“I’ll Be Very Curious to See How It Comes Out!”

An earlier blog entry described the background of my recent correspondence with Michael Kitces on safe withdrawal rates (SWRs). Set forth below is the text of an e-mail that I sent to Michael on September 22, followed by the text of one that Michael sent to me later the same day.

Michael:

Thanks for letting me know. That’s an extremely helpful and important blog post. I believe that that will do a lot of good for a lot of people.

I’ve posted a number of the e-mails at my blog and still have a number more to go. I was recording a podcast the other day and there was a moment that came up in which I wanted to make note of a point that you made in one of your e-mails and I was not sure that I pronounced your name correctly. I’d be grateful if you could help with that. I hate to get something like that wrong.

John and I are now at work on a fourth calculator — the Buy-and-Hold Reality Checker. The idea here is to give percentage odds of success for various investing strategies, using a valuation-informed analysis of the historical return data to assign odds to various possible outcomes. Early versions look exciting but there have been technical hangups in getting things presented properly. I’ll send you a link
when we get it finalized.

Rob

Rob,

Thanks so much for the feedback!

For your podcasting – my name is pronounced Kit’-sis. Another one of those names that didn’t get translated into English as phonetically as one might have hoped. 🙂

As for the fourth calculator – please keep me posted! I’ll be very curious to see how it comes out! I’ve already been starting to play with some follow-up research of my own applying some basic investment rules based on valuation to see if it enhances safe withdrawal rates. I’ll be very interested to see what you and John develop!

Thanks again for the great dialogue on this topic!

With warm regards,
– Michael