Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
“ And, yes, everyone agrees that a person needs to earn an income. I of course agree with that as well. But I am aware of the unusual circumstances that apply here.”
No there is nothing special. You can still waste your time doing whatever you want, yet there is still plenty of time to work a job as well. Funny how you won’t admit that.
This is the most important public policy issue in the United States today. Everyone who works in this field should make it their top priority until every site on the internet had been opened to honest postingt re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. It shouldn’t take 20 years to get an error corrected in a study that people use to plan their retirements. It shouldn’t take more thsn 20 hours.
Rob
I can’t see any possible scenario in which you come out okay from a financial perspective if you don’t do anything. If things keep going status quote, nothing changes for you. On the other hand, if we suspend reality for a second and say that buy and hold causes a crisis, the buy and hold goons would be broke and/ or in jail and can’t pay you even one dime of your $500 million demand. Either way, you can’t fix your problem of depleted savings. Your other options won’t help much. A reverse mortgage would run out quickly and you have missed out on a large part of working year contributions to social security. You and your wife both have to get jobs and work until you can no longer physically work. It is not pleasant given your age, but what other choices do you have?
I think I’ll be fine, Anonymous. In any event, I don’t have any choice in the matter. If I didn’t try to help, I couldn’t live with myself. I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night. That’s clearly out.
My big fear is what will happen to the entire nation as a result of the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis. That one scares me very much. But I’ve done all that I can do in that regard. So I just have to accept that things are what they are. We are at a turning point in U.S. history. The future is bright beyond words if we make the sensible (research-based!) choice. And things look more than a little dark if we fail to work up the courage to take some steps.
I believe that we are deep down a good people. Otherwise, I don’t see how Shiller would have gotten his research published in a peer-reviewed journal in the first place So I am willfully optimistic that we will see a happy ending to this sage. But of course I am the one who thought that Motley Fool would give Greaney the boot after two or three days of highly abusive posting. So I don’t know everything, you know. We are just going to have to wait a bit to see how it all plays out.
My best and warmest wishes to you and yours, in any event.
Rob
“ I think I’ll be fine, Anonymous. ”
Does your wife agree with that statement?
She does not.
Rob
“ She does not.”
Doesn’t she have an equal voice? Why would you not take steps to address her concerns by being in some income. You would still have plenty of time to write your book and post on the internet. It isn’t an either/or thing, right?
It’s an either-or thing until the book is finished, We have seen thousands of our fellow community members express a desire that honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research be permitted on the internet. That translates into many millions of investors out in the great big world outside of the small number of discussion boards and blogs that have particiupated in The Great Safe Withdrawal Rate Debate. I could see mixing in some income-producing work after the book is finished. But that’s not where things stand today. Finishing the book is my top priority by a factor of 20.
My best wishes to you.
Rob
But the book can be finished even while you bring in an income. There are plenty of hours in the day.
My plan is to finish the book first. I want to see that one locked up. Then we’ll see about the rest. I will become open to different possibilities at that point.
Wish me luck!
Rob
But why won’t you do both at the same time in order to address your wife’s concern?
I’ve answered your question.
Any income that I earn from income-producing employment helps my family. That’s an obvious good.
Finishing the book helps millions of people facing possibly the worst Buy-and-Hold Crisis in our nation’s history. Go watch “The Grapes of Wrath” if you wsnt to get a sense of what some of the earlier ones have done to us all.
Finishing the book is my top priority. We all need to move forward re this matter of how the stock market works in the real world.
Rob
“ I’ve answered your question.”
No you haven’t. You haven’t said why you can’t do both at the same time when there are plenty of hours in the day. You seem to have time to post here, on ValueWalk, Twitter, etc. you seem to have time for watching movies, baseball, etc. Yet you have chosen to put your wife and her concerns last when there is plenty of time to address that as well.
I post here to respond to questions and comments re the material in the book. It obviously makes the book a better product the more I know about the subject matter.
I write a column every week for Value Walk. Again, doing that enhances my understanding of the subject matter of the book.
