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Bond yields have gone from essentially 0% to 4%. TIPs have gone from negative to about +1.7% real yield. CAPE has dropped from 38 to 28. A common "expected" real return estimate is 1/CAPE. So, from 2.6 to 3.6 real return For a 50/50 portfolio, the resulting expected real return has gone from less than 1.3% to something like 2.7%. So, believing you can have a WR that is something like 1% 1.5% higher than what was previously possible does not seem that unimaginable. I am just playing Devil's advocate here. I don't have much faith in using valuation to make such decisions. But, it seems many people do. My only point is that if you believe that, then it would be inconsistent to not think SWR has increased significantly. It's not like...

I largely agree with you. But, this just seems like the flip side of all the "3% is the new 4% because of valuations and low bond yields" threads. Many prominent posters here argue that when bond yields are low and valuations are high, one should use a lower SWR. I have often made the point that I don't often see the same logic applied when valuations drop and bond yields rise "Yoohoo we can spend more now that the markets have crashed!!" If nothing else, it us at least a least bit refreshing to see something other than a spiral to an ever-lower SWR being discussed. But, it does seem a bit odd that there is so much push back against the idea of higher SWR now that bond yields and valuations have come down, some it from ...

The basic idea is sound. The same concept holds for doing things like reducing the amount of SS being taxed, IRMAA, or even hitting the NIIT limit. You just need to think about the cost of doing the Roth conversion. If it is tax neutral ( you are paying 22% now or later), then it is a win. If you have to pay more (24% now versus say 12% in the future), it might take a long time for this to pay off.

This is easy to illustrate. If you have a starting portfolio of $1.5 million and you have 35 years expected lifespan, and you select a 4% WR, that is $60,000 per year and you would adjust up for inflation each year. Now, right after you retire, what if the market goes down by 25% over 12 months? Your portfolio is now $1.125 million (not including some of the money you spent), and therefore $60,000 per year which you were planning to spend is now closer to 5.5% of your portfolio because you need to bump it up a bit for inflation as well. That is a whopping 1.5%+ change in WR in just 12 months. And this is the nature of withdrawing from equity portfolios, their returns aren’t smooth, so how do you build a plan that allows spending to stay sm...

If you're retired, which safe withdrawal rate (SWR) has allowed you actually to grow your nest egg, inflation-adjusted? And how about the future? Do you have any plans to change your SWR? Asset allocation? I'd like to compare your experience with my plans for an SWR. Of course, in my planning, the withdrawal rate has to be adjusted upwards when required minimum distributions kick in, and that makes portfolio growth particularly difficult, as it is supposed to, I suppose. Thanks. You are paying taxes on the RMDs but you don't have to spend them. Unless you were planning on donating them on death, the difference between paying taxes now versus later tends to pretty small unless the person spending them ends up in a much different tax situati...

According to College Scorecard, the median salary for CS majors at OSU is $80,252. At Northeastern, it is $108,000. It seems that because of the co-ops, NEU CS grads make significantly more than OSU CS grads. Whether that is worth an additional year of school and the higher tuition is up to the OP. It could mean that. Or it could mean that median salaries in Boston are higher than they are in Ohio. If the difference were due to median salaries being higher in Boston than Ohio, one would expect the same discrepancy for other majors. This is easy to check. Some comparisons: I wouldn't expect that. I would expect graduates to go where the jobs are and that will very field by field. Take a look at this old data: https://ecs.osu.edu/sites/defau...

Up to a point. The lower the your spending level, the harder those adaptions are to make. At our spending level, it would be relatively "easy" to make different spending choices. At 40k I just think that is harder, for the obvious reason that a higher percentage of your spending is required. Also the OP is not single. The OP has a spouse and 2 kids. So adaptations have to work around the needs of four people, not one. Like you, I *could* live on 30k, but really really would rather not. And at a 30k budget, there wouldn't be any money to do things like save for retirement (or kids college ...). That said, I'm sure the OP would go back to work if expense projections are wrong, hopefully to a reasonable job. Then of course you have ...

TN_Boy wrote: ↑Sun Mar 19, 2023 12:24 pm I think you are more likely to have issues with your expense projections than your portfolio return projections.

