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

Do you attribute your failed retirement to a “get rich quick” attitude? I believe you were counting on writing income that never came, correct?

No. The attitude that I directed to putting together my early retirement plan was the farthest thing from a Get Rich Quick attitude than one could possibly get. It was a belt-and-suspenders plan. I wanted to be sure that it would work. Then I wanted to be sure that I was sure. Then I wanted to be sure that I was sure that I was sure. I owed that to my wife and to my two boys. There was a lot of blood, sweat and tears that went into the development of my plan. Years of it. I had to have bookshelves put in to handle all of the binders of materials that I put together over the years of planning it out.

It was all that planning and relentless thinking about every detail of the plan that caused me to see the error in the Greaney study. Something that I really liked about the Greaney web site (I was ecstatic on the day that I discovered it) was his focus on the safe-withdrawal-rate concept. Looking at the worst-case scenario is the analytically correct way to plan an early retirement, in my assessment. It’s not possible to ever get to “100 percent safe,” the term that Greaney uses. But it is possible to identify the withdrawal rate that is 95 percent safe, presuming that stocks continue to perform in the future at least somewhat as they always have in the past. I loved it that he put so much focus on that question. Because it’s a dangerous thing to hand in a resignation from a high-paying job. I think people should work the numbers before they do that. I don’t have a problem with people going with a withdrawal rate that is less than 95 percent safe. That’s an individual judgment call. But I strongly believe that people should work the numbers before handing in a resgination to inform themselves of the realities. I loved it that Greaney was encouraging them to do that.

I had been thinking about the safe withdrawal rate long before I discovered Greaney’s site. Something about the idea that the safe withdrawal rate is the same number at all times didn’t sit right with me. I couldn’t put my finger on the problem until I read Bogle’s book ‘Common Sense on Mutual Funds.” Bogle said that Reverrsion to the Mean is an “Iron Law” of stock investing, If that’s so, there is zero chance that the safe withdrawal rate is the same number at all times. There obviously is more Reversion to the Mean when prices are high than when they are at fair-value levels. So the safe withdrawal rate is obviously lower when prices are high. It was Bogle who persuaded me that the conventional safe-withdrawal-rate studies are in error, not Shiller.

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. There were a good number of personal finance bloggers who were less popular than I was who became millionaires in those days. My “mistake” was in telling the truth about safe withdrawal rates. That was a powerful anti-marketing engine. People used to be pulled unto my site by the saving stuff and then pushed back out by their reaction to the investing stuff. I didn’t just earn zero from the investing stuff. I earned a huge negative number from it. The research-based truth about how stock investing works is not even a tiny bit popular (but 10 percent of the population of investors loves it to death).

The plan would have worked easily if it hadn’t been for Greaney’s abusive and in some cases criminal behavior. No, the truth about stock investing is not popular at times of insanely high stock prices. But 10 percent of the population of investors loves hearing about it. And another 80 percent is okay with the thought of being exposed to it and can be brought around with regular reiteration of the message. Only 10 percent of investors are out-and-out Goons who advance death threats and engage in extortion when they see people being exposed to dicussions of the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research. Those are the people who have kept me from earning many millions by being the lead person on getting this important message spread far and wide on the internet.

But the Goons couldn’t have gotten away with it without the complacency of a lot of the Normals! There was no way that any reasonable person could have known in advance that the site administrator of the Motley Fool site would have permitted Greaney to continue to post there after he had advanced death threats. That is just too crazy. And of course we have seen hundreds of cases of behavior like that. There was nothing even a tiny bit Get Rich Quick in my belief that the laws of the United States would be applied in the investment advice field in the same manner as they are applied in every other field of human endeavor.

I still believe that we will all see the day when that will indeed happen (after the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis), Then I will collect the millions that I would have collected at an earlier time had the investing field not gone so bonkers in the Buy-and-Hold Era. No one could have possibly anticipated what we have seen. My plan was sound. It is the Buy-and-Hold stuff (no market timing now!) that is infected at the root with Get Rich Quick thinking. In the real world, price discipline (market timing!) is 100 percent required. As the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research clearly shows.

My best wishes to you.

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:

Here is a title for your new book:

“How to lose your money, wife and house by pushing timing schemes”.

That’s not the title that I am going to use, Anonymous.

But I do open the book by talking about the divorce. The price that people pay for telling the truth about stock investing is a big part of the story. If we were all thinking clearly, we would all be doing everything in our power to spread the word about Shiller’s research as far as we could and as fast as we could. Doing so would benefit each and every one of us.

Why don’t we do it? Because, when it comes to stock investing, we are not rational. We LIKE irratioanl exuberance. We LIKE bull markets. We LIKE Buy-and-Hold. So we end up with a CAPE value of 29 and all that follows from it.

Can we change?

I believe we can change. But it won’t happen until everyone who believes that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research feels 100 percent comfortable posting honesly at every discussion board and blog on the internet.

The market isn’t efficient today. Not with that CAPE value. But it could be a lot closer to efficiient tomorrow if we all worked on it together.

