“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. 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.”

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:

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?

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. Mistakes 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