The thing with expense projections is that you will adapt your life to meet them. How that 40k gets spend might not match your projections but you will find a way to live with the money you have. Maybe you take 3k from the vacation fund and it goes to the health care or home repair. Or vice versa. Now if you would have been happier working more so you could spend say 60k instead of 40k is a guessing game. I know my personal comfort level is up at more like 80k but there is always location and personal preferences. I know I could live on 30k. I just don't want to.

Where are you getting medical insurance for a family at $500? Full time working for large corps I can’t even get it all for $500 let alone any co-pays or out of pocket. But non-working I believe that number to be extremely low. I had one year of bad luck and hit full out of pocket maximums. Which eclipsed the $6000 you have budgeted by $7500. In my state, a family of 4 making 40k/year gets a 1300/month subsidy. A silver plan with an out of pocket limit of 6000 costs about 1200/month at my age. So basically you just have to pay the deductibles. There should even be some support for paying the deductible. Now that doesn't include things like adult dentists and things like eyewear. 6k seems like a pretty reasonable guess to me. Obviously this...

We have sort of reached the end point of all these discussions. We have hit the - Can you really live on that? After all there is no way I could live on X. We will end up debating life choices forever. Yeah I would save for my kids college education. I know other people feel differently. And so on down the list. - What if accident x happens? Yep you sure would like to have more money. But you will find someway to survive the same way people who make 40k and have those same things happen. -I think a x% chance of failure is ok. Hey we can debate that forever. Some want to push that to 0.0001%. Others can live with 10% -Well I will just spend x% less for a while. Ok. This basically goes back to the first point. You don't need a lot of money to...

Based on the prices of most EVs being sold, I doubt those various costs are a huge factor for many buyers. yes; and other factors. Good to have aspirational crossover dates I suppose but I think they are optimistic. My guess is they are off by 10 years. One more halfing of the cost and some density increase starts making them much cheaper than ICE cars for 80% (most people aren't driving 600miles in one shot like all the ice advocates do) of use cases and when we go from like 3% of cars being EVs to 20% things like apartments/work places installing chargers and the like all start making sense. I can totally see why post 2030 companies will switch to just maintaining their ICE lines and stop developing new models. You can have a good busine...

I spend 20 years working around boston area and in almost every company, every summer we had co-ops and interns from NEU coop system ( not from BU, not from MIT or harvard or tufts) - who would eventually convert to full time. This could mean one of two things: 1. NEU students are more sought-after than Harvard/MIT students. 2. Harvard/MIT students have more choices (including outside Boston area) than NEU students. I vote for 2 but that is with limited silicon valley experience. We would send recruiters to MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Dartmouth and the like where we had connections and would be a lot more aggressive at both interns and full time hires. We never had a need to go outside those dozen or so schools. If price is even, I could see ...

It's easy to see the benefit of inflation protection for holders of TIPS and I Bonds, but what is the benefit to the government and to taxpayers for offering to cover the cost of future inflation? I can't figure it out, it appears one-sided. Also seeing that corporations don't generally issue inflation-indexed bonds makes me suspect they are probably not a great deal for issuers, but there must be some rationale for them. Imagine it is 1981. Which is better for the government a) Issuing a 14% nominal bond b) Issuing a 2% real bond with 12% inflation adjustment In case a, they paid out 14% for 20 years. In case B they paid out 14%, then 10%, then 8%, and then 6% as inflation dropped over the years Right now a 10 year TIPS at like 1.2% or a ...

wolf359 wrote: ↑Fri Mar 17, 2023 8:15 am
As for the finances, his portfolio not only survived both the divorce and drawing from it, but was actually 20% higher than when he started. It just wasn't enough to support his new health expenses.

Stocks returned something like 15% over that time period. And it wasn't enough. What type of returns would he have needed.....

Xrayman69 wrote: ↑Thu Mar 16, 2023 6:30 pm

Johnny Thinwallet wrote: ↑Thu Mar 16, 2023 12:53 pm 03/16/23 update ...

Just got an email that YouTubeTV is hitting us next month with a sharp price increase to $72.99, up from the current $64.99.

Very disappointing, especially because they just recently dropped MLB Network.

Got the same email. It’s still great value for our household and lifestyle. I’m watching YTTV while flying and able to seamlessly watch ncaa tourney.

