Best Laid Plans

Posted on April 2, 2020 by wiseguide

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth
–Mike Tyson

As I write this the world is in lock-down due to the spread of a global virus. I write mostly about financial issues but try to consistently keep the perspective that your time is really your most valuable resource, and your continued health is what enables you to make the most of that time. So, remember that if you and your loved ones are relatively safe from this, consider yourself among the fortunate. My friends and family who are doctors and nurses see it up close and personal, and I don’t know any of them who have their stock portfolio as one of their top 10 worries. Just keep that perspective.

With that as an important backdrop, looking at this as merely a financial impact can be jarring. I’ve talked about this in prior posts, the occasional, even significant decline in the stock market is completely expected, and is actually a positive. One of the other positive things to result from a downturn is it gets you to measure your real response to a crisis. I can ask myself, what would I do right now if this were happening and I was already retired with my 50/50 stock/bond portfolio? If I’m being honest with myself, I’d be freaking out. This is extremely valuable insight into my psyche, and allows me to avoid those freak-out moments as an old man, at least when it comes to money.

I still think the 50/50 portfolio can work for many people, but recall my analysis for that example showed there was a 10% chance of outliving your money using the 4% rule for withdrawals. As risk-adverse as I am, I realize for me, that’s too big of a chance. I also realized that to mitigate the impact of this kind of downturn in the future, I’d want to have a plan that required no stock sales, so as things dropped it wouldn’t really cause any short term panic selling, which as a stock investor is what you have to avoid.

Here’s the difficulty. At today’s interest rates and stock dividend yields, you can’t count on 4% yields. You can’t really even count on 3%. To get to 4% in today’s environment you have to be reliant on some gains of your investments, or be willing to dip into principal–which can be a vicious cycle of reducing your investment assets, which leads to less yield, which causes you to withdraw more principal. I’ve adjusted my plan to try to address this.

In earlier posts, I talked about two buckets of funds, one to sustain your life from age 59.5 using designated retirement funds, and another to get you from whenever you stop working to age 59.5, your “bridge” to retirement. I’m still a believer in the long term value of stocks, so still recommend my asset allocation for those long term assets. I may rethink the retirement age allocation, but I’m sticking with it for now. For the shorter term assets, part of my solution is an asset I’ve tried to avoid up until now, rental real estate. I’ve avoided this not because I think it’s a bad investment, but because unlike other assets classes, it requires work, so to call it passive income is a stretch. It’s a little bit investment, a little bit part time job. But I’ve come to realize this is my favorite income-producing risk-adjusted asset right now. I’ll have a follow up post on this, but I’ve dipped my toe in, I can’t stay out any longer.

For shorter term, bridge assets, I recommend the following. Instead of my prior approach which was to determine the earliest possible date you can retire, take a little more conservative approach and lay out your intended work plan. How long do you believe you’ll work full time? Part time? With that plan, you can estimate each year’s income and with your forward-looking budget you can estimate expenses. You can do this for each year going out to age 59.5, I even try to estimate when I will make major purchases, like cars.

With your short term assets you can also estimate both yield (income produced) of those assets and growth of those assets. The following is a reasonable example, you may want to adjust these based on interest rates, market conditions, etc. Note the yield and growth values for Real Estate vary considerably depending on how much you initially invest. If you buy the property outright, more yield, less growth. If you finance a great deal of it, less yield, more growth.

Asset	Yield	Growth
Stocks	2%	5%
Bonds	3%	0%
Cash	2%	0%
Real Estate	3%	3%

For each year, assume the yield of your investments can be used to supplement your income and add that to any money you expect to earn working. If your expenses exceeds your income (from investments and salary) draw money only from cash and bonds (the ratio of this draw can be varied but one approach is 50/50). If your income exceeds expenses, put the extra into cash and bonds. A reasonable place to start is equal 25% allocation in each of the asset classes above then project out your balances for each of these assets classes for every year until you are 59.5 or whenever is your long-term retirement age. Do you finish with positive cash and bond balances? If yes, then you have a plan to get to 59.5 without needing to sell any stocks or real estate holdings, so when the market tanks again (remember these downturns are nearly guaranteed, the difficulty is predicting when they will happen, not if they will happen), you are positioned to continue to live your lifestyle pretty much as planned. The idea is trying to set up a condition where a down stock market or down real estate market has no significant bearing on your life.

