Set forth below is the text of an e-mail sent to me by Jaime Tardy, owner of the EventualMillionaire.com site, on October 29, 2013:
So on what grounds can the haters sue a site for publishing a post of yours? Also why the aim on women? Just curious since it’s a very data driven point that you are trying to make and many women aren’t driven by data (I am, but most are not!)
I think there is a disconnect (as I think you know!) between your site, and YOU. You are very friendly and approachable, and almost unbiased (even though you have a bent of course!) but I don’t get that from the site.
Can you send me some of the specific guest posts you have had so I can see an example?
I mean, I’ve seen haters, but not this much as you say, I’d love to wrap my head around it a bit more!
I think rebranding, and maybe even using video to portray you more is extremely important.
And the traffic and conversion strategy might be different because of the haters, but maybe not! I’d have to see some examples to really know for certain.
Does that make sense?
I’d also love to figure out what the main goals are – if it’s to generate revenue, like I said before you don’t need a TON of people if you want to coach a handful of them. (and if Todd is saying similar things and not having this level of hate, that’s good to know too!!)
Cast is off! Walking cast is on, even though I’m not actually walking without crutches yet!
A pain still, but getting better!
Warmest,
-Jaime
Anonymous says
“So on what grounds can the haters sue a site for publishing a post of yours?”
I’d like to know the answer to that too.
Anyway, I see Wade’s posting on Forbes again: http://www.forbes.com/sites/wadepfau/2016/07/12/what-is-the-sustainable-spending-rate-for-retirees-in-2016
His new equation to calculate retirement spending rates (gasp!) uses PE10. Not just that, of course, as Wade is capable of doing actual math. Still, surely this should be called the Bennett Formula.
Anonymous says
Was the feedback the motivating factor for the infamous YouTube videos?
Rob says
Was the feedback the motivating factor for the infamous YouTube videos?
No. I had planned to do YouTube videos long before I spoke to Jaime. It may be that her mentioning it pushed the idea a bit higher on my list of priorities.
I have only done a tiny number of YouTube videos. I intend to do hundreds of them. So I still have not “done” them to the extent they need to be done. My expectation is that it will not be until after the next price crash that I will do hundreds more.
I am not locked in to that position. It is possible that I could change my mind re that one. But as of today it is my expectation that I will hold off until after the next price crash to do hundreds more YouTube videos. However, I certainly will be doing them unless I get hit by a truck before the time comes (please don’t be giving my friend John Greaney any funny ideas!) when it feels right to me to be doing them.
Rob
Anonymous says
So, what will you be working on until the crash happens?
Rob says
I respond to questions from you Goons. Mostly garbage ones but not infrequently garbage with a small bit of sincerity mixed in. I focus on the sincere parts while not entirely ignoring the garbage (garbage is inevitably going to be part of the story of a 35-year cover-up, whether we like the idea or not).
I write the weekly column at Value Walk.
I am in the process of catching up on e-mails that I have not been able to post as blog entries because for a time I was so far behind on postings relating to my conversations with you Goons.
When I get caught up with the e-mails, I will be posting the remaining responses from the 30,000 academic researchers that I contacted a number of years back.
When I am caught up with all that, I expect to try to place another weekly column.
I will be doing more social media stuff in days to come. As noted above, my inclination is to wait until the crash to get busy with that stuff because I believe it will have more impact at that time. But it is possible that I will change my mind re that one.
I of course ALWAYS respond carefully to non-Goon inquiries. I don’t get many of those. But I get some. My favorite thing to do is to help out the Normals whose lives you Goons are in the process of destroying.
I hope that all meets with your approval, Anonymous.
I naturally wish you the best of luck in all your future life endeavors either way.
Rob
Anonymous says
After the next price crash? Wasn’t the point to work 12 hours per day, 7 days per week to warn people about the pending crash before it happens?
I thought that was the reason your family had to suffer today – you had so much urgent work to do.