Can't you do that with basically any of the streaming services? Heck I am pretty sure FIOS allowed you to stream TV to your phone. I have enjoyed YoutubeTV the past 3 years but it is probably time to call back my local companies and see if they are running any deals.

It put bounds on one's projected spendings. As long as that range is acceptable, then you are good to go. For me, rather than max out the "safe" FWR (with a floor) at 5.5% my plan is to use 4% of portfolio with a 3% inflation-adjusted floor. For someone retiring with, say, $2mm, then that is saying "you can start out spending $80k/year, but in the worst 5-10% or so of historical scenarios you'd drop to $60k for a large bulk of your retirement, but 90% of the time you'd be spending $80k+ with a historical median real spend of a little more than $100k/year" which may have some appeal. As long as $60k is acceptable and $80-100k is appealing then that person is good to go. I think it's a much better plan than, say, just spe...

Beyond the charity and family basics, it obviously depends on your circle of friends and family circumstances (and lifestyle preferences). A few that I've seen done: Throw a big celebration dinner for some occasion (wife B-day, anniversary, whatever). Somewhat equivalent to a nice wedding dinner. Foot the bill for friends and family to do something a bit out of the ordinary and maybe beyond their typical budgets ("we rented this big oceanfront house in Hawaii for a week/two, hope you can come join us"). This can help with the "nobody to play with" syndrome, but it requires tact to preserve relationships. Try NetJets (or maybe more realistically for some of us, buy business class seats for international travel). Leave a ...

It is a little different from 3%, because for any time period one is not starting their withdrawals at 3%, but rather at 5.5%. So even the worst cases were still ok when people were withdrawing more initially. It's also beneficial to people who might read SWR numbers and think that even if their portfolio is growing they still have to adhere to their 3% number. This method allows for flexibility--if your portfolio does poorly, you can still have a baseline of spending with the knowledge that your spending level has always been able to be maintained in the past, and when your portfolio does well you can increase your spending up to a certain amount and not feel (again, compared to historical precedents) like you are jeopardizing your financ...

I mean, I get that, but again, the blog post-dated the “retirement”, not the other way around I say that as a guy who discovered his blog pretty early, enjoyed it for awhile, but haven’t read it regularly in 8-9 years. So I’m not like a big MMM defender, but he seems to get some unfair criticism for a guy who says “hey, there are some big benefits to frugality” and people are like “your website is too popular to take your points seriously.” It’s bizarre. Like the only people who can advocate for frugality (which no one would accuse me of) are…bad writers? Super unsuccessful people? Idk. Idk who would be allowed to in that worldview. If he gave 100% of the website profits to charity would he then be allowed to advocate frugality? It’s a bit...

I know the standard advice is to withdraw from taxable accounts first in retirement. But if one wants to leave their taxable account for heirs (for the stepped-up basis), how damaging is it to withdraw from tax-deferred first and leave taxable alone as long as possible? Is there a way to calculate this? "Which Dollars to Spend First Every Year in Retirement" by Mike Piper Video: https://youtu.be/atTp3sATI44?t=1571 Article: https://obliviousinvestor.com/which-dollars-to-spend-first-every-year-in-retirement/ I hope that helps. :D Is there software/website/service that can do the optimization for you? I'm not aware of any software that takes Mike's approach to tax-efficient spending/partial Roth conversions. Yet, Income Solver/Strat...

nisiprius wrote: ↑Wed Mar 15, 2023 3:11 pm

This was a real-world failure of 5%-centered flexible withdrawals. How can you regard it as anything else?

They launched in April 2008 (about the worst timing possible ) and had some very complicated holdings (they have way underperformed the S&P 500). But yes you can back test this scheme historically and it fails 30%+ of the time.. If you want to argue that a 20% market decline makes it as safe as the 4% SWR, sure. But your failure rate is still up around 10%. And could do more stat hacking (what is the SWR after a 10+ year bull market after 1 down year?) but we really don't have enough data for that.

I've been playing with SWR long enough to instinctively know that a 5% SWR, indexed for inflation over 60 years with small supplemental cash flows is not a safe strategy. 5% SWR is not, but 5% FWR is probably okay so long as you don't have legacy motives. The VPW works somewhat similarly. In my back-testing, FWR up to 5.5% worked 100% of the time with a 100% stock portfolio and 40-year time horizon. That was also with a 3% inflation-adjusted floor on spending (no matter what, if 5.5% of the portfolio value was less than 3% of the starting portfolio value, adjusted for inflation, then you took the higher amount). Of course, the worst-case scenario was essentially depleted at the end of 40 years and would not have made it through year 41. Bu...