Why keep any money in stocks at all? Well, you could argue that the risk isn’t worth it, but I still believe that you should have exposure to the growth power of stocks. Over the long term this should still finish as your most productive asset.

What if that plan doesn’t work? What if it shows you run out of cash? Make adjustments. Maybe you have too much money in stocks or real estate. Maybe your date to quit working is too early and needs to be pushed back. Keep adjusting until you have a plan that shows positive numbers for all your assets.

Finally, remember that history says fortunes are made during market downturns. Warren Buffett’s famous financial advice to be “fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful” is difficult to execute. However, hopefully this provides you the confidence that investing in stocks for your long term assets is still a good idea, if buying prior to the crash made sense, certainly buying after the crash makes even more sense. These purchases do not care about the price of stocks tomorrow or next week or next year. These purchases are made looking out 10-20-30 years, where if history is a guide, stocks will be a smart purchase.

Psst! Secret of Investing! Gimme $5 Grand

Posted on February 9, 2019 by wiseguide

padlock-2739049_640 There’s a common sales pitch in the financial industry, again trying to let you in on the secret to wealth. There are radio ads that literally go on for hours, the guy has bought up the entire time slot for his ad, disguised as a financial talk show. He talks in vague terms like “smart strategies” and how if you’re not a millionaire but only a thousandaire you need to generate massive returns on your money. He’ll then invite you to a free seminar at a crappy Holiday Inn presumably showing you how to do this. What an awesome, free service!

Yeah, not free. The ‘seminar’ is really a sales pitch for their trading class, which only costs somewhere between $4000-$5000. Oh. And the strategies generally involve lots of trading, which requires additional commissions. But they promise (but don’t guarantee) huge returns! Let’s think about this.

They can likely present testimonials from people where their system worked. Of course, that is true, just be random chance! Would you play the lottery based on the testimonial of the person who won? (That’s rhetorical, please don’t play the lottery.) What does the average person make? Better yet, what is the full distribution of returns of all their students? Including your enormous fee. Uh, they won’t have that info.
If their system did work, why are they telling you about it? Even for $5K! Remember how difficult it is to beat the market, if you find a system that works you want to keep it very quiet and make millions not sell it for thousands! As soon as the word gets out–if the strategy they are selling was any good to begin with–the market adjusts prices accordingly and the strategy doesn’t work anymore. Short-cuts to finding that out-sized return depend on the knowledge being tightly held.
The strategies generally involve something called technical analysis which involves looking at the chart of prices in the past, finding ‘support’ levels (low prices) and ‘resistance’ levels (high prices). Some people believe in this, I think its akin to a palm reader staring at your hand to tell you your future. You can pay money for that too (again, please don’t do this either). There was a famous study by a University in New Zealand that basically concluded technical analysis strategies don’t work.
Some will offer to refund the seminar (or, more likely let you take the seminar again) if you don’t make money. No risk! Well, except for that money you put up for our high trading volume strategy. We’re not covering your losses on that. Sorry dude.
They are for profit companies, which need to make money, after they pay for their long infomercials and all their staffs and all their offices and all their other overhead. Where are they getting the money to cover all this and still make profits? You. Again, why not just use their own awesome strategies to make money? Because they know it really doesn’t consistently work and this complicated business selling questionable information is much more lucrative.

Fortune magazine took a look at these services, and walked away less than impressed, you can read about it here.

Let’s say you have $10K to invest. I suggest an S&P 500 index fund. You decide to go with these guys. One day one I’m ahead of you by $5k because I didn’t have to give it to these guys. Over the next 10 years of investing, you don’t have to just beat the S&P 500, you have to CRUSH IT. Like, double it. And that’s just to break even with me and doesn’t include all the additional commissions you’ll pay with each trade.

In 2008, Warren Buffet famously challenged any hedge fund to bet him that they could beat an S&P 500 Index fund over a 10 year period. Think hedge funds have access to these famous ‘strategies’? People pay them a ton of money assuming they do. One hedge fund management company took him up on the bet. And got crushed. They didn’t even have to wait for the end of the 10 years (the money went to charity). It’s also telling that more hedge funds weren’t willing to take him up on the bet…maybe they know something after all.

You know where you can make lots of money? Selling seminars to less informed people. Don’t be one of these.