I spend very minimal time on Twitter. I I push that little “retweet” button re some articles that I happen to come across that I think might be worth reading.
I do watch movies and I do watch baseball. The book is not an intellectually difficult project. It is an EXTREMELY difficult emotional project. That’s why no one else has written this book in the 41 years since Shiller published his amazing, revolutionary, Nobel-prize-winning research findings. Bernstein could have written it. Kitces could have written it. Shultheis could have written it. Freakin’ Shiller could have written it. Lots of others. Why has no one else written it? Why has this job been left to me? Because it is an emotionally harrowing experience to tell millions of people something that they very, very, very much do not want to hear, that their stock portfolio is not worth anything close to what they have been led to believe it is worth. It’s a very hard job. Watching a movie or a baseball game gives me some emotional relief. So, yes, I do that.
I wish that I were Superman. I wish that I did not need the emotional relief. The book would have been completed years ago if that were the case. But you know what? I am close to finishing the book. Most of these others haven’t even started writing it yet, so far as I can tell. So I am not going to get too down on myself for doing some things that I need to do to obtain the emotional relief required to bring this important work to a successful conclusion. I’ll finish the book. It will be out there for anyone who cares to learn the true story. I’ll do what it takes to get to the finish line, including watching a few movies and a few baseball games. No apologies.
My best wishes to you.
Rob
So, you confirm you have the time, but have emotional issues. That means you need counseling. That still leaves plenty of time. Counseling is only 1-2 hours a week. Spend 2 hours a day with hobbies, etc. for emotional relief. Sleep is 8 hours a day. Work is 8 hours a day x 5 days. That still leaves 56 hours a week to work on your book and waste time on this website and ValueWalk and still deal with your emotional issues.
The “counseling” that I need is the feedback that I was receiving on a daily basis from the thousands of our fellow community members who were interested in learning more about what the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research teaches is all about how stock investing works in the real world in the days before you Goons managed with your criminally abusive behavior to have a Ban on Honest Posting imposed at every large internet site. We all learn from and are encouraged by the reactions of our fellow humans when we are working to come to a fuller understanding of exciting and surprising new research findings. I am no different than anyone else in that regard.
There are good reasons for the laws against death threats and extortion and financial fraud. I believe that as a nation of people we need to see to it that those laws are enforced in the same manner in the investing advice field as they are in every other field of human endeavor. I believe that that will happen in the days following the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis. We’ll see.
Rob
Emotional issues are not solved by internet conversations. It involves professional help. With that said, you have plenty of time for all your activities AND a job.
It is emotional issues currently being suffered by millions of stock investors that are responsible for today’s CAPE value of 29. Do you think that all of those people need professional help? I do not. I think that opening every internet site to honest posting re the past 41 years of peer-reviewed research in this field would bring most of those people around. People are highly motivated to learn how to invest effectively. But we need to open up some means of getting honest, accurate, research-based investment advice out to them.
The number of people who smoked has declined over my lifetime. Most of that decline is not due to people going to professional therapy. Most of it is the result of people becoming better informed re the dangers of smoking. We can do the same thing with Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold investment strategies.
The heads of the tobacco compnaies did not want to see people become better informed and neither do our Wall Street Con Man friends (and the members of their internet Goon squads!). But we are all better off once things are done on the level. People can still smoke today. But they do so being fully aware of the risk that they will die of lung cancer as a result. I think we should do the same thing in the investing advice field. Let people become Buy-and-Holders if they wish but also permit them to become fully aware of the long-term dangers of doing so. No criminal intimidation tactics whatsoever.
Personally, I am not even able to imagine any potential downside.
Rob
“ Personally, I am not even able to imagine any potential downside.”
Being broke and having a furious wife is not a downside?
I have been spesking out in opposition to the abusive stuff going back to the first day, Anonymous. No one else has been as strong on that issue as me. No one else is in even a remotely close second place.