Cherry picking year 2000, nice! Anyone can find periods were bonds outperformed stocks, even over 10 to 20 years, but that doesn’t mean it’s usually the case. And the ERN SWR toolbox wouldn’t recommend 5% WR at the market peak of 2000, 2007, or 2022… If " equities do perform better than bonds or cash over the long term. There’s no denying that" was true, I couldn't cherry pick a date range. But as you are now agreeing that statement isn't true. There are time bonds outperform stocks and given the effects of SOR, you might not get to the long term. This is the problem of using usually when planning for events that you can only run 1 time. Don't like 2000? 1966 was a mere 24. You know 10% less than today. 1930 was only 22. Heck 197...

Regardless of how wild a ride it is, equities do perform better than bonds or cash over the long term. There’s no denying that. No one really knows the future, so if you bake in a little bit of flexibility, and you are faithful to the historical data and trends that we have, that’s really the best you can do. Oh really? https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-asset-class-allocation?s=y&mode=1&timePeriod=4&startYear=2000&firstMonth=1&endYear=2023&lastMonth=12&calendarAligned=true&includeYTD=false&initialAmount=1000000&annualOperation=2&annualAdjustment=50000&inflationAdjusted=true&annualPercentage=0.0&frequency=4&rebalanceType=1&absoluteDeviation=5.0&relativeDeviation=...

er999 wrote: ↑Tue Mar 14, 2023 8:38 pm If it doesn’t work in 20 years you’ll be 56 or so and still able to get some sort of job (drive for Uber, etc). For someone who is 65 withdrawing 5% and 20 years later is 85 they’ll unlikely to have those sorts of work options available. That gives you a margin of safety, not financial but human capital.

That is the big difference. He is also talking a low enough spend that the McJob for 1000 hours/year would cover a good chunk of expense and SS is likely to cover like half the expenses towards the end.

5% with no spending cuts(i.e. SS) is going to have something like a 50% success rate for 50 years. You either go that's pretty good or that is horrible. The cost of going from 50% success to 95% is a lot of savings.

This thread has been interesting to read as a prospective groom. Judging by others' comments the cost of a venue-wedding has climbed precipitously over time. The half-dozen or so venues my partner and I are considering range from $17k-31k for ~75 guests' worth of food plus site fees. This doesn't include other amenities i.e. flowers, music, photography, etc., which we haven't even begun to price out. Her parents have offered $80k, and mine $15k, so the funding is available, but I'm having trouble abiding the expense on principle. The unspent funds are ours to use freely after the wedding. With the price of housing being what it is, I can't make a party this expensive make sense. It is partly that but you also have areas of the country/worl...

I did start off by saying they are different legal constructs. The focus of my post was that both dividends and interest are earned during a certain accounting period and then distributed, so thinking of them similarly from an investor receiving them in that way is not incorrect. The legal constructs are what matters. If I give you 100k stick in a 20 year bond making 3%, I have a high confidence I can spend 3k/year for 20 years. Do the same thing with div stocks and you can get anywhere from 0 dollars (company hits bad times and cuts the div) to say 20k (stock explodes in value). Both are percentages which makes them easy to compare but they aren't remotely the same. There is nothing really wrong with divs only. It is conservative with tod...

I'm going to add something that's a little different than what others already added. At 67, and assuming your husband lives till average life expectancy for male in U.S. which is 77, he has roughly 10 years. This means every 1 year is 10% of his remaining life expectancy. To me, this is HUGE. Why continue to work when you've already accumulated very nice sum that should be able to easily support your disabled dependent? I recently retired at age 57.5 after realizing this. Money can't buy time. Why would you think his life expectancy is 77? Why do you think he is dying over 6 years earlier than the average 67 year old? Given the limited info we have, I would put my money on him living 6 years longer than the average 67 year old not shorter....

