muck Posted October 7, 2008 Share Posted October 7, 2008 I agree with you 100%. When I first heard the commercial I litterally said It's raining men! Hallelulah! It's raining men!. I feel pretty lucky my guy has me up about 3% ytd, not nearly as good as the last few years, but I'll take it this year with a smile on my face. You have a bunch of reason to be happy with that. As a fellow practicioner, pat him on the back for me. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
muck Posted October 7, 2008 Share Posted October 7, 2008 That doesn't bother me at all. If everything is setup, explained, and executed properly then that's not something you ever have to worry about. If you're out selling performance and talking people into rolling over their small 401k at 40 and retiring based on 15% average returns then you probably should get sued. "You see, I have this patent to print money. Just push this button on the portfolio optimizer and it tells me which funds to pick -- my investors have averaged 18.2% per year for the last two days. Oh, and Morningstar rankings are forward looking, in case you didn't know." Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Atlanta Cracker Posted October 7, 2008 Share Posted October 7, 2008 "You see, I have this patent to print money. Just push this button on the portfolio optimizer and it tells me which funds to pick -- my investors have averaged 18.2% per year for the last two days. Oh, and Morningstar rankings are forward looking, in case you didn't know." I have two funds than made 18.7% in the past 2 days so obviously you're better off with me. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
muck Posted October 7, 2008 Share Posted October 7, 2008 I have two funds than made 18.7% in the past 2 days so obviously you're better off with me. My two funds were only up 18.2% on an annualized basis. If your investors were up 18.7% in only two days, your patent must be better than mine. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
muck Posted October 7, 2008 Share Posted October 7, 2008 ...on a serious note though, one of my funds was up about 19% last week and was up another 15% or so today... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Atlanta Cracker Posted October 7, 2008 Share Posted October 7, 2008 ...on a serious note though, one of my funds was up about 19% last week and was up another 15% or so today... That's good stuff and hard to find this year. Often I see true diversification hedged away by the investment that is supposed to be providing the diversification. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sugar Magnolia Posted October 7, 2008 Author Share Posted October 7, 2008 Okay so let me quailify some things. First off the original post was to find out if Huddle financial advisors or people who are in or close to retirement use withdrawal rates as a sound means of deciding whether they are financially ready for retirement, or use other quantifications or models. We chose to semi-retire vs retire and to work 10-15 hours a week so we could use that money as discretionary income to do improvements on the house or take an extravagant vacation, which we never did during working years since we were extremely frugal and worked 60 hours a week and never took a vacation. Now we find in retirement or semi-retirement that with the market conditions, we don't want to use our money on extravagance but now feel a need hunker down and budget ourselves. In retirement our yearly expendiures are about the same as when we worked. We hoped we could actually spend a little more and live a little, since we scrimped and saved and worked our a$$es off to get to this point, but that has all changed of late. I define a semi-retirement job as one that is half time, and provides either discretionary income or you do it because it is fun and rewarding. We don't feel strapped that we can't afford a new car or roof, but when the time comes when we do, our withdrawal rate will rise from a very conservative average withdrawal rate of 2.7% to a conservative average rate of 3.65%. Actually since we are adding income right now, our withdrawal rate is more like 1.75%. But like Social Security, we are not counting on this income indefinetly. Our current income producing jobs are not recession proof and if we do enter into a big recession, our semi-retirement income will take a big hit, if not disappear. BTW, when the market was hot there were many advisors out there preaching 8% withdrawal rates were safe, but they are in hiding right now I suspect and we never even considered that. I'm not posting this for sympathy as we have lots of options that we are hoping not to have to exercise, and feel very fortunate we have these options. We can move into a smaller house If we can sell our house, try to find a full time job if there are jobs out there, quit our golf membership, not buy a ski pass, not take vacations (although our vacations are very frugal and staying with friends and family), and even cut back on basic stuff. It's not a bad problem to have. We have seen several financial advisors. We are self taught when it comes to money and every advisor we've seen cannot show us that they can do better. They do suggest other investment vehicles. The fee based advisors are expensive up front and admit their suggested vehicles really can't do signifcantly better than where our money is now, and we have calculated that they would cost more than the returns they can maybe promise us. The commissioned based advisors want us to sell our no load funds with capital gains and put in loaded funds where they get their commission but these funds have no better history than the no load funds we are in now. My question is are we safe with this conservative withdrawal rate to relax and ride the storm even if our economy goes into a historic recession lasting 5 years, or even worse, or do we need to start thinking of the above options and start cutting back now. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Atlanta Cracker Posted October 7, 2008 Share Posted October 7, 2008 My question is are we safe with this conservative withdrawal rate to relax and ride the storm even if our economy goes into a historic recession lasting 5 years, or even worse, or do we need to start thinking of the above options and start cutting back now. Based on everything you've said you are safe. Relax. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
muck Posted October 7, 2008 Share Posted October 7, 2008 My advice based on what you've said? 1) Sell anything with a loss and offset it with just enough of the stuff with the biggest gains so there is no/minimal tax impact. 2) Reallocate up to 10-20% of your nest egg into stuff that is truly diversifying your risks. 3) When taking the distributions, use #1 as the approach to take when deciding what to sell and when. 4) Leave the rest alone. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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