Rob says
I should be working this harder, Anonymous. I agree with the point you are making here (though not with the sarcasm, obviously).
I’m human. The 14-year battle has taken an emotional toll. I have pulled back a bit.
People may suffer as a result. I wish I was Superman. In my defense, I have worked this harder than anyone else on the planet. I am going to have to live with the reality that I am one of the flawed humans. I have worked it hard. But I have not quite done everything that I could have done or that I wish that I could do.
My family should not be suffering at all. I have done a beautiful thing. I discovered the errors in the Old School retirement studies. And that was just the first day. For 14 years since then, I have taken the first true research-based investing strategy to some amazing places. The members of my family should have been the happy recipients of a $500 million settlement payment a good number of years back. No suffering in that! And yet here we are.
If I were king of the world, no one would be suffering over this. Not my family. Not the millions of middle-class families in the process of seeing a large portion of their retirement savings disappear. Not Bogle. Not Pfau. Not you Goons. You Goons wouldn’t be going to prison if Motley Fool had taken action on my e-mail from June of 2002 asking them to ban Greaney. Do you ever think about it that way? I put myself on the line for you Goons long before it was cool to put one’s self on the line for one’s Goon friends. Is that not so?
Anyway, I believe that all the suffering will come to an end following the next price crash. The crash itself will cause HORRIBLE suffering, suffering so great that I don’t want to contemplate it. But I believe that that’s what will turn things around. When people suffer, they open their minds to new ideas. And we have some Grade A new ideas to give them that we all have been working on together for 14 years running now.
The good news here is 50 times more good than the bad news here is bad. So I believe that we will make it to the other side of The Big Black Mountain. But there has indeed been some suffering along the way. It’s not what I wanted. I think it would be fair to say that this is one of the bad things about Get Rich Quick schemes — they cause vast amounts of human suffering in the long run.
Get Rich Quick is popular. It’s great marketing. In the short term. But people get pissed at those who push Get Rich Quick schemes when they destroy their lives. Look at what happened to Madoff. That’s not me. Going to prison is not high on my bucket list. Please try to find somebody else, you know?
Hang in there, man. It gets better. a LOT better.
Rob
Rob says
“So on what grounds can the haters sue a site for publishing a post of yours?”
I’d like to know the answer to that too.
Here is a link to an article in Psychology Today titled “How to Deal With Litigious People and Frivolous Lawsuits”:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/so-sue-me/201407/how-deal-litigious-people-and-frivolous-lawsuits
It states: “Most likely, if you are a non-hermit adult, you have been verbally threatened with a frivolous lawsuit at least some point in your life. This can be an intimidating experience.”
This is not the first time in the history of the world that someone has engaged in intimidation by threatening to file phony lawsuits. And there is no group on Planet Earth more intimidating than the Wall Street Con Men. They have tons of money, tons of power, tons of influence and tons of reasons for not wanting their 35-year cover-up of their mistake protected from exposure. Why does this stuff always have to be so darn hard to figure out?
We’ll see what happens following the next price crash. I have a funny feeling that the New York Times will be running a front page article re this massive act of financial fraud. And I have a funny feeling that my good friend Wade Pfau will be electing not to commit perjury in his testimony. And I have a funny feeling that you Goons will be going away to prison for a long time. And I have a funny feeling that, following the announcement of your prison sentences, we won’t be seeing too many bloggers “defending” the smelly Buy-and-Hold garbage.
But time will tell the tale, you know?
I am on the side that has been saying for 14 years now that the retirement study posted at John Greaney’s web site does NOT contain an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins.
There are Post Archives.
Please take good care.
Rob
Rob says
Anyway, I see Wade’s posting on Forbes again: http://www.forbes.com/sites/wadepfau/2016/07/12/what-is-the-sustainable-spending-rate-for-retirees-in-2016
His new equation to calculate retirement spending rates (gasp!) uses PE10. Not just that, of course, as Wade is capable of doing actual math. Still, surely this should be called the Bennett Formula.