Why the 50%-50% ratio of stocks and bonds in retirement

Posted on January 26, 2019 by wiseguide

apple-926456_640 In an earlier post on asset allocation I talked about the notion of a 50/50 split of your assets between stocks and bonds at retirement. I also mentioned the “4% rule” for calculating withdrawals from your accounts in retirement as a good number. Where did these come from? It’s not simply a compromise between the assets, and we can show why it makes sense. With math! Hurray!

Previously I showed how we can use Monte Carlo analysis to predict probabilities of certain events, by running many possible future outcomes using prior years’ mean (average return) and standard deviation (variation of a given year’s performance from the mean). In the case of retirement, the goal is for the money to last for the rest of your life. Let’s assume you are taking good care of yourself and you are going to have a nice, long 30 year retirement. And because of inflation, you’re planning on increasing your withdrawals by 3% every year. We can run Monte Carlo analysis for different asset allocations to see what is the probability you will still have some money left after living off your nest egg for these 30 years. I did a simple analysis with only 100 cases just for illustration, most Monte Carlo analyses would use many more, but this should be reasonably close. Also, here I’ve assumed that stock and bond means and standard deviations will mimic those of the past. Again, not a guarantee. Here’s what I got:

Probability of your money lasting if 100% in stocks: 83%

Probability of your money lasting if 100% in bonds: 39%

Probability of your money lasting if 50/50: 90%

These results should look weird. So all stocks is pretty good, all bonds not so much, but if I allocate some of my stock money to these (worse performing) bonds my results get better? Huh? Yep. Remember your goal for this money: last 30 years. It is not maximize the most money I can possibly make, that would be in stocks. What happens is the addition of the lower variable bonds help smooth out those cases where stocks get hammered, and increase your chances that your money will last.

Is 50%/50% perfect? Not really. Here’s my analysis for more stock bond ratios, for convenience graphed as % of assets in bonds:

This analysis shows an ideal is actually about 60% bonds, but what’s clear here is you need the growth power of stocks to help your returns, but there isn’t a lot of difference between 40%/60% to 70%/30% (bonds/stocks) in terms of probability of the money lasting. I like to lean a little heavier toward stocks with bond yields so low lately, but I think anywhere in this range is fine in retirement. The other thing to notice is, how comfortable are you with a 10% chance your money will run out before 30 years? If not, the 4% rule might be more of a 3.5% rule. Or, as I mentioned earlier, you can throttle back your spending in the years of stock/bond downturns. Living to your means, always a good idea.

Rebalancing the Portfolio

Posted on January 19, 2019 by wiseguide

In an earlier post I talked about determining a desired asset allocation based on the goal and time to get there. Due to normal market fluctuations, your portfolio will not continue to maintain this allocation on its own. Traditional advice is to review your allocation periodically (every 3, 6, or 12 months) and make transfers between accounts accordingly. This is a fine approach, but does run some risk of selecting the wrong time to make large investments–making a large transfer just before a big turn-down in the asset. Good advice for regular investments is the concept of dollar cost averaging, which is a complicated term for something very simple, regularly invest a set number of dollars, not a set number of shares, which will help even out the prices you pay for an asset. You can take a similar approach to rebalancing.

An approach for a 401k (or any other investment where you are making regular contributions) is to ‘rebalance by contribution’ meaning use continuing contributions every 2 weeks to try to get back to the ideal allocation. For example, lets say I have the following for my investment in the Vanguard Total Stock Fund:

For the example case, the normal contribution for the Vanguard Total Stock Fund would be 60% of the total contribution (60% of $300, or $180). This is then offset by the fact that I’m currently overweighted in this fund by 1%, or

$180 + (-0.01 x $100,000/20) = $130

In other words, I’m adjusting my contribution down due to the fact that I currently have “too much” of this asset class. Other underweighted funds, using the same approach would be adjusted up. This can be updated with each contribution period (provided you keep up with your current allocation) and done for each investment. Note, sometimes the contribution may actually be a negative number, meaning you should be transferring that amount of money out of the fund at that contribution time, to another fund that is underweighted.

This approach makes you buy less of the assets that have grown in value and more of what has fallen, hopefully leading to buying at a lower cost, similar to the wisdom of dollar cost averaging. Admittedly, this is a bunch of work that you might not want to do, I’m a bit of an obsessive on this, and if you’d rather just do the periodic rebalancing (lump sum transfers back to your ideal allocation) every 6 months or so, that is OK too.