Where does the possibility of leaps in productivity fit into this puzzle? I realize it's been somewhat anemic in the recent past, but in the absence of available labor, companies are eventually going to deploy investments in AI, automation, self-service solutions, etc., etc. If Japan is any guide, we should expect that, as well -- things like robots that bring your drinks to you in a restaurant are things I've already experienced. But is that enough, soon enough? It might take a decade for that to get built out, and some service jobs (e.g. barber) would seem hard to automate. There are already demo robots that cut hair. I think it is going to be hard to predict which jobs really get automated in the next 10-15 years. In the end we don't ne...

retired@50 wrote: ↑Mon Mar 13, 2023 11:28 am If you want to buy stocks with a lower P/E ratio, consider an international stock index.

VTIAX - International index has a P/E of 12.0, while VTSAX - US Stock has a P/E of 19.5.

Regards,

You shouldn't compare US and international PE to each other. They are based on different types of industry mix (imagine if historically oil stocks are a 10 and tech stocks are a 40. If country A is 100% oil with a PE20, it is overvalued. If country B is 100% tech with a PE of 20, it is undervalued.) and different accounting rules. You would need to look at historical norms for each. That being said international sure looks undervalued. Course we have been saying that for a decade. Have to be right one of these days....

There is some correlation but individual differences matter a lot. A doctor starting at 30 making 300k/year for 30 years is different than a software developer who starts at 22 making 150k/year goes up to 700k with RSU, then back down to 250k, and is put out to pasture at 55.

The other question is a lot easier. If 40 years ago you started saving 15% and invested 50/50, you would have 15 million nominal and just over 5m real. In general saving 15% for ~40 years gets you in the range of 20x of your income which is plenty to fund your retirement for most time periods. Obviously this stuff changes a lot when you don't start til 35, save 10% or 30%, and so on.

finally, i’ll share what my business partner told me which i took to heart: “send your kids to the best college you can afford”. the key is that each person has to figure out what they can afford. Defining best is equally as hard. Your best might be my worst...... In the end we all end up projecting our life experiences and biases. It is easy to write down the cheapest path. Is it the best? Who knows. It is hard to compare the social growth of some kids who get together with friends, figure out how to rent an apartment, feed themselves, and so on to the kids who stay at home and have parents who cover that stuff. How many CC fail to make the jump to the 4 year school because it is one more thing. How many of those 4 year degrees are hard b...

I did start off by saying they are different legal constructs. The focus of my post was that both dividends and interest are earned during a certain accounting period and then distributed, so thinking of them similarly from an investor receiving them in that way is not incorrect. The legal constructs are what matters. If I give you 100k stick in a 20 year bond making 3%, I have a high confidence I can spend 3k/year for 20 years. Do the same thing with div stocks and you can get anywhere from 0 dollars (company hits bad times and cuts the div) to say 20k (stock explodes in value). Both are percentages which makes them easy to compare but they aren't remotely the same. There is nothing really wrong with divs only. It is conservative with tod...

If you expect to retire at a higher marginal tax rate, then it does make sense to contribute to Roth rather than traditional, and to contribute traditional accounts to Roth accounts up to the top of the current tax bracket. However, you should still contribute to the SEP-IRA in preference to taxable investing. You get the benefit of tax deferral, which is much more valuable than any possible small tax difference. Tax deferral might be more valuable. Odds are they will end up paying 24% instead of 28% if they pay taxes now. That covers a decent chunk of tax drag. The real risk though is having to pay 32% or 35% if they are close to the top of the 24% bracket already. And things can get worse if one of them dies. If the s-corp has large prof...

Hi All, My accountant and financial planner are giving conflicting advice, and I'd appreciate some help regarding tax-deferred savings strategy. Background: We're a married couple, 67 years old, husband still working. In the past we always maxed out tax-deferred savings, funding a SEP-IRA from our S-Corp and a 401-K offered by husband's employer. This year, my financial planner advised us NOT to contribute to a SEP-IRA at all, and to change my husband's 401K contributions to Roth, not pretax. His rationale: Any thoughts on this? To me, both positions have merit! Roth seems like a good idea but I am not sure about skipping the sep-ira. Do you have account flexibility to do things like contribute to the sep (save 24%), convert to Roth (pay 2...

StevieG72 wrote: ↑Sun Mar 12, 2023 2:47 pm I agree a good mattress is important, however I don’t believe you need to spend 3k.

The problem is that it is basically impossible how much better a mattress is. If you could tell me that tempurpedic was like sleeping an extra 20 mins, I would drop the 6k in a heart beat. But the evidence for stuff like that is weak at best especially when you start cross off the low end models. You will find big fans of just about every tech and model out there.

