Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
If only you considered this wise advice and adjusted your approach:
“You go about it in a manner that is catastrophically unproductive by adding missionary zeal that inflates your importance and demeans others. The whole idea that there is a new school of Safe Withdrawal Rates reeks of personal aggrandizement.”
It was Scott Burns who said that. Scott was one of my favorite personal finance columnists.
Those words do an outstanding job of highlighting the problems that we all need to overcome re these matters. There are two suggestions made in those words: (1) that it is not a big deal to point out errors in retirement studies for the purpose of getting them corrected; and (2) that the person who points out errors in retirement studies is in some respect “demeaning” the person who made the error.
I couldn’t possibly disagree more with both suggestions. There were thousands of people at the Retire Early board who used Greaney’s study to plan their retirement. I helped them in a big way by pointing out the error. And of course I helped Greaney even more. By pointing out his error, I permitted him to correct the study and avoid incurring additional legal liabilities. John Greaney has never had a better friend than Rob Bennett.
Rob
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