The year 2000 retiree status

Research on Safe Withdrawal Rates

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ben
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The year 2000 retiree status

Post by ben »

On this board the year 2000 retiree is often refered to as being doomed at the conventional 4% w/r.

I looked at the unclemick style balanced Vanguard index fund VBINX (60/40) for retiree w. $1M pulling 40k first year and adjust for inflation yearly. He would have ended 2004 with $883k in the fund (in todays $).

Now if we add a Ben style rule of trying not to adjust for inflation (through smart shopping/reducing holidays Etc.) in bad times and say he did not adjust for inflation and just pulled the $40k/year he would today be having $893k in the fund. (In the low inflation period we had I believe it would be possible for most).

My point is: he retired at historical TOP valuations and while he is a bit down after first 5 years - it does not look like the disaster to me that some on these boards seem to indicate. Cheers, Ben
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Post by Mike »

Demographics still strongly favor a bull market. Y2K was just a bear within the cyclical bull, caused by tech spending going overboard in the years leading up to the non existent Y2k bug. S&P profits temporarily dropped in half when tech spending ended. The real test will come when demographics turn against the market. In the mean time, private accounts may help the market to party on.
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Post by hocus2004 »

He retired at historical TOP valuations and while he is a bit down after the first 5 years - it does not look like the disaster to me that some on these boards seem to indicate.

We haven't experienced a major price drop yet, Ben. The hard part is not surviving the good years.

Contrast the guy you describe above with the guy who went with TIPS paying 4.1 percent real. That guy has a government guarantee backing up a 5.85 percent take-out for 30 years (or a smaller take-out and a longer guaranteed survival time).

I don't say that everyone should have gone with 100 percent TIPS. That would be as unbalanced as the intercst claim that anyone who went with less than 74 percent stocks is "mentally ill." But people should have been looking at those 4.1 percent real TIPs for more than just the cash-reserve portion of their portolios.

The REHP study steered people wrong. The false claims put forward in that study put a lot of retirements at risk that didn't need to be at risk.
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Post by ben »

4.1% real TIP return would cetainly be nice - and a very prudent move indeed.

I will continue to keep track of this VBINX 2000 lazy-bugger retiree for years to come and we will see if he makes it or not. If he makes it through 11 years without too big losses pr with gains JWR research seems to indicate that he will make it? (I probably misunderstood that so JWR pls feel free to correct).

Cheers, Ben
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Post by hocus2004 »

If he makes it through 11 years without too big losses or with gains, JWR's research seems to indicate that he will make it?

That's my understanding. There's no guarantee, of course. But I believe that JWR1945's research identifies the first 11 years of retirement as the danger zone.

I think that an implication of that finding is that it makes sense to construct strategies that provide a counter to stock losses for the first 11 years, and that then provide a shift to greater risk and greater growth potential. One possible strategy might be to work part-time for as many years into the retirement as needed to insure safe passage to the end of the 11-year danger zone. If you got hit with losses in the early years, you would continue working part-time and thereby avoid having to sell stocks for the entire 11-year time-period. If you had gains on your stocks in your early years, you might be able to accumulate enough capital from the part-time work to be able to stop doing it sooner than at the end of the 11 year time-period.

There are lots of other possibiites along these lines that might be developed, I believe.
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Post by JWR1945 »

I saw these numbers. They do not look right.

Because of that, I have hand calculated what would have happened from January 2000 to January 2005 with a 100% stock portfolio (using the S&P500 index and Professor Robert Shiller's database).

It is down 32% nominal and 40% real (using year 2000 dollars).

Here is how it is easy to miscalculate balances: one fails to adjust balances for each year individually.

Notice that you cannot simply start with the total return of a portfolio when there are no withdrawals. It doesn't work that way. Withdrawals in down years have a disproportionate impact.

It is easy to make that kind of mistake. I have made it myself.

It may be that ben's numbers are right. I don't know. I am suspicious.

In any event, I have posted all of the details of my own calculations.

Have fun.

John R.
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Post by ben »

JWR one difference is that VBINX is TOTAL US market and TOTAL bond market - no need that the 2000 retiree stick to SP500 and gov bonds only when a fund like that is available. Only reason we keep looking at SP500 and gov bonds further back is that we do not HAVE the total market data. But for the 2000 retiree o course we have.

I DID pull the initial $40k in morning of 1st Jan 2000(or closing on 31st Dec) every year. Here are the nos:

year w/r40k+CPI VBINX balance end year
2000 40000 -2 940800
2001 40640 -3 873155
2002 41615 -9.5 752543
2003 42364 19.9 851505
2004 43847 9.3 882769

Can't see anything wrong - he is certainly NOT eating cat food yet! :D
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Post by JWR1945 »

I have posted additional details on the A Hand Calculation for 2000 to 2005 thread dated Wed Jan 19, 2005.