Rob
“ I have been spesking out in opposition to the abusive stuff going back to the first day, Anonymous. ”
Yes, we have seen the abusive stuff. You have called Jack Bogle a con-man. You have harassed Wade Pfau. You tell people they are going to prison for not agreeing with you. but the most abusive thing is failing to financially support your wife. She needs you to get a job to support her, yet you tell her no. Shameful.
I loved Bogle. It was Bogle who taught me that the idea that the safe withdrawal rate could always be the same number is a logical impossibility. not Shiller. Shiller certainly deepened my understanding. But it was Bogle who helped me to understand that the idea that the safe withdeawal rate could be the same number at all times was an absurdity. He said in his book: “Reversion to the Mean is an iron law of stock investing.” That was the click experience for me. So I loved Bogle.
But, yes, Bogle was a bit of a con man. Bogle visited the Bogleheads Forum regularly during the time when Mel Lindaur was terrorizing those of us who were saying that honest posting re Shiller’s research findings should be permitted and he did nothing. What would you call that? Wade Pfau would never have flipped if he was confident that Bogle would back him up if you Goons followed through with your threats to send emails to his employer in an effort to get him fired. If Wade were confident that Bogle wouldn’t tolerate such behavior, he would have continued doing honest work in this field and we would all be living better lives today as a result.
We all have a bit of the con man within us for so long as as a scoiety we do not permit challenges to the Buy-and-Hold dogmas. I certainly am guilty of participating in the con to a small extent. I knew that the Greaney study was in error the first time I saw it, three years before I said anything publicly. The first thing I looked for when I saw his study was to see if there was a valuation adjustment. Why did I keep my mouth shut? That’s a pretty darn devastating error to make, is it not? I kept my mouth shut because I didn’t want people yelling at me and threatening me and all that sort of thing. People’s financial futures are riding on the accuracy of the Buy-and-Hold dogmas and they are very, very, very sensitive to questioning of them.
It is that desire to con outselves that makes stock investing risky. The Bennett/Pfau research shows that we can reduce the risk of stock investing by 70 percent just by permitting questioning of the crazy Buy-and-Hold dogmas (market timing/price discipline is a good thing, not a bad thing!). The con is part of the stock investing experience. We all want to con ourselves and we all pay a heavy price in the long run for doing it. The job of the experts in this field is to discourage the con that we use to tell ourselves that market timing/price discipline is not necessary, not to encourage it.
I look forward to living in a world in which the greats like John Bogle no longer feel that they have to work a con to be able to work in this field. I believe that we are well on our way to getting there. We’ll see. I know for sure which side I want to be on in this amazing fight for the future of our nation.
My best and warmest wishes to you.
Rob
Let’s set aside your spin on Bogle and Pfau for a minute. Notice that you constantly ignore the needs of your wife and avoid addressing her issues. It’s hard for you to spin that as you do with anything else.
I feel great anguish over that issue. It is something that I have thought about every day of my life for 20 years running now.
Say that you learned about the 911 attacks before they happened but knew that, if you contacted the authorities, the people behind the attacls would try to hurt your family in retriburion for what you did. Would you keep your mouth shut?
I would have sympathy for someone who kept his or her mouth shut. I would understand. But I don’t think that I could do it in a situation that was going to cause that much human misery. I don’t think that I could live with myself knowing that I could have stopped it. That’s how I feel about the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis. It stocks continue to perform in the future anything at all as they have always performed in the past, we are going to see an ocean of human misery play out before our eyes. I could not live with myself knowing that I could have stopped it if only I were not so concerned with my personal affairs.
My loves ones matter a great deal. But my country matters a great deal too. It is simple not a long-term viable situation that we have 41 years of peer-revivwed research telling us all how stock investing works in the real world and yet we continue to devote enormoust amounts of resorces encouraing people to do precisely the wrong thing (the research tells us to be certain that all investors always practice price discipline/market timing and the Buy-and-Holders continue to act as if there is some alternate universe 500 billion light years away in which the stock market behaves in exactly the opppite manner to how it has always operated her on good old Planet Earth.