I am 100 percent certain that following the next price crash Wade will be testifying honestly about all the stuff that he never learned while earning his Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton but that he did learn in his 16 months of e-mail correspondence with me. But I don’t have a time machine, you know? We are just going to have to wait to see how it all plays out.
I will at that time be putting forward some words aimed at getting your prison sentence reduced a wee bit. There are words that I believe I can put forward honestly that may achieve that effect and I am of course happy to say them. But that’s as far as it goes. No financial fraud for this boy. It doesn’t happen. Not in 14 years. Not in 14 billion years. Not in this solar system. Not in any far distant one. That one is non-negotiable. For obvious reasons.
My best and warmest wishes to you and yours.
Rob
Anonymous says
Don’t you care about SWR at all? If so you would have some insight or opinion on the substance of Wade’s article. Assuming you even read it.
Rob says
I plan to prepare a blog entry that will offer Juicy Excerpts from Wade’s article and I plan to write a column for the Value Walk site offering my thoughts on his article. I have not read Wade’s article yet. I was just about to do that when I saw your comment. The next items on my list after reading the article are preparing the blog entry and the column.
Since you asked, I will also put forward something brief here summarizing my reaction to the article. I am grateful to you for bringing it to my attention.
I certainly care about SWRs. That’s the thing that kicked things off. But the SWR issue is certainly not my top priority today.
I developed the Valuation-Informed Indexing Model as a result of what I learned about SWRs and the reaction that I saw to what I learned. VII is a much bigger matter than SWRs. It covers retirement planning, yes, but also risk management and asset allocation and lots of other strategic questions. SWRs is only one piece of a much bigger puzzle.
I also care more about the process side today, the financial fraud stuff. We need to have thousands of people commenting on the implications of the last 35 years of peer-reviewed research, Anonymous. I do the best that I can. But, even if I had an I.Q. of 140 (I do not, as you well know), I couldn’t possibly make contributions as valuable as those offered by thousands of people even if I worked at it for 10,000 years. We need to hear different perspectives and I can only provide mine no matter how hard I work the thing.
So it is very important that we open up every investing discussion board and blog on the internet to honest posting on SWRS and scores of other critically important investment-related topics. This has gone far, far beyond the SWR issue alone over the course of the first 14 years of our discussions. I mean, come on!
Don’t let the bad guys get you down, man.
Rob
Rob says
It’s cool that Wade is getting deeper into this stuff. I am not persuaded by every word that he wrote. But that doesn’t matter much. What matters is that he is digging. That’s how we all learn. So my first reaction is just to be excited that he continues to dig deeper into this stuff.
This paragraph sounds like a cop-out to me: “It is not a conservative guess about a safe withdrawal rate, but rather it is the best guess based upon the historical relationship between withdrawal rates, market valuations, and interest rates. It could end up being more or less (we won’t know which for another thirty years).”
It’s fine to calculate the “best guess” rather than the “safe” number. I have zero problem with that. John Walter Russell and I did that with the Retirement Risk Evaluator. The withdrawal rate that has only a 50 percent chance of working out (rather than a 95 percent chance — defined as “safe”) is the “best guess” number because factors that cannot be known can push it in either direction.
But people want to know the “safe” number to plan their retirements. It is hard for me not to speculate that the reason why Wade does not want to give that number is that he knows that you Goons will come after him if he writes honestly about this question. This is an important matter. He should not permit your intimidation tactics to influence him.
We obviously do not know what number will barely work at the end of 30 years. But we know what the odds are of various possibilities. He should be willing to identify the “safe” number (the number that is virtually certain to work (John and I defined “safe” as the number with a 95 percent chance of working out).
Wade is trying to stay out of trouble and he is putting millions of middle-class retirements at risk to do so. This is where we part company. There’s still good stuff in the article and I think we all should be grateful that Wade continues to do the good work he does. But he is not being fully honest here. He is playing games. I find it highly offensive and irresponsible and, frankly, shameful.
