Tag: Sequence of Return Risk

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…

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

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” →

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” →

Passive income through option writing: Part 7 – Careful when shorting long-dated options!

May 3, 2021

Welcome back to a new installment of the options series! In the discussion following the previous post (Part 6), a reader suggested the following: In recent history, the index has never lost more than 50% over the span of one year. Then why not simply write (=short) a put option, about one year out with a strike 50+% below today’s index level? Make it extra-safe and use a strike 60% below today’s index!

12-month rolling S&P 500 index returns (price index only, not total returns!).

So, let’s take a look at the following scenario where we short a put option on the S&P 500 index slightly more than a year out and with a strike about 60% below the current index level:

  • Trading date: 4/30/2021
  • Index level at inception: 4,181.17
  • Expiration: 6/16/2022
  • Strike: 1,700 (=59.2% below the index)
  • Option premium: $11.50
  • Multiplier: 100x  (so, we receive $1,150 per short contract, minus about $1.50 in commission)
  • Initial Margin: $4,400, maintenance margin: $4,000

In other words, as a percentage of the initial margin, we can generate about 26% return over about 13.5 months. Annualized that’s still slightly above 23%! Even if we put down $15,000 instead of the bare minimum initial margin, we’re still looking at about 6.8% annualized return. If that’s a truly bulletproof and 100% safe return that’s nothing to sneeze at. A 6.8% safe return certainly beats the 0.1% safe return in a money market, right? Does that mean we have solved that pesky Sequence Risk problem?

Here are a few reasons to be skeptical about this strategy…

Continue reading “Passive income through option writing: Part 7 – Careful when shorting long-dated options!” →

Pre-Retirement Glidepaths: How crazy is it to hold 100% equities until retirement? – SWR Series Part 43

March 2, 2021

A while ago I wrote about the challenge of designing pre-retirement equity/bond glidepaths (“What’s wrong with Target Date Funds?“). In a nutshell, the main weakness of Target Date Funds (TDFs) for folks planning an early retirement is that if you have a short horizon and a large savings rate then the “industry standard” TDF is probably useless. 10 years before retirement, the TDF has likely shifted too far out of equities, likely below 70%!

The problem is that the traditional glidepaths are calibrated to the traditional retiree (who would have guessed???) with a sizable nest egg ten years away from retirement. In that case, you want to hedge against the possibility of a bear market so close to retirement from which you might have trouble recovering due to the relatively small contributions of “only” 10-15% of your income. But people planning early retirement with a small initial net worth and a massive 50+% savings rates should clearly take more risk to get their portfolio off the ground.

In any case, back then I mentioned that I had some additional material about glidepaths toward retirement for the FIRE community, to be published at a later date, which is today!

Why is this post part of the Safe Withdrawal Rate Series? First, today’s post is a natural extension of the FIRE glidepath posts (Part 19, Part 20) in this series. Moreover, the majority of readers of the series are not necessarily retired yet. Many seek guidance during the last few years before retirement. In fact, one of the most frequent questions I have been getting is that people who are almost retired and still holding 100% equities wonder how they are supposed to transition to a less aggressive allocation, say 75% stocks and 25% bonds at the start of retirement. Should you do a gradual transition? Or keep the allocation at 100% equities and then rapidly (cold-turkey?) shift to a more cautious allocation upon retirement? 

My usual response: It depends on your parameters and constraints. You can certainly maintain your 100% equity allocation much longer than the traditional TDFs would make you believe. If you are “flexible” with your retirement date you can even keep the equity weight at 100% until you retire. If you are really set on a specific date and want to hedge the downside risk, you probably want to gradually shift there over the last few years. So, let’s take a look at my findings…
Continue reading “Pre-Retirement Glidepaths: How crazy is it to hold 100% equities until retirement? – SWR Series Part 43” →

The Effect of “One More Year” – SWR Series Part 42

January 13, 2021

Happy New Year, everyone! And welcome to a new installment of the Safe Withdrawal Rate Series. Today I like to write about the One More Year Syndrome (OMYS) – the fear of retirement and the decision to just work another year. What I find intriguing about OMYS is that procrastination normally works the other way around. You opt for the fun and easy stuff and promise yourself to do the hard work tomorrow. Only to repeat that charade again tomorrow and postpone the unpleasant tasks to the day after tomorrow. And so on. 

But why procrastinate a fun-filled early retirement and keep working? Physician on FIRE and Fritz at The Retirement Manifesto have written about their rationales. The number one reason is that you grow your nest egg and put your retirement finances on a better footing. That was certainly my main rationale, too. I could have retired comfortably in 2017, probably even in 2016 but I delayed that decision until 2018.

So, qualitatively it’s obvious. But can we quantify by how much the OMYS improves your retirement security? Is it worth the additional year in the workforce? How can we incorporate OMYS in the Big ERN Google Safe Withdrawal Simulation Sheet? Is it possible that OMYS will boost your retirement health so substantially that it’s not as irrational as it’s sometimes made? Let’s take a look…

Continue reading “The Effect of “One More Year” – SWR Series Part 42″ →

Can we raise our Safe Withdrawal Rate when inflation is low? – SWR Series Part 41

