Asset Location: Do Bonds Really Belong in Retirement Accounts? – SWR Series Part 35

Welcome back to another installment of the Safe Withdrawal Rate Series. This one is about taxes. Amazing, how after 30+ installments in the series, I have written conspicuously little about taxes. Sure, I’ve done some Case Studies where, among many other issues, I delved into the tax planning, most recently in the Case Study for Becky and Stephen. But I’ve never written much about taxes and tax planning in the context of the Series.

There are two reasons why I kept the tax discussion on such a low burner: First, my background: If I had an accounting Ph.D. and CPA instead of an economics Ph.D. and a CFA charter, I would have written a whole lot more about taxes! Second, pinning down the Safe Withdrawal strategy and the safe withdrawal rate is my main concern. Most (early) retirees will have extremely low tax liabilities as I outlined in a post last year. You’d have to try pretty hard to pay more than a 5% federal effective tax rate in retirement. So, as long as you stay away from anything clearly irresponsible on the tax planning side, you’re fine. Don’t stress out over taxes in retirement unless you have a really, really large nest egg and taxable income deep into the six-figures during retirement.

But you don’t want to leave any money on the table either. So, I still want to write about taxes if I encounter something that captures my attention. And I came across a topic that’s most definitely interesting from a withdrawal strategy perspective: Asset Location (as opposed to Asset Allocation).

Imagine you target a particular asset allocation, say 60% stocks and 40% bonds. Or 70/30, or 80/20, or whatever suits your needs the best. How should we allocate that across the different account types? If we put all the different accounts into three major buckets…

  1. Taxable, i.e., your standard taxable brokerage account: Interest, dividends and realized capital gains are taxable every year they show up on your 1099 tax form. But you don’t have to pay taxes on capital gains until you realize them.
  2. Tax-deferred, i.e., your 401(k) or your Traditional IRA. Your account grows tax-free until you actually withdraw the money (or roll it over to a Roth). So, so can realize as much in interest income, dividends, capital gains along the way, as long as you keep the money inside the account.
  3. Tax-free, i.e., your Roth IRA or your HSA. The money grows tax-free and you can withdraw tax-free as well.

… then where do we put our bonds and where do we put our stocks? It would be easy, though likely not optimal to simply keep that same asset allocation in all three types of accounts. But is there a better way to allocate your stock vs. bond allocation?

Sure, there is! One of the oldest pieces of “conventional wisdom” investment advice I can remember is this:

“Keep stocks in a taxable account and bonds in your tax-advantaged accounts.”

Or more generally:

“Keep the relatively tax-efficient investments in a taxable account and relatively tax-inefficient investments in a tax-advantaged account.”

Most stocks would be considered more tax-efficient than bonds because a) dividends and capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than interest income and b) you can defer capital gains until you actually withdraw your money, which is a huge tax-advantage (more on that later).

So, it appears that we should ideally load up the taxable account with stocks and the tax-advantaged accounts with bonds. Hmmm, but that doesn’t sound quite right, does it? Why would I want to “waste” the limited shelf space I have in my tax-advantaged accounts with low-return bonds while I expose my high-return stocks to dividend and capital gains taxes? So, it would be completely rational to be skeptical about this common-sense advice!

So who’s right? Conventional wisdom or the skeptics? Long story short: they’re both wrong! You can easily construct examples where either conventional wisdom or the skeptics prevail. So neither side should claim that their recommendation is universally applicable. The asset location decision depends on…

  1. Your expected rates of return,
  2. Your expected tax rates,
  3. Your investment horizon. Yup, you heard that right, it’s possible that you want to go either one way or the other depending on the horizon. Though, this is not really a separate case but really only a result of asset allocation drift. Accounting for that, we’re back to the two cases, but more on that later!

Let’s look at the details…

Continue reading “Asset Location: Do Bonds Really Belong in Retirement Accounts? – SWR Series Part 35”

How much can we earn in retirement without paying federal income taxes?

