An irony of personal finance is that retirement can take work. More than once I’ve heard a retiree express this sentiment: “Working was easy. Retirement is complicated.” There is, I think, a lot of truth to this, because when retirement appears on the horizon, a number of new questions enter the [...]
How Much?
“How much can I withdraw from my portfolio each year?” It’s one of the most common questions retirees ask. In the past, I’ve talked about the so-called 4% rule, a popular tool for addressing this question. Among the reasons it’s so popular is because it’s so simple: In the first year of [...]
SECURE 2.0 planning opportunities
In the waning days of 2019, Congress passed the SECURE Act, a law that delivered a mix bag of changes for retirement savers. Well, Congress has been busy, and at the tail end of 2022, a follow-up law, known as SECURE 2.0, was signed into law. The good news: There’s a whole lot included in this [...]
The planner’s tool box
It’s human nature, I think, to be impressed by things that sound sophisticated or look complex. In the world of personal finance, this certainly applies to the planning tool known as Monte Carlo analysis. That’s because its roots go back to the 1940s, when it was developed by Stanislaw Ulam, a [...]
Dogma
In 1954, Harry Markowitz was a graduate student in economics at the University of Chicago and had just finished defending his thesis. Most of the committee accepted his work. But Milton Friedman, an economist with a national reputation, and easily the most influential member of the economics [...]
