The 4% rule of thumb for retirement savings is under threat. After 10 years of retirement, through the end of 2009, individuals who retired at the beginning of the year 2000 are potentially on a path to run out of money before the end of their 30 year retirement period. Read more…
There are lots of lies in finance or more subtly put, a lot of things wrong with conventional wisdom. I have trouble deciding which lie is the biggest but definitely one of the candidates is ‘Stocks for the Long Run’ which usually means that buying and holding the market index Read more…
Here I go again. Bond bashing time. I think many income investors worried about risk mistakenly focus too much on the lower volatility of bonds as a risk measure. Volatility is only one measure of risk. On other measures of risk bonds perform just as poorly as stocks but with Read more…
Well, its finally time to put it out there. Since I started blogging I’ve been trying to build a base of background posts to get me to this point. Today, I want to share with you the retirement model that I am using to fund my retirement. I think I Read more…
I’ve had a lot of trouble thinking about investing these past few days. In the past 15 years or so I’ve traveled to and done business in Japan many a time. I have many friends there. My wife and I have enjoyed some great vacations there. I even experienced a Read more…
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 Read more…
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 Read more…
That dreaded time of year is fast approaching. Yep, tax time. As we barrel to that dreaded time I’d thought I’d touch on an often overlooked tool for investors, tax loss harvesting. Used appropriately, it can reduce the burden of capital gain taxes in retirement and also be a great Read more…
In my last post I described the commutative property for dividends, i.e. that a 3% div stock with a 2% growth rate is exactly the same as a 2% div stock with a 3% div growth rate. I showed that the commutative property only holds for investments in non-taxable accounts Read more…
Sometimes it is good to get back to basics. After a recent conversation with a family member, an elementary school teacher, about the school’s decision to rename improper fractions into something else (no, I’m not joking) I ended up thinking about some dividend basics. One of the basic properties in Read more…
In my 2011 outlook post earlier this month I mentioned that I had raised the cash portion of my portfolio to 40%. I did this by selling out of my commodity positions. A recent post I read at Pragmatic Capitalism reminded of me of this and that I should explicitly Read more…