Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to another blog entry at this site:
Any wife would be saddened by a husband who is capable of working but hasn’t “made a dime in 13 years”. Since you acknowledge that fact, to what extent (if any) does it bother you?
It bothers me.
But it doesn’t bother me enough to persuade me to betray my fellow community members and to betray my profession and to betray my country and, yes, to betray my family.
Timothy is 15 and Robert is 13. They are going to be making their own way in this world in not too long a time, Anonymous. Are they going to be making their way in a country trying to survive the Second Great Depression? Will that Second Great Depression bring us to the Third World War in the way that the First Great Depression brought us to the Second World War? Or will they be making their way in a country enjoying the greatest period of economic growth in its history, a country in which the risk of stock investing has been reduced by 70 percent and in which millions have learned what they need to know to retire many years earlier than what they thought was possible in the Buy-and-Hold Era?
We all have jobs to do in this world. Opening the internet up to honest posting on safe withdrawal rates and scores of other critically important topics is mine. It’s a hard job. It’s not a job that I sought for myself; it is one that was handed to me. I don’t see anyone else stepping forward to take on this important work. So I soldier on.
When I am awarded the $500 million settlement payment, that will be my wife’s money too. She will have earned it with her patience as I earned it with my determination. No one gets paid $500 million for nothing. My wife will have earned every dime of that money. She will be able to live the rest of her life proud of the sacrifices she made so that our country could recover from the economic crisis caused by the Buy-and-Holders (inadvertently — but still!).
She has hung in there in the face of all that you Goons have dished out to us. I am proud of her. She shouldn’t have to exercise such patience. But we don’t all get everything that we deserve in this life. We all have times when we have to bear up in the face of injustices. She’s done a good job of that. To her great credit.
I hope that helps you understand the thinking going on in the Bennett household a bit better, Anonymous. We certainly don’t approve of any of your Goon garbage. But we try not to let it influence our behavior too much. We try to keep our eyes on the prize — the shift from Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing that will liberate millions of middle-class workers from the ignorance that made stocks a risky investment class for many years prior to the publication of Robert Shiller’s “revolutionary” (his word) 1981 research.
My best and warmest wishes to you and yours.
Rob
Laugh says
Does the 15 yr old realize how strange you are yet?
Rob says
Timothy is 16.
Robert is 13.
I was expressing skepticism about something at lunch the other day (it might have been a claim that someone made on an Amazon review about the battery life for a laptop computer) and Robert said: “Dad, you have trust issues.” That made me laugh. That has relevance to our investing saga, in my assessment.
The thing I loved about Buy-and-Hold in the days when I carried around a membership card in my wallet is that Buy-and-Hold was the only strategy rooted in the scientific method and the scientific method is all about skepticism and about rooting one’s beliefs in evidence rather than just going by what feels right or what sounds plausible. The Buy-and-Holders lost me when they became too dogmatic even to consider the possibility that they might have somewhere along the line made a mistake.
Valuation-Informed Indexing is what Buy-and-Hold used to be, what Buy-and-Hold was meant to be, what Buy-and-Hold should be. There will come a day when some young whippersnapper will put up a post that will become famous on the internet for showing where I went off the track. That’s just the way of the world. I pray that I own up to the mistake instead of dragging everyone through 13 years of muck pretending that the obvious (once it is uncovered!) mistake really isn’t a mistake for those willing to stand on one leg and dance to the beat and twist their mind into a pretzel shape.
But, heaven help us all, I may well behave as poorly as Bogle has and as poorly as Greaney has and as poorly as Lindauer has. How often do we become the very thing we fight? Great novels have explored this tragic aspect of human nature.
Yowsa!
Rob