No guarantees in life, a quick lesson in probabilities

Posted on January 12, 2019 by wiseguide

cube-1655118_640 Don’t panic, I’m not going to get into too much math here. But it is very important to understand that all of personal finance is about making projections, which are far from certain. I will repeatedly emphasize that no one has a good crystal ball on exactly what the future holds, but we can use the past and a little probability to help us determine our chances. For example, would you retire if you had a 80% chance of outliving your assets? 50% chance? 10% chance? near zero? That answer is different for everyone, but no one can make that decision without getting an estimate of those probabilities, here is an approach you can use.

Although I don’t believe anyone can precisely tell you what will happen tomorrow or next month or next year, it is reasonable to look at stock and bond price histories for any given time period, going back 100 years if you want, to make estimates of the general trend of those assets. Let’s look at the past 10 years, the longer term numbers actually aren’t too different. The average return of the S&P 500 (which we’ll use as our metric for stocks) is 10.4%, with a standard deviation of 18.3. For the Vanguard Total Bond fund (which we’ll use as the metric for bonds) the average is 4.0% with a standard deviation of 2.8. Don’t worry if you skipped that lesson on standard deviation in math class, just understand that a big number relative to the average means that the return fluctuates a lot year to year, and a small number less so. We can then use something called Monte Carlo analysis which is a complicated term for a simple concept, run a whole bunch of sample “futures” and see how they all turn out. Think of it like throwing dice 1000s of times and recording what numbers you get. You can make some inferences on those future possibilities based on the results.

Using a little magic in Excel with random number generation for the return on a given year, and the means and standard deviations above, we can see what is the probability of getting to our retirement goal. Recall in an earlier post we showed we would get to our retirement savings goal of $1.2M. Hurray! Guaranteed? Uh, no. Crud. Going back to our 30 year old with $50k in her 401k, using our asset allocation, adjusting each year, and diligently saving, the chances of having at least $1.2M in the account at retirement? 78%. Good, but maybe you don’t want to bet your whole livelihood on it. Before getting completely bummed, the chance of at least $2.0M? 38%. Not bad, probability works both ways! Also, remember you aren’t doing this in the dark! If things happen to not be working out the way you planned, you can adjust. Maybe your house is a little smaller, or you work another year, or find cheaper hobbies; you have the ability to live to your means, no matter what the future holds.

If you are a weirdo like me and interested in the gory details of the excel calculations, here is a link. It’s really not that bad!

The Upside of Down

Posted on January 5, 2019 by wiseguide

natural-2728146_1920 No, not about Stranger Things. Sorry for the false advertising. What I want to talk about is why you should be happy about drops in the stock market. I know, stick with me here. Just a short time ago the stock market experienced a sharp downturn, and many people “lost” tons of money (I’ll have another post on this fallacy). People are understandably sad when their portfolio loses value, I don’t like to see those numbers go down either, but we shouldn’t be. Let’s think about the alternative. Stocks always go up. Everyday. Nearly guaranteed. No need to worry, right? Great! But remember my discussion on the investment “flea market”. If stocks had a near guarantee of going up every day, they wouldn’t need to pay you nearly the same return. People (correctly) are willing to take less money on their investments in exchange for lower probability that they will decrease in value. This is why stocks have a greater return than corporate bonds, which have a greater return than US Gov bonds, which have a greater return than CD’s. Return follows risk in an open market. So if stocks went up every day without a worry, they’d yield much less! That’s bad! We already have lower-yielding safer investments available to us, the beauty of stocks is for those of us with long time horizons to invest, they offer a great return in exchange for riding those ups and downs. The downs are not an unfortunate part of investing in stocks, they’re necessary. And, if that day, week, month or even year downturn hurts you financially because you were planning on selling right away, you shouldn’t be in stocks in the first place. So, go ahead and cheer those hits to your portfolio. Maybe privately so everyone else doesn’t think you’re crazy.

Oooh, that’s a good price for stocks!

Posted on December 29, 2018 by wiseguide

athens-2476281_1280 What’s a good price to buy stocks? By itself this is an impossible question to answer but it is useful to understand what can cause prices to go up and down when considering where to put your money.

