Set forth below is the text of an e-mail that I sent on November 27, 2018, to the editors of the Empty Wheel site:
Empty Wheel Editors:
My name is Rob Bennett. I was pulled to your site today by a link to the article “Mueller Just Guaranteed He Can Issue a Public Report.” A quick look indicated to me that you are doing important work — non-fluff journalism on subjects otherwise not widely covered. Thanks for that.
I am trying to get people interested in a story that I believe is of great consequence and that is not being covered hardly at all in a frank way. I have attached an article titled “Buy-and-Hold Is Dangerous.” It sounds to me that this might be of some interest to Ed Walker.
I understand that the article is too long for publication at your site. My intent is to present enough background to make the story fully understandable and thereby to get you interested in it. If there is interest in the story, I can of course write something that focuses on one or two angles or we can together come up with some other way to work together.
I wish you the best of luck in all your future life endeavors.
Set forth below are the words of a comment posted by Anonymous that I had to delete because they were associated with a blog entry that I did not intend to post until March 15:
Oops. I don’t think you meant to post this today. You never do two posts in one day, let alone one of them to a ValueWalk that you just posted. One thing we can always count on you for is sticking to the routine.
Unless you’re having a crisis/meltdown. Care to share?
That’s okay. With the thousands of stressful split-second decisions it takes every day to keep this site running smoothly, an occasional slip-up is inevitable.
I intended to have that post appear on March 15 and I failed to change the month in which it is to be posted from “January” to “March”. (the WordPress system uses the current month as the default choice). I have now changed the month so that it will appear when I had intended it to appear. Thanks for the assist.
You are correct to note that it is a personality trait of mine to stick to a routine. I am a cautious person by nature. I think that is one of the reasons why I spent so much time investigating the safe withdrawal rate concept during the years when I was putting together my Retire Early plan. I was not willing to go by what other people said. I wanted to be sure. So I read what lots of other people said. But when some aspect or another of the story did not seem to add up, I dug deeper until I was able to make better sense of the matter.
It’s also a reason why I find it such a big deal that the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies have not all been corrected in the 17 years since I pointed out the error in them. I assume that lots of middle-class people are like me, they are seeking accurate and honest information when they go to the internet for guidance on how to invest their retirement money. I see it as a big problem when one of the experts makes a mistake and then fails to correct it when it is brought to his attention. Mistake made in this field hurt real live human beings in very big ways. That sort of thing bothers me on a deep level. I find it incomprehensible that someone would discover that he got an important number wrong in a retirement study and then would fail to correct the error within 48 hours. I can’t even say how shocked I am that a lot more than 48 hours has passed since I pointed out the mistake that Greaney and lots of others made in their retirement studies. My basic cautious nature is certainly a contributing factor to my feelings of shock.
No crisis/meltdown other than the one that has been ongoing since the morning of May 13 2002, when I learned that Greaney had zero intention of ever correcting his study or of thanking me for pointing out the error to him or of doing anything to compensate the thousands of people whose lives were destroyed by his error and by his long-time failure to correct it.
Please take good care, dear Goon friend.
Rob
That’s okay. With the thousands of stressful split-second decisions it takes every day to keep this site running smoothly, an occasional slip-up is inevitable.
We all make mistakes from time to time. I think that much is more than fair to say, my dear friend.
Please take good care.
Mistake-Maker (and Fixer!) Rob
“You are correct to note that it is a personality trait of mine to stick to a routine. I am a cautious person by nature. I think that is one of the reasons why I spent so much time investigating the safe withdrawal rate concept during the years when I was putting together my Retire Early plan. I was not willing to go by what other people said. I wanted to be sure. So I read what lots of other people said. But when some aspect or another of the story did not seem to add up, I dug deeper until I was able to make better sense of the matter.”
It is funny how you even use mistakes as a way of patting yourself on the back and/or telling us how great you are.
It is funny how you even use mistakes as a way of patting yourself on the back and/or telling us how great you are.
People interested in these matters have a right to wonder why it is that it was me who discovered the error in the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies. There are a lot of smart people who work in this field. You would think that those errors would have been discovered and corrected long before I came on the scene. But they weren’t.
My comment was explaining why it was me who discovered the error. I was planning to hand in a resignation from a high-paying job. So it was important that I got the numbers right. So I spent more time thinking the matter through than Greaney or Linduaer or Bogle did. And I hit pay dirt.
I did a great thing in discovering those errors. There’s no question about it. I am very proud that I did that. I am not taking anything away from anyone else by pointing out that that famous post from the morning of May 13, 2002, had my name on it. Different people make important contributions in different sorts of ways. That is how I made mine. Good for me, you know?
What have you done to get those studies corrected, Anonymous?
Correction-Seeking Rob