My hand calculations keep withdrawals at $40000 nominal. I make my inflation adjustment only when I reach January 2005.

There is a glitch in ben's originally reported balance of $893K. It does not include the $40000 withdrawal at the end of 2004. In essence, ben is doing the same thing that I did in my original set of calculations except that all four of his withdrawals are at the beginning of each year (instead of at the end of each year).

That is, ben makes four withdrawals, not five.

Ben's fund portfolio has done substantially better than the S&P500 over the last five years. It is up by 12.7% (total, nominal). It has matched inflation almost exactly if you exclude withdrawals (and deposits). The S&P500 has lost (10.5% total, nominal and) 20.9% (total, real) of its buying power over the last five years.

Have fun.

John R.
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Post by hocus2004 »

One difference is that VBINX is TOTAL US market and TOTAL bond market - no need that the 2000 retiree stick to SP500 and gov bonds only when a fund like that is available. Only reason we keep looking at SP500 and gov bonds further back is that we do not HAVE the total market data.

I am not impressed by a showing that the Ben approach has done OK for five years. Any approach can do OK for five years. I am impressed that the Ben approach seems to have done a good bit better than the REHP study approach during a five-year time-period in which the REHP study approach did not well. This suggests to me that the Ben approach is another reasonable alternative to the intercst recommendation that all aspiring early retirees go with 74 percent S&P stocks regardless of valuation levels.

Three alternatives to which we have devoted extensive discussion are: (1) holding TIPS purchased at a time at which by themselves they provide an acceptably high SWR; (2) holding TIPS at times of extreme overvaluation of stocks and switching gradually to stocks as valuations come down; and (3) going with high dividend stocks rather than an S&P index. Two alternatives to which we have given brief mention from time to time are: (1) investing in individual stocks and seeking to gain an edge over the results "locked in" for an index by engaging in extensive personal research to identify a portfolio likely to provide an acceptable long-term return; and (2) investing in real estate either instead of investing in stocks or in addition to investing in stocks. A sixth alternative was discussed in SWR discussions held at the FIRE board in earlier times, but not here. That is the raddr approach, which, as I understand things, is to invest in index funds but to shift money to different types of index funds as valuation levels for the various alternative change. I believe that raddr has little or nothing invested in the S&P index today, but he still has most of his money in stock index funds of different types (small cap funds or international funds or value funds).

I see the Ben approach as a seventh alternative to the intercst approach. Ben is advocating an approach similar to one that I gave serious consideration to when I was putting together my plan. I first heard about it from Harry Browne, who termed it "The Permanent Portfolio." The idea is to take the diversification concept a good bit further than you do when you invest in an S&P index fund. The idea behind the Permanent Portfolio concept is to be truly diversified, not just among stocks, but among all possible asset classes. The 60/40 portfolio that Ben is examining in this thread is not a true Permanent Portfolio, but Ben's personal allocation is a little different, and I believe that his personal allocation really does represent the Permanent Portfolio concept. I think he just went with the 60-40 thing here to simplify.

The point that I am getting at is that I do not see Ben's argument here as being a defense of the REHP study approach. He is making a case for something that is in a significant way different from that approach, perhaps as different as the approach of looking for high-dividend stocks. Five years of history does not prove anything. But it is possibly signifcant that in times that are not so hot for the REHP approach, the Ben approach (which also calls for a significant investment in stocks at times of generally high stock valuations) does not so bad. I am a little concerned that the point that I believe that Ben is trying to get across might get lost in the numbers comparisons.

I see the Ben approach (the Permanent Portfolio approach) as being an alternative worthy of further study. There are a good number who simply are not comfortable with the idea of timing. This is a non-timing approach that calls for significant investment in stocks but which may well provide for a SWR significantly higher than the SWR obtained from the REHP approach at times of high valuations for S&P stocks. We need to look at some data to confirm this, of course. But it makes sense to me that the 60-40 total stock/total bond fund examined by Ben in his posts above might have a higher SWR than a 74 percent S&P stock portfilio at today's valuation levels. The Ben fund is more diversified, so one would intuitively expect that the highs would not be as high and the lows would not be as low.

My bottom line here is that I think that Ben is onto something significant. I personally think that he compromises his point at times by putting it forward in ways that make it sound like a defense of the REHP approach. I don't see it as a defense of the REHP approach at all. I see the Ben approach as being as much opposed to the REHP approach as my TIPS approach and as JWR1945's high-dividend stocks approach (I understand that Ben does not seem to see it this way).