People don’t behave like this in other fields of human endeavor. People shouldn’t behave like this in the investing advice field either. I of course have sympathy for the fact that Wade has kids to feed and he fears the consequences of behaving in a fully honest manner re these questions. But there are responsibilities attached to putting yourself forward as an “expert” in this field. Wade knows about the history of this question and he knows how dangerous the Old School SWR Studies are and I am not able to feel good about his ducking of this very important question.
That’s my sincere take re that one, in any event. We won’t KNOW what will survive for 30 years. OBVIOUSLY. No one ever thought we could know such a thing. But we know the worst case scenario today. And we should tell people that. To duck the question just extends the cover-up to the great harm of every single person involved.
I don’t personally buy what he is saying about interest rates. It seems to me that the effect of interest rates would be factored in to the price. So you don’t need to separately count that. Mispricing is the product of emotion, which by definition CANNOT be factored in (investors cannot be aware of their own irrationality — if they were they would stop being irrational!). It’s possible that I am wrong. I certainly don’t object to Wade looking at the question. But I am not personally convinced at this point in time.
Saying that “investors should remain cautious and flexible” is just verbiage. It tells us nothing. The Old School SWR studies were promoted in thousands of places. The numbers in those studies are wildly off the mark from the numbers you get from an accurate and honest analysis. That’s the headline here. Wade should be focused on warning people about the dangers of the Old School studies and about the need to get them corrected immediately and about the 14-year cover-up and about the intimidation tactics that have been employed to keep him from promoting the research that I co-authored with him. AND he should continue digging, as he does in this article. That’s my take.
What I am saying here benefits ALL of us, Anonymous. Including you Goons. The worst thing for all of us is continuation of the cover-up. You don’t see it and Wade is afraid to take you on at this point in time. But I am pretty darn sure that we will all be breathing a lot easier when this massive act of financial fraud comes to a full and complete stop.
My bottom line is that there is a mix of good and bad in this article. The continued probing will yield good fruit in time, I have no doubt of that. But Wade is ducking the most important issues. And that’s a darn shame. For everybody.
Again, thanks for bringing the article to my attention. I am happy to know about it even if I am not 100 percent thrilled with the content.
I guess those observations ended up not being so terribly brief after all!
Rob
Anonymous says
“My family should not be suffering at all.”
Given the size of your house and the vacations you’ve lamented you’ve had to skip, I’d say they most certainly are. No one escapes unscathed when Dad’s “job” is trolling the internet.
Meanwhile I’ve maintained a mostly stock buy and hold portfolio, remained gainfully employed, and given my family – and myself – the life we deserve.
Rob says
And yet you are the one going to prison and not me, Anonymous.
There’s something messed up here.
The mess-up is that giving investment advice is not ONLY about turning a quick buck.
Honesty matters.
That’s why we have laws against financial fraud.
Those laws were adopted by the entire nation. Those laws are my protection. I have zero desire to give up the protection of those laws by putting up some words endorsing your massive act of financial fraud. Zero.
So we are just going to have to wait and see whether the price crash changes things. I believe that, when people lose most of their retirement money, they are going to be angry at those who tricked them out of their life savings. That’s what happened to Bernie Madoff (“Saint Bernie” in the days before his con was exposed) and I believe that that’s what will happen to Jack Bogle and those who have posted in “defense” of him.
You pretend to believe otherwise. I am not convinced by the act. If you really believed otherwise, you would drop it and get on with your life. But even if you really did believe otherwise, we still end up in the same place. There are no words that I can put forward that will convince you that Shiller is right and there are no words that you can put forward that will convince me that Fama is right. Fama got there first and so Buy-and-Hold is dominant for now and some crooked people have elected to use that dominance in ways not permitted by U.S. law to shut me out.