Picture yourself at flea market. At each booth someone is trying to sell you something. There’s the Certificate of Deposit booth, a guy selling government bonds, a guy selling corporate bonds, a woman selling real estate, and a woman selling stocks. You’re trying to decide what to buy, and they’re all competing for your business. Let’s say at today’s interest rates CDs are offering 2%, guaranteed. The government bond guy is offering 3%, with low risk of default, corporate bond lady is offering 4% at a bit more default risk, real estate people can show rents on her properties that give a return on investment of 5% and the stock woman is offering stocks that have average earnings of 8 cents for every dollar invested (In other words, earnings vs price of 0.08. You will usually see company valuations given as the inverse of this, price over earnings–PE ratio. With earnings of 0.08 per dollar, this would be a PE ratio of 12.5, and only one way of valuing stocks, but a useful on for this exercise). Today you decide to buy the stocks because even though they are the most risky—the corporate earnings vary a lot and certainly no guarantee—you feel the risk is worth the return compared to everything else. This is the key. You aren’t judging the price of the stocks all by themselves, you’re judging them in comparison to all other possible investments. Let’s say when you go back, the fed has raised interest rates, driving up yields on CDs and other bonds to double what they were before. Let’s also pretend the companies that you have invested in have done exactly as expected. Now, the stock prices have plummeted. Why? The companies are doing fine! At least in part, it’s because of the competing options available to investors. If I can now get a corporate bond at an 8% yield, I’m probably going to need the stock to yield more. It’s now expensive by comparison. If the earnings are the same, the only way to get the yield higher (e.g. PE lower) is the price has to drop: the same earnings for a lower price. This is a simplified example and bond prices moving higher also hurts earnings themselves by making borrowing costs higher, but the important thing to remember is always evaluate the return and risk of an investment to every other alternative. There isn’t a magic PE ratio for “cheap” vs “expensive”, it’s always relative to the times.

Asset Allocation

Posted on December 22, 2018 by wiseguide

chicken-1686641_640 Where you put your money to attempt to maximize your returns while protecting your money is the subject of countless studies and makes up the primary job of many financial professionals. My suggestion for asset allocation is far simpler than what many of these professionals would recommend, and due to ultra low fees, the returns are likely better.

The first questions that need to be answered for asset allocation is a) What is the money for? and b) How long until you need it? For definitive expenses (like your emergency fund or saving for a major purchase in the next year or two), the money should be in something safe, like a CD or a money market fund. For something like retirement or other longer-term investing, it’s more interesting. Here is a starting example:

Age 25, Planned Retirement Age 65: Years to Goal: 40 years

For anything 25+ years to the goal, my recommendation is a 90%/10% stock/bond ratio. This isn’t magic, but certainly with a long time horizon, history has shown the vast majority of your money should be in stocks. I prefer a diversified group of index funds of all sizes, both domestic and international. You could go a long way to achieving this with just two funds: 60% in Vanguard Total Stock Market Fund (VTSMX) and 30% in Vanguard Total International Fund (VGTSX), The other 10% of the money can go into bond funds, such as Vanguard Total Bond Fund (VBMFX) and Vanguard Total International Bond Fund (VTIBX). I’m a big fan of Vanguard for their low fees, but if your 401k does not offer these funds hopefully you can find some similar funds that have very low fees—less than 0.2% should be standard for an index fund. For God sakes hopefully the funds they offer have no loads (sales commission). Aside—this is completely wasted money. “Sales Loads” are money paid to the salesperson for “selling” you the fund. They are so worthless you likely didn’t even know they sold you anything. This is different from the higher fees that actively managed funds (vs index funds) charge, that money is actually for the person picking stocks for you, but isn’t worth it either.

The suggested allocation looks something like this

60% Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund
30% Vanguard Total International Index Fund
8% Vanguard Total Bond Market Index Fund
2% Vanguard Total International Bond Market Index Fund

The above can be substituted for other equivalent index funds, you are looking for funds with fees of <0.2%. This gives you a broadly diversified portfolio in just four funds.