I will say that figuring out if a mattress is bad for you is a lot easier....

[So if you have a US bias and it underperforms you will be in a similar place as your peers and will probably get a bit of a bailout from the government. Now, if you diversify more globally and international underperforms you will likely find yourself a bit more alone and without handouts coming your way. Where was the US stock bailout during the Lost Decade? If past history aren't going to bail out your stocks. But they will set up soup kitchens so you don't starve. We all know that US and international performed about the same post 1960-2008. Depending on your starting and ending dates, one or the other might have done slightly better or worse. And then since 2008, the US has crushed. It seems hard to believe that international could eve...

It is a meaningless statement. Over the last 100 years, how many times have you made more money holding more risky stocks versus cash over 10 year periods. Something like 95% of the time. Obviously you can keep going down the risk path (i.e. buying 1 lottery ticket even in the case where you expect to make money is unlikely to pay off) til you are taking on risks that you aren't being paid properly for. Buying an index fund is taking on risk that at any point in the next 20 years you could be down. Sometimes a lot. But your odds of having more moeny at the end is high. Take that same money and stick in 1 stock and your odds of going both broke and getting fantastic returns goes up. But the question is why do you think higher returns come f...

Here's Morgan Housel's take: So many investors say, “higher risk means higher reward.” They view it as black and white. If I take more risk, I’ll get more reward. But that’s not how it works at all. Most of the time, taking more risk means you are most likely to earn lower returns , [my emphasis] with a smaller chance that you will earn fantastic returns to compensate. https://collabfund.com/blog/psychological-paths-of-least-resistance/ Or as Ed Easterling puts it: Risk is not the fertilizer in your garden, it’s the weeds. It is a meaningless statement. Over the last 100 years, how many times have you made more money holding more risky stocks versus cash over 10 year periods. Something like 95% of the time. Obviously you can keep going dow...

As you noted, many consider stock dividends to be interest. It's very hard to dissuade them otherwise. (You need only look at threads here to see.) While stocks and bonds are different legal constructs, the earning of dividends and the earning of interest do essentially arise similarly. Stock dividends arise from excess business profits, which become part of the balance sheet in retained earnings after closing out each period. A stock fund made up of these companies would see this as an increase in NAV, as retained earnings is an equity account. When the dividend is declared, the fund's NAV will similarly decrease, as retained earnings is decreased. Bond interest arises from coupon payments. A bond fund made of of these individual bonds ma...

If dividends stocks get a slightly better return really doesn't matter for sequence risk. Here is a simple question. I have 1 million dollars. I take out 3% of the current portfolio value every year. Do I have sequence risk? Do you say their is no risk because I will never run out of money? Or do you go yeah their is risk because when stocks drop 50%, by income will drop 50%? This is basically what a spend only the divs scheme is. Divs tend to be a trailing thing (they cut slower than crashes and increase slower than market gains). The issue with divs is that it is easy to chase yield. These people are talking about going to European stocks over US because of higher yield. That is a questionable way of going. You could go buy a bunch of 8% ...

"Previous history doesn't mater. You can't change it." Absolutely true - but you do have the option of planning before they get to that point. And that is where some choices lie. "Or maybe you end up in the nursing home and can take it out at basically 0%" Or maybe you have LTCi. "Our gap has shrunk a bit. If we could spread the tax free part over 20 years instead of 5, the Roth would normally pass taxable. The 10 year RMD payout method makes things very close when I did the math with my assumptions." You could always run the most likely scenarios through some detailed calculators like RPM and/or Pralana and then review the results. Comparing all the results from the most likely to the least and also handicapp...

If Cramer's stock pick recommendations can change on a daily baseline, forget about him and his advice. He's merely one step ahead of a basement call center trading firm. It does seem to be true that Cramer's announcements of his stock picks can move their prices, though. So it's... complicated. The Cramer bounce ...in January 2009, graduate students from the University of Pennsylvania published a study claiming that over time, the average next-day increase for a stock that Cramer recommended was 3% for the entire study sample, and almost 7% for smaller cap stocks. They proved through the use of electronic communication networks (ECN) that most trades came in after 7 p.m. ET, when "Mad Money" concluded. Another study conducted by...

