On episode 289 of the Rational Reminder podcast, the guests were retirement spending researchers, David Blanchett, