – A 2021 Update” →

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…

Continue reading “Retirement Bucket Strategies: Cheap Gimmick or the Solution to Sequence Risk? – SWR Series Part 48” →

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…

Continue reading “When to Worry, When to Wing It: Withdrawal Rate Case Studies – SWR Series Part 47” →

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…

Continue reading “The Need for Precision in an Uncertain World – SWR Series Part 46” →

Our Three-Year FIRE Anniversary

July 1, 2021

Time flies! I can’t believe I already had my 3-year FIRE anniversary last month! Time to reflect and think back on the first three years of early retirement: travel, moving, “market timing”, dealing with the shutdown, and some other exciting news in the ERN retirement life. Let’s take a look…

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Stealth Frugality

June 16, 2021

We all heard about stealth wealth, i.e., being wealthy without being flashy! Live below your means! There are blog posts about it (Physician on FIRE, Retirement Manifesto, and many more). A large part of The Millionaire Next Door book is about Stealth Wealth. We certainly have been practicing that principle while accumulating wealth, and especially now that we live our comfortable life in early retirement.

But we never overdid the stealth wealth either. In other words, when I announced my retirement in 2018, not a single relative, friend, or colleague blurted out “Yeah, you’re such a cheapskate, no wonder you accumulated seven figures!” Quite the opposite, people wondered how we were able to save and accumulate so much without looking cheap to the outside world. Very simple, we were frugal, but we were able to hide that frugality very well. In other words, we were practicing…

Stealth Frugality = frugality without looking and acting like a miser!

And Stealth Frugality doesn’t rule out Stealth Wealth. It’s more of an extension, a less extreme form of stealth wealth. Being a math wonk, let me make the point with the diagram below. If we plot on the x-axis the perception of wealth and on the y-axis the reality, then really everything above the 45-degree line, i.e., reality > perception, is stealth wealth of sorts. But the trick is to move out of that top-left corner (act poor, big bank account) and a little bit more to the right. Without dropping too close to the x-axis and certainly not all the way to the lower right corner (=Keeping-up-with-the-Joneses, drowning in debt). In other words, Stealth Frugality involves spending wisely without breaking the bank, i.e., try to find some spending categories to splurge on that follow a flatter path than the Minus-45-degree line!

So, why and how did we practice Stealth Frugality? Let’s take a look…

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