It must be that time of the year again. Retirement hysteria time. Usually in the new year I start seeing a slew of articles on how your retirement is at risk, how you cannot possibly retire now, and the theme for the last few years – how high stock market Read more…
About once a year I go through various future expected return forecasts. Here are some recent updates on what the investment community is saying about future asset class returns, most of them focused on US stock returns, over the next 10 years. In short, nothing really new from last year, Read more…
Today I wanted to revisit the topic of spending in retirement. Having a retirement spending plan and monitoring that plan is just as important to retirement success as asset allocation or deciding on safe withdrawal rates (SWRs). Yet, it’s not discussed nearly as much as the other retirement topics. And Read more…
Compounded annual returns are the crack of the investment world. Wall Street is the pusher and investors are the addicts. Investment companies and investors focus on the annual return metric as the most important in a portfolio to the long term detriment of most investors. This myopic focus on annual Read more…
I often get asked “how do I get started with an investment portfolio?”. The best answer, but not very helpful, is to learn about building and investing in a diversified buy and hold portfolio for the long term. A very true statement but it usually leaves the investor still looking Read more…
In today’s post I want to address another approach to dealing with the prospect of poor future returns. In my last post I described the prospect of poor future returns and different risk-based portfolio strategies in such an environment. Today I’ll consider an alternative. The alternatives are various dedicated income Read more…
There’s been a lot of chatter recently about asset valuations, in particular US stocks and US bonds, and their impact of future returns. This is nothing new. It just seems to get louder at the start of every new year. I’ve discussed this topic before on the blog. Last time Read more…
Time for another one of those yearly updates. In this post I’ll update the data for the worst times in history to retire by adding 2014 data to the 4 worst retirement portfolios in history. See here for last year’s update. The worst time to retire since 1929 turns out Read more…
This post has nothing to do with asset prices, valuation, or timing the market as the title may have led you to believe. It has to do with investor psychology and behavior. Over the years I’ve wondered if certain types of people would be happier if they didn’t invest in anything Read more…
Today I wanted to talk about the forecasting of future returns and more importantly what implications future returns have for SWRs (Safe Withdrawal Rates). As I showed in my last post, the first 10 year period real return in retirement is the best predictor of SWRs for 30 year retirement Read more…
The starting year of retirement makes a huge difference in the success or failure of a retirement plan. This is the key difference between the accumulation phase of investing and the withdrawal phase of investing. Yet the majority of investing writing does not take this key difference into account when Read more…