I understand that it may be difficult or even impossible to do numbers investigations to confirm the value of the Ben approach because of a lack of pertinent data. My hope is that we might be able to come up with some creative ways of exploring the concept and assessing its workability. I had a book once by Harry Browne that discussed the Permanent Portfolio concept in depth, and I presume (I don't remember) that that presented some data. I don't think that I still have the book. But there might be material available on the internet, or the Harry Browne book (I don't recall the title right off the bat) might be available at used bookstores.

Ben is not saying that a 74 percent S&P allocation was safe for a retirement beginning in the year 2000. He is saying that something else might have been safe. I doubt that the SWR for the Ben approach was 4 percent on January 2000. But my guess is that the SWR for the Ben approach was higher than the 1.6 percent that applied for the REHP approach at that time. It's worth noting that Ben's level of saving permits him to use a take-out number of less than 4 percent. For those in Ben's sorts of circumstances, I am inclined to believe that the Permanent Portfolio approach might represent a sound means of financing an early retirement.

One last point. The true Permanent Portfolio approach (not the 60-40 thing described above, but the approach that Ben actually uses) addresses the problem that I have often raised that the REHP study is not a real-world approach because it fails to deal with the emotional fallout of suffering huge losses. The Permanent Portfolio was designed to include enough asset classes with different characteristics so that at all times at least one of them is doing well. When the performance of the stock portion of the portfolio is causing emotional distress, there is another portion of the portfolio bringing an emotional lift. This "Making It Real" aspect of the Permanent Portfolio is a big part of its appeal to me.
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Post by JWR1945 »

hocus2004 wrote:I am not impressed by a showing that the Ben approach has done OK for five years. Any approach can do OK for five years. I am impressed that the Ben approach seems to have done a good bit better than the REHP study approach during a five-year time-period in which the REHP study approach did not well. This suggests to me that the Ben approach is another reasonable alternative to the intercst recommendation that all aspiring early retirees go with 74 percent S&P stocks regardless of valuation levels.
This points out an important weakness of our calculators.

Remember that one of the weaknesses of our calculators is their handling of non-stock investments. They do OK with commercial paper. But they do poorly with just about everything else.

Remember all of those nonsense posts about how hocus's real life CD from MBNA with its 7% interest rate never existed. The Retire Early Safe Withdrawal Calculator said so!

The pseudo-logic went along these lines: because you cannot buy a 5-year CD with a 7% interest rate today, it is impossible that hocus is able to get a 7% return on his original investment today.

Similarly, because you cannot buy TIPS (at par) with a 3.5% yield to maturity today, the pseudo-logic tells us that it is impossible that hocus has achieved Safe Withdrawal Rates corresponding to owning TIPS with a 3.5% yield to maturity.

Actually, the calculator treats all non-stock investments as single-year trading vehicles without any gains or losses and without any transaction costs. The calculator never allows you to lock in an interest rate for more than a single year.

Ben's real life investment fund invested in real life bonds for its non-stock component. That is why it did better than the calculators indicate. If the fund had allocated money only between the stock index and money market funds, the fund and the calculator would have been in close agreement.

Funds (and real life balanced funds in particular) have not been around long enough for us to exploit their real life returns.

Have fun.

John R.
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Post by hocus2004 »

Remember all of those nonsense posts about how hocus's real life CD from MBNA with its 7% interest rate never existed. The Retire Early Safe Withdrawal Calculator said so!

I of course understand the point that you are making here, JWR1945. I have a point of my own that I need to make re the words quoted above, and I will put it forward here (since it is an appropriate response to the words you put on the table for discussion) regardless of my sense that some might find it "distasteful" for me to do so.

The problem that you are making reference to above is not a calculator problem. The problem is a lack-of-personal-integrity problem. We all understand that the existing calculators do not answer all possible questions. We all (well, all but one) also understand that we need to relate to each other on these boards with a measure of personal integrity guiding our responses. When a poster lacking the mimimal standards of personal integrity required of all others is tolerated for too long a time-period, all sorts of confusion ensues.

All sorts of junk has accumulated in the Post Archives of the various boards. Most community members do not have the time available to them that you and I do to sift through the junk and discover the pearls. When they see posts by well-regarded posters like Wanderer or raddr or Ataloss or someone else with that sort of reputation saying something, they presume that there is at least a little bit of truth to it. As you well know, and as all those who have been paying attention for some time know, that is not the case when it comes to the SWR discussions that have been held over the past 32 months. These three posters and many others have engaged in multiple acts of deliberate deception in order to "protect" intercst from having to acknowledge getting the number wrong in the REHP study.

