While I saw not much appeal to anyone in trying to untangle the skill as Mauboussin would call it, in a contest that is by its nature mostly luck, I was able to work in a "lucky" reference to this forum in my 6th article in a series I have been writing on retirement.Your winning statistics and our messages should make a good article for your website.
I hope you will post a link to your article with a new post on the Bogleheads Forum
This article is called "Surviving the Tax Bite in Retirement:"
http://seekingalpha.com/article/2837636 ... retirement
Once again as longinvest has suggested if you don't want to register for this site, and you know enough about your browser to disable your browser cookies, it seems you can read the whole article without registering.
That title is a little bit of a tease, because the longer version of that title would probably say something like:
The results are extremely disheartening for those who actually would live to an older age of say 99 (where my study goes.) It seems that over half of that dividend income is eaten up by taxes - at least if my math is correct! The reason being, as most already know, the IRS doesn't care if you don't want or need the income, they want to get paid.Can someone really put a group of high growth dividend paying stocks in an IRA and expect to live off the dividends only
So I think the "between the lines conclusion" that I wish I had stated in the article is NOT to avoid the IRA at all costs, because truly most can get great value out of it, by deferring taxes while you are working to build a bigger retirement and then taking that money out at a much reduced tax-rate during retirement (maybe!) The "between the lines trick" is really to have the IRA "right sized" so the money you take out in RMD's is the money you need to spend. In that way you aren't paying more taxes than you need to.
Also using the RMD withdrawals as a retirement strategy is what a couple of my other articles stress as a quite efficient way to extract the maximum value from your portfolio -- in most cases even more than the typical VPW strategy discussed on this forum. Here is a link to one of those articles should you care to explore:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/2747405 ... ithdrawals
So, sometimes when you get close to retirement or during your first few years, Roth conversions can tone down the later RMD affect, but I strongly disagree with the thinking that you need to convert all your IRA money to a Roth because you are essentially afraid of taxes or the risk they add.
Personally, at 63 and retired, I am in the "toning down" (through conversions) and spending down phase of my IRA money.
fd