Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
“ I temporarily do not have a fully funded retirement but I have even more than $500 million if I just hang in there and complete the work that I need to do to keep us all from landing in the soup. Gee, I winder how I should play this one?”
You are no different than the guy waiting for his lottery tickets to pay off. It’s not going to happen. Are you just trying to make yourself feel better by making up these stories?
You don’t need to worry about those of us with fully funded retirement portfolios. Our only remaining challenges are related to growing inflation due to the fed and the typical healthcare issues. Both of those, we can manage.
Your retirement is not “fully funded” if more than half of the money in your account consists of irrational exuberance, Anonymous,
Rob
Anonymous says
You somehow feel more confident in getting your $500 million windfall versus the guy(s) who have built and maintained a fully funded retirement portfolio?
Would you rather have an established $5 million portfolio of index funds in your hand today or your wish/hope of getting a $500 million windfall? Which would your wife rather have.
Rob says
I would prefer to have the $5 million. But I would not count it as $5 million. I would count it as $2 million. But I would still prefer to have $2 million in hand to having a good prospect of having $500 million a few years down the road.
I didn’t do any of this for the purpose of collecting the $500 million. I had almost no idea of what I was getting involved in on the morning of May 13, 2002. Everything was revealed to me by the behavior of the Buy-and-Holders.
The significance of the $500 million figure is that that is a very conservative estimate of the value of the information that I have provided. Every investing textbook that exists will have to be rewritten when knowledge of the amazing implications of Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research becomes widespread. I certainly would have earned that much or more had it not been for your criminal behavior.
But for me personally $2 million would be more than enough to live on. So the remaining $ 498 million would just be money to leave to heirs and charities and so forth. I earned it and I see no reason why I shouldn’t collect it. But it was never my motivation to earn that extra $498 million. That’s just the way things played out given all the craziness of this situation.
Rob
Anonymous says
If you had continued working, you would have easily accumulated $2/5 million with a simple buy and hold strategy. I haven’t seen anything that indicates you have earned even one dollar of the $500 million. Given that things haven’t worked out like you thought they would, why haven’t you considered that you were wrong and that you should look at a plan B?
Rob says
Because there is zero evidence that the Greaney retirement study contains a valuation adjustment. We now have Evidence-Based Investing, one of the lead Goons, acknowledging that the study lacks a valuation adjustment. I don’t know how you could have any more proof than that. What possible motive would Evidence have to say that the study lacks a valuation adjustment other than that he truly believe that to be the case?
Say that there is a one-in-a-hundred chance that Evidence and me are right, that the study really does lack a valuation adjustment. If that is so, then we should be talking about what that means at every investing site on the internet. Greaney is not the only one who has advanced the 4 percent rule. There were thousands of newspaper articles that did that. There were millions of retirement plans that were constructed with that rule in mind. If that study truly lacks a valuation adjustment, then the story of how that happened is the biggest story in the history of personal finance. We need to be talking about it every day at every site.
I’m not wrong. If I were wrong, I would have Evidence now coming over to my side. I mean, please give me a freakin’ break. No freakin’ way, no freakin’ how. The Greaney study does not contain a valuation adjustment. It should have been corrected within 24 hours of the moment I pushed the “Send” button on that famous post from the morning of May 13, 2002.
My sincere take.
Rob
Evidence based investing says
No one has ever claimed that Greaney’s study contained a valuation adjustment. Including anonymous.
Anonymous says
I realize that once your brain locks on some nutty idea, it’s locked forever. But Evidence has explained multiple times that he is not “on your side.”
Greaney himself never claimed his study had a valuation adjustment. So I guess he’s on your side too. Time to declare victory, pick up your ball and go home.
Rob says
“No one has ever claimed that Greaney’s study contained a valuation adjustment. Including anonymous”
Okay. Are you willing to specify the date on which you and Anonymous first called on Greaney to correct the error in his study?
Rob
Evidence Based Investing says
I never called for him to correct his study. A study that calculates the withdrawal rates that survived different historical time periods does not require a valuation adjustment.
It simply requires the calculation of what rate survived.
Rob says
“I realize that once your brain locks on some nutty idea, it’s locked forever. But Evidence has explained multiple times that he is not “on your side.”
Greaney himself never claimed his study had a valuation adjustment. So I guess he’s on your side too. Time to declare victory, pick up your ball and go home.”
I declared victory on the evening of August 27, 2002. That was the evening on which Greaney advanced his first death threat and on which over 200 of my fellow community members endorsed his death threat. I had been a Buy-and-Holder up to that point. From that point forward, I have devoted my energies to development and promotion of the Valuation-Informed Indexing concept.
Rob says
“I never called for him to correct his study. A study that calculates the withdrawal rates that survived different historical time periods does not require a valuation adjustment.
It simply requires the calculation of what rate survived.”
We agree that Greaney calculated properly the rate that survived all existing 30-year historical time-periods.
Rob
Evidence Based Investing says
“We agree that Greaney calculated properly the rate that survived all existing 30-year historical time-periods.”
So clearly no correction is needed.
If you wish for a different set of calculations to be performed either perform them yourself or find someone to do it for you.
Rob says
Every investor needs to know the accurate safe-withdrawal-rate numbers. We need to open every discussion board and blog on the internet to honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research in this field.
My sincere take.
Rob
Evidence Based Investing says
“Every investor needs to know the accurate safe-withdrawal-rate numbers. ”
Which is why you (or someone else you can persuade) needs to work on that calculation. You seem obsessed with getting Greaney to change his calculation of the rate that survived all existing 30-year historical time-periods, which you admit he got correct.
Stop obsessing with what Greaney calculated correctly and get working on the different calculation that you believe people should use instead.
Rob says
The answer is to open every discussion board and blog on the internet to honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research in this field, without a single exception.
I am sure.
Rob