For how long? In which time period would T-bills beat a, say, 30/70 market portfolio? What if t-bills are 7% but inflation is 7%? If you have the capital and spending requirements such that you don't need to take the risk, and want to bet that inflation's effect on t-bill rates will be negligible, then sure, you can coast on it. Don't assume that longer duration will get you more yield. You can't exactly lock in the 5.25% on 12-month right now any longer on the curve. To me, this is starting to ring the "Why not 100% XYZ?" indicator we get any time something is doing better than a balanced portfolio. "Why not 100 stocks?" in the boom times, "Why not 100% real estate" in 2007, etc. Does real return matter? If i...

The wrongdoer should leave his or her job, not the employee who didn’t cause the problem. Unless she is truly able to find something suitable (and so far she hasn’t) it’s too big of a sacrifice to leave one’s job because others can’t get their act together. If she quits a senior management job she may not get another management job. Plus, unfairly, it will be construed that she couldn’t hack it etc. both internally at her company and externally. Certainly there are internal corporate and external coaching and legal resources she can draw upon to address this. If she’s being mistreated reporting it is an option. These days some companies take such things seriously. Maybe that’s just my perspective as a single person who doesn’t have the lux...

For how long? In which time period would T-bills beat a, say, 30/70 market portfolio? What if t-bills are 7% but inflation is 7%? If you have the capital and spending requirements such that you don't need to take the risk, and want to bet that inflation's effect on t-bill rates will be negligible, then sure, you can coast on it. Don't assume that longer duration will get you more yield. You can't exactly lock in the 5.25% on 12-month right now any longer on the curve. To me, this is starting to ring the "Why not 100% XYZ?" indicator we get any time something is doing better than a balanced portfolio. "Why not 100 stocks?" in the boom times, "Why not 100% real estate" in 2007, etc. Does real return matter? If i...

Take all vacation/sick/personal time. Take belongings. Spend that time looking for another job. Then quit, whether a job has been found or not. No reason needed. Good ideas but my guess is they won’t let her take vacation time. I’d rather quit and have it paid out if they do that. Judging by what’s been told they’ll certainly bother her on her time off. In some states you don't get vacation time paid out and I think pretty much everywhere you lose personal days. You should of have to decide if a week or two off to recharge would make the job tolerable or if you are really done. If you are done, figure out if you need to take vacation or not and then give notice. If you don't want a job that requires long hours, you need to find one that do...

... Now do it for say a 1972 person who wants to take out 4% of the portfolio every year. Now this isn't exactly correct (10 years for bonds is the best I can come up with and wellsey isn't exactly a 35/65 type fund) but it gives the general idea. https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-asset-class-allocation?s=y&mode=1&timePeriod=4&startYear=1972&firstMonth=1&endYear=2023&lastMonth=12&calendarAligned=true&includeYTD=false&initialAmount=1000000&annualOperation=2&annualAdjustment=40000&inflationAdjusted=true&annualPercentage=0.0&frequency=4&rebalanceType=1&absoluteDeviation=5.0&relativeDeviation=25.0&leverageType=0&leverageRatio=0.0&debtAmount=0&debtInt...

Was listening to Kristy and Bryce from the popular FIRE podcast Millenial Revolution and they made a few statements about their strategy that i'm having trouble understanding. Here is the clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxRt2fAzRi0&t=736s First they claim that if you live off the dividends then you can eliminate the sequence risk. How is this possible? Then they claim that if you just spend the dividends then you're not selling anything - however my understanding of dividends is that it comes off the NAV so getting dividends and spending it is functionally equivalent to NOT getting dividends and then selling shares in that amount. Their suggestion is to invest more in International to increase dividend yield because the US market...

"No I am saying that getting 100k in taxable can be better than getting 85k in a Roth" That would make sense as long as you ignored the 10-20+ years of those accounts' previous history. Previous history doesn't mater. You can't change it. You have arrived at a given point in time with the given accounts and are deciding where to spend the money from. Now as I mentioned there is the future. It is one thing if you die tomorrow and the kid gets 100k instead of 85k and they spend the money the next day. That is the 85k versus 100k case. That is different if you live 20 years (there is potential for tax drag) and they take another 5 years to spend the money (even more tax drag). Tax drag tends to not be enough to make up for paying 15...