So be it. I don’t like it. It happened regardless of my feelings. I accept it.
Is there something you want from me?
I say that this matter is going to be decided following the next price crash. That’s when lots of people will work up the courage to join me in standing up to you Goons and prison sentences will be announced for you and then all the rest of us will live happily ever after.
Is that okay by you?
Is there something you want me to do (something that I CAN do — I don’t do financial fraud) to make it okay by you?
I have offered to spin things to put you in the best possible light. I’ve done it before, I think it’s the right thing to do in these circumstances, and I fully intend to continue to do it in the future. I ask nothing from you for that favor from me. But that’s as far as I go. I don’t cross the felony line. I don’t CONSIDER crossing the felony line. I work hard to get thousands and thousands of posts in the record showing that it has always been my uncompromising policy not to cross the felony line. I don’t think you are dumb, but even if I did think you were dumb, I couldn’t possibly think you were so dumb that you wouldn’t get this by now. So I have to believe you get it.
So what are you trying to accomplish with your posts here?
Do you ever ask yourself that question?
I get more posts in the record in which I speak out in strong OPPOSITION to the 35-year cover up. What do YOU get?
You get nothing. Feel free to continue. Most of your efforts will get deleted. But some will get through. Include a little joke and I will approve the post. Include a question that appears to me to possess a tiny bit of sincerity and I will approve the post. Approach something from an angle that hasn’t been explored 20 times before and I will approve the post.
But we both know my words are not going to change anything. I think it would be fair to say that that was clear to every single person involved at least 13 years ago, perhaps something close to a full 14 years ago.
I cannot post dishonestly re the numbers that my friends use to plan their retirements. I care about my plan. I want it to work. And that makes me feel for the people being tricked. And that makes it impossible for me to lie about this stuff. I am clearly an outlier. Most people are able to rationalize a million lies. I am not. I’m proud of this trait of mine, lots of others think I am a moron. So be it. I think what I think and other people think what they think. I believe that someday I will stand before my Creator and I want to be able to say that I did not lie to my friends about the numbers that they use to plan their retirements. So I will continue to do what I feel I need to do.
And you will continue to do what you feel you need to do coming at things from a very different perspective. Good luck with it, you know. I can’t say that I understand what you think you might accomplish by continuing to post here. It’s my job to figure these sorts of things out. That one remains a bit of a mystery to me. My best guess is that you are not at ease with your position and so you feel compelled to do something and yet you do not want to go to prison AT ALL and so you cannot bear to come clean and so you follow this crazy middle position of saying the same thing over and over again to no apparent purpose.
Whatever, I guess.
I hate that word “whatever.” I like to know why things happen. I don’t like to give up trying to figure things out. But after 14 years I believe that I may have to acknowledge that this one is beyond my reach. Feel free to do what you like. I don’t really get it. I get it halfway but not fully. If you truly have decided to roll the dice (I believe that you have), then it seems to me that you should just let it play out and not spend any more words on any more nonsense.
But it’s your call. I like jokes. So come up with even a little joke and you get past the line. And I obviously want to respond to any even partly sincere questions. That’s my job and, Goon or no Goon, I can learn from someone putting forward a partly or fully sincere question. So those go up.
The rest I will just have to accept.
Just don’t get any funny ideas in your head that you might someday say something that would cause me to consider crossing the felony line. Not this boy. Not gonna happen. No way, no how.
And please do take care. These warm ending lines of mine are sincere. You may not see it that way but they are sincere and its important to me that I make the effort to reach out and help someone whom I consider a friend even if he is a long-confirmed Goon. This is investing stuff, it should never have gotten personal on either side. The fact that the Buy-and-Holders take any mention of the last 35 years of peer-reviewed research in this field so personally is one of many things that tells me that this “strategy” is a big pile of smelly garbage.
That remains the dominant model for the time being.
But not for too much longer.
Or at least so Rob Bennett says.
The End.
Rob