I have hopes that those dark days are drawing to an end and that it will soon be possible once again for community members to engage in honest and informed posting on SWRs at the various boards. Let's say that that long-anticipated change really does take place. Will we still have the problem with the weaknesses of calculators that you make reference to in the words above?

Yes and no.

We are obviously not going to be able to rely on the calculators to answer all of the questions that come up. That does not mean that we cannot aim to engage in meaningful analysis of all of the questions that come up. Some questions lend themselves well to analysis by calculator. On those, we will make heavy use of calculators. Other questions lend themselves to common-sense consideration. On those, we will rely on common sense. Some lend themselves to the use of analogy. On those, we will use analogies. Some lend themselves to analysis by anecdote. On those, we will make use of anecdotes. Some lend themselves to the use of sophisticated logic exercises. On, those we will make use of sophisticated logic exercises.

The numbers stuff is always going to be core for us. Why? Because investing is largely a numbers game. Sooner or later, you need to stop talking about what you are going to do and actually do something. You need to take a specified number of dollars out of your portfolio, and you can't take that step without deciding on a take-out number (at least one that applies for the first year). So we MUST at some stage of the process translate our logic exercises and our anecdotes and our analogies into numbers. Numbers matter. Big time.

But we are not going to fall into the trap that intercst fell into and start rejecting perfectly reasonable strategies on the thinking that "there's not 130 years of data on that one, so we can't consider it." No. That's dumb with a capital B (dumb people can't spell). Here's what we will do when we don't have assess to the data needed to come up with perfect answers to a question--We will do the best we can under the circumstances. How did I ever manage to think that one up? See how much smarter I am than intercst?

None of this invective is aimed at you, JWR1945. I hope that that is obvious to all. The invective is aimed at the ignorant head-in-the-sand approach to analyzing investment strategies that has dominated at the various Retire Early/FIRE posting communities for the past five years. It's stupid to fail to consider perfectly good strategies just because you don't have 130 years of data on them. That whole "we need to see 130 years of data before you are permitted to post on this" thing was a tactic used by intercst and other DCMs to block reasoned discussions of investing strategies that make more sense than the REHP approach. The investing approach failed, the tactics to block discussions of alternatives failed, and we are now going to move on to consideration of some more promising ideas.

Will we have as much confidence in the analyses we do that are not backed by extensive reference to numbers? Generally not, but in some cases we might. In some cases, we might have more confidence in non-numbers analyses. A logic-based analysis can be darn persuasive in the right circumstances.

In any event, it is not for the people generating the analyses to determine whether the analyses are good enough or not. That's for the readers of the analyses to determine for themselves. Those of us who post here (and at any other boards that come to permit honest and informed posting on investing questions) will do the best we can to generate good stuff and the aspiring early retirees who make use of the boards to learn what they need to learn will do with all of the stuff we generate what they will.

Are we still an SWR board if we permit consideration of non-numbers-oriented analyses? We are. Numbers serve us, we don't serve the numbers. Our purpose is to develop the tools needed to put together effective investment strategies, and we have found that numbers can help a lot, so we will of course always make use of numbers. When we don't have access to all the numbers we would like to have access to, we just make use of other tools, that's all. We do the best we can. That's our answer when a DCM asks us "Where's the 130 years of data for this idea?" We say "We did the best we could to help people learn how to retire early and we didn't concern ourselves too much with the question of whether there was 130 years of data available to us or not."

The idea that you need 130 years of data in order to consider an investing strategy is one of the dogmas that has caused us all to waste a lot of the past five years running around in circles trying to defend investment strategies that can't be reasonably defended. My May 13, 2002, post suggested that it was time to stop spinning in circles and begin some forward movement. We have now endured a 32 month Debate About Having a Debate as to whether to permit community members to do so even if intercst objects, and, if I am reading the signs of the times properly, we are now close to coming to a consensus to do so. So let's move foward. I believe that we have all just about exhausted our patience for the nonsense. I know for sure that I have. So let's move forward. Let's Learn Together!
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Post by unclemick »

I was under some Harry Browne influence in the 1980's. 7-8 asset classes outside of my 401k.
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Post by JWR1945 »

hocus2004 wrote:The problem that you are making reference to above is not a calculator problem. The problem is a lack-of-personal-integrity problem. We all understand that the existing calculators do not answer all possible questions. We all (well, all but one) also understand that we need to relate to each other on these boards with a measure of personal integrity guiding our responses. When a poster lacking the minimal standards of personal integrity required of all others is tolerated for too long a time-period, all sorts of confusion ensues.
I agree.

