The investing for a living top 10 posts on retirement

Over the past year or so I’ve received many comments from readers that it is a bit difficult to find items on the blog, especially for new readers. The search function, categories, and tags are meant to help this but they don’t do a good job of providing an overview or a guide to important topics that I cover frequently on the blog. This is one of the drawbacks of blogs in general. So to help overcome this drawback I’ve decided to write intros or guides to the major sections of the blog and make these guides ‘sticky’ or the first post you see in that particular section. With that in mind, I’ll kick this off with a guide to the top posts on retirement on the blog. Here we go.

Retirement is one of the main topics I cover regularly on Investing For a Living. Here is a list of what I think are the most important posts on retirement that a new reader should begin with with a brief summary of each.

Top 10 posts on retirement

1. How much does it take to retire? The first post on the blog. Details the most popular method, the 4% safe withdrawal rate (swr), to determine how much money do you need to retire. Basically, you need enough money so you can withdraw 4% of that money every year. That works out to be 25 times your estimated income needs in retirement.
2. How to implement the 4% safe withdrawal rate (swr)? Describes the details of implementing the swr rule. Not as simple as it seems on the surface.
3. Inflation: retirement killer – details why inflation is the one of the worst things to deal with in retirement. A very misunderstoood topic.
4. Living a better retirement – withdrawal rates higher than 4% – describes a few ways of being able to live off more than 4% of your retirement $$$.
5. Understanding volatility and compound investment returns – a bit of an advanced post but critical. Basically, the most important message here is to avoid large losses. They take massive rallies to recover from and kill long term returns.
6. High investment fees will ruin your retirement – pretty self explanatory but also a very over looked topic. Basically, avoid high fees like the plague
7. Higher retirement spending by staying flexible – being able to control you living expenses can allow you to withdraw more money in retirement
8. Higher withdrawal rates through diversification and timing – this post describes how a market timing portfolio (the IVY timing portfolio) allows you withdraw more money in retirement. This is the retirement investment model I advocate for most retirees.
9. The early warning retirement indicator – how to track and know when your retirement livelihood is in trouble
10. The investing for a living retirement model – describes the basic investment model I used in my retirement. Builds on several earlier posts/

And that about does it. I think these 10 posts will give a reader a good introduction to the retirement section of the blog. There are a lot more posts on retirement on the blog. Many other posts are linked to in these top 10 posts. For a full list you can search the blog for a particular topic or see the retirement section for a full chronological list of retirement posts.

Next up is a guide to the dividend section of the blog. Enjoy.