Once you get within 25 years or so from your retirement age, you want your portfolio to start to get more conservative, meaning a shift from stocks to bonds, such that at retirement you have something close to 50%/50% split of stock and bonds. I’ll have a future post on the logic of this allocation in retirement. This can be achieved by shifting your allocation by 1.5% from stocks to bonds with each year. For the ratio of the above funds at years until retirement, for example,

25 years to go (60%/30%/8%/2%)
15 years to go (50%/25%/20%/5%)
5 years to go (40%/20%/32%/8%)
At retirement (35%/18%/38%/9%)

Target retirement funds attempt to do this adjustment for you and there are some of these that invest in low-cost index funds, but I usually like to have this control myself.

That’s it, not complicated.

When Do I Have Enough?

Posted on December 8, 2018 by wiseguide

money-2724235_640 “Enough” is a tough concept to answer for each person, but extremely important to define for an person’s financial goals. Remember the role of money is only to give you a happy, satisfying life. For some people “enough” means a yacht with two helicopter pads (because with just one they’d be unhappy), though I’d suggest they may have lost their perspective on what it takes to make them happy. This concept is so critical that John Bogle, the founder of Vanguard and the father of index investing, used it as the name of his book.

There is a classic bit of financial wisdom, that totally misses this point. It states you figure out your needed retirement income as a percentage of your current income, typically about 75%. This is overly simplified, foolish, and sends the wrong message. Think if you get a big raise late in your career, would you think, “Oh no, my retirement account is suddenly way underfunded!” Of course not. Further, your expenses in retirement are completely different from those pre-retirement. Instead, you want to calculate what you need for enough. This is obviously different for each person, but I suggest determining your happiness needs in three categories.

1. Lifetime income. Hopefully you’ve gone through the budgeting exercise for your current expenses. For your retirement income needs, you should go through this again, except for retirement life. Your categories will undoubtedly change quite a bit. If you’re retiring before Medicare age (65), or if you think the Government will screw this up before you get there, your medical insurance will be a significant expense. This is going up considerably every year, I’d budget at least $2000 per month for medical insurance and expenses. Also, perhaps you’re looking to travel more, golf more, eat out more, whatever, but you should have less expenses for that house mortgage (paid off!) and for kids. Again, you’re trying to define “enough” for you. Lets assume your monthly budget adds up to $5000 in today’s dollars. If you’re 30 and retiring at 65, with a 2.5% rate of inflation, this is

$5000 x 1.025³⁵= ~$12,000 per month

Once you’ve built this retirement monthly budget subtract your expected social security payment (also adjusted for inflation and if you are retiring after social security age AND you think it will actually still exist when you retire!) as well as any expected retirement pensions you might have. Multiply that number by 12 to get your yearly income need, it will look something like this:

12 x (Monthly budget -Social Security-Pensions) =Income need

e.g. 12 x ($12,000-$6000-$2000)= $48,000

Multiply this number by 25 and that is the rough amount you need to save to support the budget you developed, in this case $1,200,000, or roughly a little more than a million bucks. Multiplying by 25 follows the “4%” rule meaning you should be able to invest your money reasonably conservatively and withdraw 4% per year. This isn’t magic, and has a ton of assumptions, but is a decent best guess.

2. Home. I’m a believer that your retirement home should be mortgage free. If you are carrying a mortgage, that needs to go into the budget above, but let’s assume you are not continuing to carry debt in retirement. If you’re a homeowner now, generally your retirement home will be no more expensive, and possibly much less if you downsize. What I suggest is start dreaming about where you want to live, and what kind of house will make you happy. Use sites like Zillow to see what that house costs. Once again, adjust for inflation as we did for the budget above, and there is your number. If you really, really want another big purchase (like that second helicopter) include this cost also. But please, try not to believe you need a helicopter. Or two.

3. College. If you have kids not yet in college, and you believe it is your obligation to pay for it, this is the third big expense. I’ll have a separate post on saving for college, but in summary a good place to start is the current in-state tuition, room, and board where you live and multiply this by 1.5 for a teenager, 2.0 for a grade-schooler, and 3.0 for a baby. College inflation is pretty ridiculous. Thank your parents if they paid your way. Then multiply this by 4, for 4 years of college, and encourage your young one to finish in 4 years. Again, this could change a bunch if he/she really wants to go to that expensive private school, or grows into a world class volleyball player, but again, it’s a good guess. For example, where I live in Virginia, current tuition, room and board at UVa is $28,000. For a grade schooler, I’d plan on