Update 11/22/2019: After I published a shorter version of this piece on MarketWatch and the story was picked up by YahooFinance as well I got a lot more readers! Thanks and welcome to my blog! Make sure you subscribe to be notified of future blog posts! Both on Yahoo and MarketWatch I saw the expected assortment of hate comments. They fall into two categories, see below plus my response:

  • “I’m a CPA and this doesn’t make any sense!” My response: You’re either not a CPA at all or you’re a really bad & incompetent one. The standard deduction and the 0% bracket for capital gains are all very well-known in the financial/tax planner community. The same goes for the taxability worksheet for Social Security.
  • “How unfair that you retired already and don’t pay taxes while I’m working so hard and pay a lot of taxes!” My response: I hear ya! I’ve paid a ton of taxes throughout my work life. A seven-figure sum, more than most people pay over their entire lifetime. Keep that in mind if you complain about the unfairness of the U.S. federal tax system!

* * *

The question “how much can we earn without paying federal income taxes” is relatively easy to answer for most people. The standard deduction for a married couple is $24,400 in 2019 (if both are under 65 years old) and the top of the no-tax bracket for capital gains is $78,750. So, we can make a total of $103,150 per year, provided that our ordinary income stays below the standard deduction and the rest (2nd bracket + any leftover from the std. deduction) comes from long-term capital gains and/or qualified dividends. With our daughter, we also qualify for the child tax credit ($2,000 p.a.), so we could actually generate another $13,333 per year in dividends or capital gains, taxed at a 15% so that the tax liability of $2,000 exactly offsets the tax credit for a zero federal tax bill.

Once people file for Social Security benefits, though, things become a bit more complicated. That’s due to the convoluted formula used to determine how much of your Social Security is counted as taxable income, see last week’s blog post! So, calculating and plotting the tax-free income limits is a tad more complicated. Oh, and talking about tax planning in retirement: as promised, I will also go through an update on the Roth Conversion strategy for the Becky and Stephen case study from two weeks ago.

Let’s get started…

Continue reading “How much can we earn in retirement without paying federal income taxes?”

Ask Big Ern: A Safe Withdrawal Rate Case Study for “Mr. Corporate Refugee”

Welcome! It’s time for another Safe Withdrawal Rate case study! Please click here for the other seven installments. Today’s volunteer is “Mr. Corporate Refugee,” not his real name, obviously. But as the name suggests he is ready to pull the plug on the corporate grind. He and his wife did everything right to prepare for early retirement. Pay off the mortgage on their house (as recommended by yours truly) and accumulate a nice nest egg close to seven figures. The only problem: they reside in a high-cost-of-living area in California and more than half of their net worth is tied up in their primary residence. Even a portfolio as large as $1 million will likely not be sufficient to cover expenses in your current location. What to do now? I’ll propose two routes to early retirement. Move to a cheaper location, a “secret” low-income-tax paradise – more on that below, and be able to retire now. Or work for only four more years and retire in the current location. Let’s go through the math…

Continue reading “Ask Big Ern: A Safe Withdrawal Rate Case Study for “Mr. Corporate Refugee””

Ask Big Ern: A Safe Withdrawal Rate Case Study for “Ms. Almost FI”

Welcome to a new installment of our “Ask Big Ern” series with case studies on safe withdrawal calculations. This is already the seventh part, see here for the other parts of the series! Today’s volunteer is Ms. Almost FI and that’s not her real name, of course. She’s planning to retire early in 2019 and this causes a lot of anxiety: Does she have enough money? When should she take her pensions? What about long-term care insurance? All very valid questions, all impossible to answer without a careful customized analysis! Continue reading “Ask Big Ern: A Safe Withdrawal Rate Case Study for “Ms. Almost FI””

Why would anyone have a mortgage and a bond portfolio?

We are homeowners with a pretty sizeable mortgage but we also accumulated a nice retirement nest egg, which is actually many times larger than our mortgage. Even our taxable investments are several times larger than the mortgage. Still, we don’t pay off the mortgage because we like the benefit of leverage. We have a liability with a low-interest rate and assets with a much higher expected rate of return, so our overall expected rate of return is higher than without a mortgage. Our friend FinanciaLibre (now a defunct site) did some nice number crunching on this topic recently and we agree wholeheartedly.

