Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for one of my columns at the Value Walk site:
By the way, you were proven wrong on SWRs by Wade Pfau and you keep talking about death threats that you refuse to prove. Those are just two more points you bring up to try and explain your failures.
I am the person who discovered the errors in the Old School safe-withdrawal-rate studies, Sammy. Those studies should all have been corrected within 24 hours of my famous post of the morning of May 13, 2002.
It was nearly 10 years later that the Wall Street Journal ran its story pointing out that the famous “4 percent rule” is in error. That rule was at the core of THOUSANDS of articles on retirement planning that appeared at hundreds of web sites. MILLIONS of middle-class people will be suffering failed retirements as a result of the failure of the experts in this field to correct that error promptly when it was discovered. Even today, when everyone acknowledges that the 4 percent rule is wildly off the mark, none of the people who pushed it in earlier days have acknowledged the error.
This is a field where people don’t admit their mistakes. The “experts” in this field feel that they need to persuade their clients that they are super-human and thus incapable of making mistakes. It’s not so. And we all are suffering in serious ways as a result.
I believe that acknowledging mistakes is going to be coming into fashion following the next crash. I don’t believe that most investors expect their advisors never to make mistakes. I believe that most people just expect that mistakes that are discovered will be promptly acknowledged and corrected.
I guess that we will see what happens following the crash. I know what I believe will happen. I believe that we will all pull together because we will all be too scared to play these stupid games any longer. I will be working side-by-side with Jack Bogle and with all of my other Buy-and-Hold friends. Nothing could make me happier.
Anyway, we will see how it goes as events continue to play out.
I wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person, Sammy.
Rob
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