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

“ Yes, my plan called for $20,000 of annual ncome from my writing business. That was a super lowball number. I had earned $15,000 in six months from my Soapbox report (“Secrets of Retiring Early”) while holding down a full-time job. Once I was free to write reports like crazy, I obviously could earn a lot more. So the plan was super safe. The fact that I am still here 20 years later despite never earning that $20,000 shows how super safe the plan was.”

No that is not super safe. Perhaps it would have been safer if you had a long history of writing many reports that all sold that amount on a regular basis. You never wrote and tried to sell another report after that one, as far as we know. Further, if this was your plan and you were not generating this income after the expected period of time, why did you not go back to work? You admitted that you were able to write the first report while, working, so you could have taken a job and continued writing reports until getting back on track. Your story does not make sense.

It makes sense. I had been writing about the Passion Saving concept for three years before I wrote the Secrets report and my work had been hugely successful. Even Greaney was on board. He wrote a note to be read by newcomers to the Retire Early board urging them to read my stuff before they did anything else because my stuff was “seminal.” So it wasn’t like there was any question that my further work was going to bring in lots of money. There’s a lot more money to be made selling a successful book than selling a successful report. So, when Soapbox shut down, I turned to developing a book expanding on that material. Judging by the reactions I saw from people who read the book, I would have made millions from the book had you Goons not junped in to destroy me. There were people who were pleasing with you to permit me to post just about saving issues. But you understood that, any popularity that I gained writing about saving strategies would come back to bite you in that I was undoubtedly going to post honestly about stock investing as well and then Greaney’s study (and Buy-and-Hold!) would go down. So no dice.

The only problem that I have ever experienced is the insane Campaign of Terror that you Goons have led against any board or blog community that permitted honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. You believe (properly so) that to permit honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research will be the beginning of the end for Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold strategies. I agree. The difference is that I see that as a very good thing and you see it as a very bad thing. We have been working at cross purposes for 20 years now.

It would be crazy for me to take on some other form of work when I have not yet opened every discussion board and blog on the internet to honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research, without a single exception. This is the most important public policy issue facing the United States today. If stocks continue to perform in the future anything at all as they have always performed in the past, we are looking ahead to millions of failed retirements, hundreds of thousands of business failures, millions of people losijng their jobs, a significant increase in political tensions. You think I am going to find a journalistic enterprise with more potential than this one? In what century?

I have indicated that I may take up employment after I finish my book. That would make sense because, when the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis hit, I would have the definitive statement about what caused it already in hand and I could quickly shift again to doing the more important (by a factor of 500 ) work. Outside of that, though, thanks but not thanks. I love my country. I am going to continue to do everything in my power to open every discussion board and blog to honest posting re the past 41 years of peer-reviewed research in this field, without a single exception. I am not even able to imagine any possible downside.

I believe that the people of this country are fundamentally good. We are not perfect. But we are not Goons, you know? If we were all Goons, we would not have laws in place protecting us from the tactics employed by the small pervcentage of us who are Goons. I believe that we are going to work through this thing and that we will from that time forward all live lives better and richer and fuller than we ever imagined possible back in the Buy-and-Hold Era. We’ll see, you know?

My best and warmest wishes to you and yours in any event.

Rob

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

Rob’s, you’re living 50 miles away from Purcellville, shacking up in a shared room in some townhome. This really is sad. There’s definitely mixed feelings from me, and I suspect the others. I’m glad that you failed to succeed in selling your bad retirement advice to others. It is sad to see this happen to you and your family regardless of that silver lining.

If it was up to me, we would have opened every discussion board and blog to honest posting on the evening of the day that Shiller published his Nobel-prizr-winning research showing that valuations affect long-term returns. There wasn’t even an internet in those days. But people had other ways to communicate. They had books and magazines and speeches and conferences. They could have talked about the amazing and far-reaching implications of Shiller’s research findings at those sorts of venues. And we would be 41 years ahead of where we are today in our development of the Valuation-Informed Indexing concept if we had done that.

It’s like the story of the two economists who are walking on a path when one stoops down to pick up a 20-dollar bill. The other one says: “Why are you doing that? If there were reallly a 20-dollar bill there, someone would have picked it up before we came along.” Except in this case, it’s a 20-trillion-dollar bill. All of the research is done. All that the rest of us need to do to live better and fuller and richer lives is to stoop down and pick it up. I say that we should do that. We are not as a nation of people going to make it to the magic place that Shiller pointed out to us until a larger number of us work up the courage to point out that there’s a 20-trillion-dollar bull sitting on the sidewalk and the sensible thing is to stoop down and pick it up.

That’s pretty much it.

Rob