$28,000 x 2.0 x 4.0 = $224,000

So now, just add them all up. For example, let’s say you figured out the $1.2 Million you need to generate the income you want, and figure you would like a $300k house, adjusted for inflation is ~$700k, and figure it will take a little over $200k to send your kid to college. The total then is ~$2.1 Million. This is your targeted net worth. That’s the minimum you will need, assuming all the assumptions above, and is a reasonable target for what you’ve determined as “enough”. Scary? It doesn’t have to be, and I’ll show you how to get there. If that’s too big a goal, you can make some adjustments to your future lifestyle, or decide to work a little in retirement or junior’s college choice. Also, if your goal is to retire prior to social security age, I’ll have a separate post on retiring early and how to define this need. The point is to have a definitive goal to shoot for that has some relationship back to what you feel you need.

Let’s Get Started

Posted on November 17, 2018 by wiseguide

rocket-launch-67723_1280 I starting writing this blog mostly as an advice column for my kids. I’ve taken what opportunities I’ve had with them to sit down and explain the importance of budgeting, investing for the long run, and making smart decisions, but those conversations are not as thrilling as they sound. It’s really, really tough for a teenager to look away from a YouTube compilation of people doing crazy things to hurt themselves so you can explain the beauty of index funds. And I get it–I don’t think my YouTube channel called “Successes” would get nearly the number of hits. They indulge me and they are great listeners, but this blog will always be sitting patiently, here when they need it.

Always a lover of math puzzles, I’ve made personal finance a bit of an obsession. As I’ve gotten older I’m constantly amazed at the amount of bad advice out there, and how financial salespeople feed people’s fear of math and investing know-how into making decisions that really only makes the sales person rich. I’d like to try to fix that. The math isn’t scary–I’ve worked through all of what you’ll need that I’ll readily share–and the knowledge required is amazingly simple.

Often what people are looking for is what are those “magic” investments that pay insanely high returns with almost no risk. Somehow there is a belief that there are people out there in the know, working their way through the system, hopefully legally, to get richer. I still hear infomercials on the radio using lots of words like ‘smarter strategy’ basically implying they have found that low risk/high return investment to get you rich with almost no capital. I’ll write a separate blog post on the ridiculousness of this argument, if there are loopholes of return without risk, they are quickly closed. But people hear this and think, man, I need to be part of that action if I ever want to be financially secure. Thankfully, cheaters and scammers aside, there really isn’t a shortcut, and furthermore, you can get there without a shortcut.

So what to do? First of all, the mega return on investment is not that necessary, boring and average is just fine. What is really important is DISCIPLINE. The discipline to automatically and consistently save money, month after month, year after year. The discipline to not keep up with the Jones’ and not satisfy every wish and desire at the expense of your financial freedom. You need to save as much as your budget can stomach. Very few young people (or old people) get this. If you get it, you will grow your nest egg. Yes, hopefully you are investing smartly, and I do have some advice for this, but the most important thing is to invest consistently. Don’t sweat too much trying to find that ultimate return year after year. Even professionals can’t do it, though many claim they can.

The next question is, how much do I save every month? That is where a good budget comes in. You need ruthlessly adhere to a budget, and coming up with a budget is not difficult, I’ll show that in my next post. You can’t really know what you can afford to save unless you know what you really need to spend. Hopefully the money budgeted on expenses is less than the money coming in. If not, you need to make some cuts. Painful if need be, but you cannot support a lifestyle by going further into debt or stealing from savings. Lots of young people fight this because they figure they are young, shouldn’t this be the time they are living it up? Well, yes, but that can’t be at the expense of your future, which will only lead to greater stress in your life. So allow some money in your budget for fun, but if you really want to set yourself up for your future, you need to save early and as much as you can.

All of this is really about freedom (this is another rant coming, prepare yourself). As long as we NEED to work, all of us are servants to some degree, we are never truly free. Hopefully you like your job, but few of us would continue coming in if the little pieces of paper that come every two weeks stopped. Having complete financial freedom is about having options, where money does not have to be part of the equation in your decisions. So you can keep doing that job you love if you’d like until you’re 90 and that is your choice. Or, with a big enough pile of cash, you can do what you want, when you want, as much as you want. That is freedom.

I’ll touch on a these topics in more detail in later posts, but this hopefully gets you fired up to save some cash! Well maybe not fired up, that’s just me. Slightly motivated? I’ll take it.

The Wealthy Wise Guide

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Tag Archives: investing