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I DID ACHIEVE financial independence and retire early—if you count age 64 as early. My friend Jose, a true believer in FIRE, or financial independence-retire early, celebrated his retirement at 44. That took a steely nerve that I lacked, plus I had big college bills to pay before retiring.
One big challenge of FIRE, of course, is that your savings might need to last 40 or even 50 years. Vanguard Group recently published a research paper to help FIRE followers go the distance. It includes major tinkering with the 4% rule, which was designed with only a 30-year retirement in mind.
Under the 4% rule, you withdraw 4% of your savings in the first year of retirement, then raise that dollar amount by the rate of inflation in the second year and so on thereafter. This approach worked 82% of the time over a 30-year period with a 50% stock-50% bond portfolio. If retirement gets stretched to 50 years, however, the success rate fell to a discouraging 36%, Vanguard’s researchers found.
To improve the odds, they suggest FIRE followers try these four steps:
There are no automatic inflation adjustments under this dynamic spending model, so the shoe would pinch if higher inflation turns out not to be “transitory.” Still, the concept follows human nature: Tighten your belt when balances are down and spend a bit more when they’re higher.
Does this mean the 4% rule is repealed? Not really. FIRE followers who adhere to all four steps could start with a 4% withdrawal rate, the researchers found, and have at least an 85% chance that their savings would last a full 50 years. Your results may vary, of course. Good luck, Jose.
What FIRE retiree with a 50-year time horizon (or 60+ years like Mr. Money Mustache, who retired at 30) is going to hold 50% bonds? That’s crazy.
I think a much better long-term strategy than using a fixed % involves using some version of a “required minimum distribution” which is an actuarially adjusted annual amount. This adjusts for age, life expectancy, and prior returns. It still doesn’t adjust for variability in future returns, but that is unknowable in any case.
To do this, you treat your whole balance under consideration like it was in an IRA, look up the RMD in the actuarial table (which is available for younger ages also) and take that as your target amount.
I think it is worth noting that the Vanguard analysis used the following assumptions.
We use forecasts from the Vanguard Capital Markets Model® to estimate future returns. The VCMM’s 10-year median return forecasts are 4.02% for U.S. stocks and 1.31% for U.S. bonds—both below the historical averages. Its inflation forecast is 1.58%. Accounting for inflation, the 10-year VCMM median forecasts of real returns are 2.44% for U.S. stocks and –0.27% for U.S. bonds. These forecasts reflect the “initial conditions” (stock market valuations and real interest rate and inflation expectations) that prevailed in December 2020.
Thanks parkslope! I never see the point in reading anything that’s like “BTW stocks will only return 2% over cash… over the next 50 years.” Yeah, right.
If I was retiring early, I would want a little more room for unforeseen contingencies. Remember how the world was in 1985? The world today is very different. Who knows what might happen if you are retired for 30 or 40 years.
I did retire at age 61, but I had 25 times my salary in financial assets. Combined with Social Security, this is enough to live on your income and not spend down principal.
I am curious how you are covering expenses until social security kicks in – assuming you will start collecting at age 70?
If Vanguard was going to tinker with asset allocation by adding international, why keep the overall allocation at 50/50 stock/bond? That allocation is dead, and I assume very few FIRE followers would be this conservative. Also, the use of historical returns is framed as a negative by Vanguard, but I trust history more than I trust Vanguard’s ability to predict the next 50 years.
I agree 100% Brent. Someone who FIREs in their 30s or 40s on $40,000 a year can scrape up $20,000 in part-time work when the stock market goes down 50%, and there’s a decent sequence-of-returns chance that their returns go up 200% before ever declining 50%.
For me, Dividend Growth stocks are the new bonds. For context, I am 50. My portfolio comprises 40% Indices, 40% dividend growth stocks, 20% Cash and I-Bonds.
The growing dividends (2.62% yield with a 10% dividend growth rate in that portion of my portfolio) meet 75% of my current expenses (not counting Social Security).
That mitigates risk on two fronts.
@Purple Rain Wade Pfau has some good stuff on “bucket strategy” to reduce sequence of returns risk, where the basic idea is that you sell bonds and increase your exposure to stocks over time to mitigate “bad returns early in retirement.”
But I’m a little more doubtful about holding a large cash position; I’m -300% cash myself.
Can you reference where the 82% success rate comes from? Everything I’ve read on Bengen and Trinity show 95 to 100% success rate for the 4% rule. Bengen has actually revised the rule to over 4% now. While some others have revised it down to 3.3%.
Figure 4 page 5 of the Vanguard analysis linked in the article.
The Vanguard analysis that Greg Spears summarized in this article found an 81.9% success rate for a 30-year retirement.
https://personal.vanguard.com/pdf/ISGFIRE.pdf
I’m so glad you wrote this. I get into heated discussions with FIRE folk who seem to have their heads buried in the sand on this issue somehow thinking retiring at 40 is the same as 65 when it comes to using assets to live on the rest of their lives.