Moreover, if you follow our blog you’ll also remember that we take a pretty dim view on bonds:

So, personally, we skip the bond allocation altogether. Others have written about this, too, check Physician on Fire’s 2-part guest post here and here. In light of all of this, here’s one question that occurred to us:

Why would anybody have a 30-year mortgage at about 3.50% and a bond portfolio currently paying around 1.8 to maybe 2.5% interest for safe government bonds?

Leverage works only when the asset has a higher expected return than the liability!
Continue reading “Why would anyone have a mortgage and a bond portfolio?”

The ultimate retirement account comparison in one single Google Sheet

Some people argue that there is a rule of thumb for which account is more attractive when saving for retirement (both early retirement and “normal” retirement). Jeremy over at Go Curry Cracker likes the 401(k) and is skeptical about Roth IRAs, while someone on Kiplinger recently recommended the Roth and trash-talked the regular 401(k) in light of higher projected future tax rates. Who is right? Nobody. There are likely no universally true answers to the following (and many other) questions:

  1. Taxable account vs. Roth IRA?
  2. Roth 401(k) vs. regular 401(k)?
  3. After-tax 401(k) contributions or a taxable account?
  4. Should I invest in a high-fee 401(k) at work or a low fee taxable account?
  5. What is the drag in after-tax returns from having to pay taxes on dividends throughout the accumulation phase?
  6. If you have a lot of money to invest and already max out the regular 401(k), should you shift more money into a Roth 401(k), to get more “bang for the buck?”
  7. Should I roll over an IRA to a Roth IRA?
  8. Should I use a deferred variable annuity to boost tax-deferrals?
  9. Pay down credit card debt first before saving for retirement?

It all depends on the individual situation, tax rates, expected return assumptions, account fees/expense ratios, etc. The only way to tell which account is more attractive is to get out the spreadsheet, punch in your particular parameters and compare. But how do you do that? Others did it before but sometimes we have the feeling they compare apples and oranges. A Roth 401(k) is best because you can withdraw tax-free? Not necessarily because you have to take into account the taxes you pay upfront when contributing to the Roth IRA.

We came up with an easy way to make sure you compare apples to apples to gauge the relative attractiveness of different accounts.  Continue reading “The ultimate retirement account comparison in one single Google Sheet”

Why we don’t trust financial planners: a rant

I remember recent posts by Plan Invest Escape and Slowly Sipping Coffee about bad advice from the experts, the so-called financial planners. The post itself and the comments from others about bad experiences with advisers can really raise your blood pressure. But you don’t even have to hire them. Sometimes just reading their posts online is enough to expose the empty suits. One of those nuggets was on Kiplinger (via Yahoo! Finance) today on why, ostensibly, the 401(k) is not a good option to save for retirement Continue reading “Why we don’t trust financial planners: a rant”

How to create a no-limit Synthetic Roth IRA in a taxable account

Tired of contributing a paltry $5,500 per year ($11,000 for couples) to your Roth? If you like to contribute more than that, why not find a way to generate returns in a taxable account that mimic those of a Roth IRA? Impossible, you say? Under very specific conditions it is possible to generate after-tax returns in a taxable account that replicate those of a Roth IRA. We call it the Synthetic Roth IRA. Continue reading “How to create a no-limit Synthetic Roth IRA in a taxable account”

REITs pros and cons

We live in a low-yield world. Interest rates are much lower than in recent history and this has spurred a mad “search for yield” whereby investors look for anything, really anything, that offers yield above the measly low interest rates currently prevailing in this country. REITs have greatly benefited from this trend and when my hairstylist starts telling me that he invests in REITs it makes me wonder if that sector might be a little bit overheated (brings back memories of the late 1990s when a different hairdresser in a different city gave out Tech company recommendations). Here are some pros and cons of REITs.
Continue reading “REITs pros and cons”