October 26, 2020

A few weeks ago I wrote the post “Do we really have to lower our Safe Withdrawal Rate to 0.5% now?” about the pretty ridiculous claim that the Safe Withdrawal Rate should go all the way down to just 0.5%, in light of today’s ultra-low interest rates. The claim was transparently false and it was great fun to debunk it. But recently I came across another proclamation of the type “We have to rethink the Safe Withdrawal Rate” – this time proposing to raise it all the way up to 5% and even 5.5%! Well, count me a skeptic on this one, too. Though I’d have to tread a bit more cautiously here because the 5.5% SWR claim doesn’t come from some random internet troll but from the “Father of the 4% Rule” himself, Bill Bengen. He’s been doing the rounds recently advocating for a 5% and even 5.5% Safe Withdrawal Rate:

  • In September in a piece he wrote for FA-mag with a recommendation to raise the SWR to 5%.
  • On October 1, the same article, reprinted almost verbatim under a different title in the same magazine: “Choosing The Highest Safe Withdrawal Rate At Retirement”
  • On October 13 on Michael Kitces’ podcast, Bengen made another explicit SWR recommendation: “[I]n a very low inflation environment like we have now, if we had modest stocks, I wouldn’t be recommending 4.5%, I’d probably be recommending 5.25%, 5.5%” It’s not clear what made him raise the SWR by another 0.25-0.50%, though.

And the whole discussion was quickly picked up in the personal finance  and FIRE community:

The main rationale for increasing the SWR: inflation has been really tame recently and will stay subdued over the coming years and even decades. That’s his forecast, not mine! Hence, Bengen makes the case that we’d have to make smaller “cost-of-living adjustments” (COLA) to our withdrawals. Smaller future aggregate withdrawals afford you larger initial withdrawals, according to Bengen. But as you might have guessed, the calculations that justify the significantly higher withdrawal rate don’t appear so convincing once look at the details…

Continue reading “Can we raise our Safe Withdrawal Rate when inflation is low? – SWR Series Part 41” →

Should we preserve our capital and only consume the dividends in retirement? – SWR Series Part 40

October 14, 2020

Welcome to a new installment of the Safe Withdrawal Rate Series!  40 Parts already! If this is the first time you encounter this series, I recommend you check out the landing page here to find your way around. 

Today’s post is about a question I’ve encountered quite a few times recently. If Sequence of Return Risk means that you face the danger of retirement ruin from liquidating (equity) shares during a down market early during retirement, why not avoid touching your principal altogether and simply live off the dividends only in retirement? Sounds reasonable, right?

But by solving the “running out of money” problem we create a bunch of new questions, such as:

  • Will the principal keep up with inflation over a typical retirement horizon?
  • Will your dividend payments keep up with inflation over time?
  • How much volatility in the dividend payments would you have to expect?

So, in other words, the “dividend only” strategy – simple as it may seem – is somewhat more complicated than your good old Trinity-style 4% Rule simulations. In the Trinity Study, failure means you run out of money before the end of the retirement horizon – simple as that. With the dividend-only approach, failure can come in many different shapes. For example, you may not run out of money but the volatility of dividends could be too high and/or you face deep and multi-year (or even multi-decade!) long drawdowns in dividend income and/or you have to live like a miser early on because the dividend yield is so low. All those are failures of sorts, too. Then, how good or how bad is this dividend-only approach? Let’s take a look…

Continue reading “Should we preserve our capital and only consume the dividends in retirement? – SWR Series Part 40” →

How often should we rebalance our portfolio? – SWR Series Part 39

August 5, 2020

In the 3+ years, while working on the Safe Withdrawal Rate Series, I regularly get this question:

What’s my assumption for rebalancing the portfolio?

In the simulations throughout the entire series, I’ve always assumed that the investor rebalances the portfolio every month back to the target weights. And those target weights can be fixed, for example, 60% stocks and 40% bonds, or they can be moving targets like in a glidepath scenario (see Part 19 and Part 20).

In fact, assuming monthly rebalancing is the numerically most convenient assumption. I would never have to keep track of the various individual portfolio positions (stocks, bonds, cash, gold, etc.) over time, but only the aggregate portfolio value. If the portfolio is rebalanced back to the target weights every month I can simply track the portfolio value over time by applying the weighted asset return every month.

But there are some obstacles to rebalancing every single month:

  1. It’s might be too much work. Maybe not necessarily the trading itself but keeping track of the different accounts and calculating the aggregate stock and bond weights, potentially making adjustments for taxable accounts, tax-free and tax-deferred accounts, etc.
  2. It might involve transaction costs. Even in today’s world with zero commission trades for ETFs, you’d still have to bear the cost of the bid-ask spreads every time you trade.
  3. Even if you hold your assets in mutual funds (no explicit trading costs) there might be short-term trading restrictions prohibited you from selling and then buying (or vice versa) too frequently.
  4. It might be tax-inefficient. If an asset has appreciated too much you might have to sell more of it than your current retirement budget to bring the asset weight back to target. But that would mean you’ll have an unnecessarily high tax bill that year. Of course, this tax issue could be avoided by doing the rebalancing trades in the tax-advantaged accounts, not in the taxable brokerage accounts.

And finally and maybe most importantly, there might be a rationale for less-than-monthly rebalancing: it might have an impact on your Sequence of Return Risk. So, especially that last point piqued my interest because anything that might impact the safety of my withdrawal strategy is worth studying.

So, on the menu today are the following questions:

  • Under what conditions will less-frequent rebalancing do better or worse than monthly rebalancing and why?
  • How much of a difference would it make if we were to rebalance our portfolio less frequently?
  • Could the “right” rebalance strategy solve or at least alleviate the Sequence Risk problem?

Let’s take a look… Continue reading “How often should we rebalance our portfolio? – SWR Series Part 39” →