I’m not a huge fan of investing in bonds, although I do invest in them from time to time. In general, their prospective returns are lower than stocks, they’re taxed at marginal income rates, and individual bond issues are harder to research/buy/trade than individual stocks. However, the most surprising reasons […]
I’ve talked a lot about how much it takes to retire and safe withdrawal rates and ways to increase safe withdrawal rates. See the series of posts here. All of these discussions and studies I reference are based on a certain retirement model. Lets call it the portfolio value retirement […]
I haven’t talked about safe withdrawal rates (SWR) in a while. For earlier discussions on what the SWR is on how to use it in retirement see the series of posts here. The SWR basically determines what is the maximum a retiree can withdraw from their portfolio every year and […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
In today’s post I want to explain and demonstrate how modern retirement calculators work. There are two basic ways to calculate how much you can safely withdraw from your portfolio in retirement; looking backwards using historical data for past retirees and looking forward using possible future investment returns. On this […]
Contrary to the overwhelming consensus at the beginning of the year, bonds have done remarkably well year to date. With that in mind I wanted to update the SWRs for the 100% US TIPs retirement portfolio I presented last year. With rates down, SWRs will be down as well but […]
What’s the hardest part of the retirement decision? For many its taking the leap of faith that financially what’s worked in the past will continue to work in the future. And often the start of every single year, during those early years of retirement, brings the anxiety right back again. […]
Today I’d like to address some of the biggest concerns with the IVY portfolios, in particular the timing versions. Three big concerns with the implementation of IVY are management fees, trading commissions, and taxes and that they may impact performance enough to render any advantage mute. These are truly valid […]
In my last post I updated the official numbers for the IVY timing model. The original version of the model consists of a diversified portfolio of 5 asset classes. In the research paper Mebane Faber also looks at several extension to the 5 asset class timing model that improve returns […]