I do not believe in the existence of that altnernate universe. I love my family members. But my family members are going to have to live in what this country becomes in the days following the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis. I am not protecting my boys if I do nothing to stop a possible Second Great Depression or even a possible World War Three (global depressions can increase political tensions to a pojnt where they bring on global conflicts). It’s a question of what you can live with. I think we need to open every site to honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research and I would not feel comfortable not doing everything in my power to make that happen. I can do no more and I can do no less.
That’s where I am coming from, Anonymous.
Rob
“ I feel great anguish over that issue. It is something that I have thought about every day of my life for 20 years running now.”
So you have left your family in this situation and know that, yet you have done nothing about getting a job when you have more than enough hours in the day to work a job and still do all the rest of what you want to do. You haven’t given any excuse for that which any sane person would agree with.
I’ll have enough time for both once the book is finished. Until then, it would be wrong to take time away from the book just to bring in money. Bringing in money helps me and a small number of others. Opening every site on the internet to honest posting re the past 41 years of peer-reviewed research helps and protects millions and millions of people.
I wish there were five of me, you know? That would make things easy. There’s only one of me, just like with everybody else. I didn’t ask to get pulled into this thing. It’s something that happened to me. Who would think that making a simple observation thst a retirement study posted at some guy’s web site lacks a valuation adjustment would bring on a 20-year smear campaign? If that is what life presents to you, you have to figure out how to respond to it. Somehow I don’t believe that the right response is to pretend that that is in any way, shape or form normal. That’s extremely weird stuff. That tells me that I have a tiger by the tale re this one.
It’s not even just you Goons. How about all of the Normals who tolerate the behavior of you Goons? That’s the bigger issue. That tells us that we ALL have that Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold urge residing within us. We had better get about the business of learning about it and figuring out how best to cope with it! Otherwise, it could kill us as a society. How the stock market works is not some trivial matter. It’s important. We have the safety of our retirements riding on it. The last 41 years of peer-reviewed research is trying to tell us something. We very much need to pay attention. I am proud to be able to say that I have been trying to get us all to pay more attention for 20 years running.
You cannot speak for all sane people, Anonymous. You are a freakin’ internet Goon! I mean, please give me a freakin’ break. It’s true that most people are improperly complacent re these matters. I’ll give you that one. But will that remain the case in the days following the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis? I do not think so. I think that a good number of people are going to look at the ocean of human misery and regret not having taken effective action sometime over the prior 41 years. I think we are as a society on the thresdhold of some amazing breakthrough advances. I sure hope so.
My best and warmest wishes to you and yours, in any event, Mr. Sane Buy-and-Hold Goon Person.
Rob
“ I’ll have enough time for both once the book is finished. ”
You have more than enough time to work on the book and everything else while still working a job. The rest of your post is just the same non-sense and doesn’t provide any justification as to avoiding work.
You just fall back to same failed talking points and can’t come up with any reasonable explanation why you can’t work a job and do the other things you Ave liSted as well. The math shows you have huge amounts of free time. You won’t even start with a part-time job.
You have more than enough time to work on the book and everything else while still working a job. The rest of your post is just the same non-sense and doesn’t provide any justification as to avoiding work.
Okay, Anonymous.
Please take good care, man.
Rob
You just fall back to same failed talking points and can’t come up with any reasonable explanation why you can’t work a job and do the other things you Ave liSted as well. The math shows you have huge amounts of free time. You won’t even start with a part-time job.
Yeah, yeah.
Part-time. Schmart-time.
Rob
“ I think I’ll be fine, Anonymous.”
Your wife is not fine. She needs you to support her, but you refuse to do so.
The entire country is not exactly fine, Anonymous. Today’s CAPE value is signaling snother Buy-and-Hold Crisis within the next year or two or three.
But we have survived worse, you know? I believe that we will all make itsafely to the other side of the river. I believe that in coming days we will thrive as we never have before. I believe that that good news re this matter is 20 times more good than the bad news re this matter is bad.
It will be interesting to see how it all plays out.
Rob