Personal Finance (Not Investing) • Re: how much do you think you need to retire?

Sure, but what happens if you live for 15 years instead of 10?

Again, what I presented was already a ridiculous, contrived set of circumstances.

My intended point is that presuming a positive rate of return during one’s retirement lifetime entails some risk—and that perhaps expecting a flat or even negative return might be more realistic or “safer,” in the sense that if things go poorly, you might be in a better position than if your retirement math requires a positive return.

Even though nothing anything like that has ever come even remotely close to happening. Note that my contrived example didn't "require a positive return" at all, it was a -50% real return forever. A drop of 50% followed by no real gains until the end of time. For something like this to happen to a BH retirement portfolio, there would have be such catastrophic failures in the structure of society that your stock/bond ratio will be unimportant, and your 9mm/.223 ratio will be top of mind.

Although then you can easily get into an endless cycle of how much extra do you need and just how negative of a return can you handle and for how long, so perhaps it is better to just double whatever your anticipated number is and go with that.

I think you need $11T to retire. You know, just in case.

Statistics: Posted by lazydavid — Wed Nov 13, 2024 5:31 am

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