Have fun.

John R.
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Post by peterv »

Hocus wrote:We are obviously not going to be able to rely on the calculators to answer all of the questions that come up. That does not mean that we cannot aim to engage in meaningful analysis of all of the questions that come up. Some questions lend themselves well to analysis by calculator. On those, we will make heavy use of calculators. Other questions lend themselves to common-sense consideration. On those, we will rely on common sense. Some lend themselves to the use of analogy. On those, we will use analogies. Some lend themselves to analysis by anecdote. On those, we will make use of anecdotes. Some lend themselves to the use of sophisticated logic exercises. On, those we will make use of sophisticated logic exercises.
Right on Hocus. We need lots more of this kind of thinking. I've long been concerned about the non-number crunchable a aspects of trying to figure out a SWR/PRW. All the caluclations I've seen for instance ignore the effects of the aging baby boomers. (Read _The Coming Generational Storm_ by Kotlifoff and Burns and _Grey Dawn_ by Pete Peterson.) I'm hardly going very far out on a limb by predicting that SS and Medicare will change significantly in the next decade or two. But what kind of number do you put on it? I just make a mental note that whatever the brainiacs like JWR come up with probably needs to be adjusted down. Accuse me of doom and gloom if you like but I'd rather live under my means now than at 80 be sitting down to a dinner of a nice steaming bowl of Alpo.

Many years ago in an article on retirement planning I came accross a comment that profoundly affected by outlook; it's easier to be young and poor than old and poor.

Cheers,

Peter
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Post by ben »

the browne concept has been studied widely at business schools (I spend some time at INSEAD where it was a popular concept) and there is a great fund: PRPFX using the principles(e/r a bit high). i agree with Hocus that my personal portfolio uses some of those principles.

That said mr. lazy-bugger couch potato (LBCP) is not me :lol: . He is simply a guy trying to survice 30 years of retirement using VBINX.

JWR: we do NOT agree. LCBP DID pull 40k 5 times (every 1st Jan starting in 2000). Below are the nos without the inflation adjustments to make it simpler(the difference is about $20k):

year w/r VBINX balance end year
2000 40000 -2 940800
2001 40000 -3 873776
2002 40000 -9.5 754567
2003 40000 19.9 856766
2004 40000 9.3 892725

So sitting on $893k (in todays USD) or about $20k less if he had adjusted for inflation(still in todays $). JWR: hope we can agree? Cheers, ben

Ps. note that since LCBP pulls the full $40k he needs in the start of the year he could even put it in an ING Orange account at 2% or so and thereby receiving an average 1% over the year, offsetting close to 50% of the inflation during the period.
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Post by JWR1945 »

peterv wrote:Right on Hocus. We need lots more of this kind of thinking. I've long been concerned about the non-number crunchable a aspects of trying to figure out a SWR/PRW. All the caluclations I've seen for instance ignore the effects of the aging baby boomers.
You will probably enjoy reading this thread:

Demographics and Dividends dated Tue Dec 21, 2004.
http://nofeeboards.com/boards/viewtopic.php?t=3200

Have fun.

John R.
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Post by JWR1945 »

ben wrote:LCBP DID pull 40k 5 times
You are right.

I failed to count the withdrawal at the beginning of 2000. That is, when I listed my first initial balance, I had already made my first withdrawal. I should have counted it.

Have fun.

John R.
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Post by peterv »

Hocus wrote:I had a book once by Harry Browne that discussed the Permanent Portfolio concept in depth, and I presume (I don't remember) that that presented some data. I don't think that I still have the book. But there might be material available on the internet, or the Harry Browne book (I don't recall the title right off the bat) might be available at used bookstores.
Just about every used book that ever existed in available at abebooks.com. http://dogbert.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchEntry

I just did a search on Harry Browne books and it looks like this might be the one you were refering to;


Inflation-Proofing Your Investments:A Permanent Program That Will Help You Protect Your Savings... (ISBN:0688035760)

Cheers,

Peter
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Post by ben »

He has written quite a few books actually: http://www.harrybrowne.org/about.htm
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Post by JWR1945 »

peterv wrote:Just about every used book that ever existed in available at abebooks.com.
Is there any way to browse around without knowing the ISBN number?

Not having this number is what has kept me away from abebooks in the past.

It is one thing to buy a copy of something that is in the library or that is a textbook in current use. It is something else to browse around and select something that you had never seen before.

Have fun.

John R.
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