My sincere take.

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:

“I’ll do what I can to get along.”

Not really a plan when you are in your 60’s. It’s now to late to say you will wait to see how it will all turn out. We see how it played out. It failed.

It’s about 500 times better than betraying my friends and then not knowing how I am going to be able to sleep at night, Anonymous. I had posted with a good number of people at the Motley Fool board for three years and had gotten to know them and to care about what happened to them.

Do you see?

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:

“I’ll do what I can to get along.”

Not really a plan when you are in your 60’s. It’s now to late to say you will wait to see how it will all turn out. We see how it played out. It failed.

It’s about 500 times better than betraying my friends and then not knowing how I am going to be able to sleep at night, Anonymous. I had posted with a good number of people at the Motley Fool board for three years and had gotten to know them and to care about what happened to them.

Do you see?

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:

“ I always want to remain open to hearing thoughts coming from people on the other side of the table, Anonymous.”

I think your ex-wife and priest would disagree with that statement.

There’s some truth in that comment but it does not express the complete truth.

I once asked my priest whether he felt that I had committed a sin in making the choices that I had made. He said that someday in the future we would need to sit on the porch and have a long talk examining all the angles of the matter. If I had not listened to the other side at all, I think that that would have been a sin because of the damage that was done to my family. So I think that my priest was signaling that he believed that there was a bit of listening going on on my end.,

There certainly have been times when my ex indicated that she did not believe that I was listening to the other side. But we had a recent conversation in which she expressed the view that she believes that I am “a good soul.” So I think that she too is of two minds re this matter.

It’s hard for people to accept that there could be 41 years of peer-reviewed research showing that market timing is always 100 percent required and that there still could be a ban on honest posting at every large site on the internet. How could something like that happen? It boggles the mind.

I believe that people’s minds will change when they see the human suffering that we will experience in the days following the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis (I am presuming here that stocks will continue to perform in the fututre at least somewhat as they have always performed in the past). Then they will be concluding that it is the Buy-and-Holders who have been too closed to hearing the other side of the story.

We’ll see.

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:

I am guessing your own wife agrees more with me versus you.

I don’t agree with that. She hates the Goon stuff. She has total contempt for it. The sense in which she agrees with you is that she believes that a husband and father needs to be bringing in money, that there’s just no getting around that core reality.

She doesn’t understand the investing stuff well enough to see how it affects the lives of millions of people in very serious ways. If she saw that, I think she would agree with me all the way. She’s like all of the Normals in that respect. 90 percent of the Buy-and-Holders would never dream of advancing a death threat. So they do not support the Goon stuff. But they do not feel a sense of urgency re opening every site because they are not able to picture what the conseiences are likely to be if as a society we continue to fail to do that.

That’s why I believe that the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis will be the turning point. I believe that that will shock people out of their complaceny. They will be able to see with their own eyes how much Buy-and-Hold/Get Rich Quick has been hurting us all for as far back as the stock market has been in business. So long as prices remain high, it doesn’t seem like such a big deal to permit honest posting. It will be clear to everyone why it is important when Buy-and-Hold/Get Rich Quick does harm to millions of human lives. as it always does sooner or later.

But I don’t know everything. We will have to be a little patient to see how it all plays out.

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:

Sadly,you have lost everything and learned nothing.

Good one, Anonymous. Didn’t Jesus say that a man must lose his life in order to gain it? Maybe I took that one a little too literally.

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:

“ 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

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 is a fantastic buy and hold investor. He has kept his 0% stock allocation consistent since the mid 90s, never adjusting it, no matter what the stock market does.

Exactly!

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:

Since you ignored the question, obviously your book is nowhere near completion, and you will miss yet another self-imposed deadline.

That book would be done by now if you had put in just five minutes of serious work every day. Clearly any amount of serious work on anything is too much to expect from you.

I’ll probably miss the June 30 self-imposed deadline. But I put in work on the book every day, And it is going to be an amazing book. I believe that it will be the most important book ever published in the field of personal finance. I certainly wish that it had been finished years sooner. But I am extremely proud of what I have accomplished and will be even more proud when it is finished.

The delay is because of the social isolation. It is an extremely painful experience. No one else has written this book. Why do you think that is? Shiller’s Nobel prize-winning research has been publicly available for 41 years and no one (including Shiller himself) has written a full exploration of the far-reaching implications of his Nobel-prize-winning work. Even you Goons have acknowledged that nowhere in his book does Shiller start in clear and direct terms that the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies need to be corrected immediately. Huh? What the f?

This was a hard book to write. Very, very, very, hard. That slowed me down. But it did not stop me. I am not at the finish line. But I am very close. The fact that it was so hard to write makes it that much more important that someone do the job. And in a short amount of time I will be able to say that I pulled that off. Good for me, you know? It’s certainly not something that as a young man I had any realistic expectation of being able to pull off. Life sometimes takes funny turns on you.

My best wishes.

Rob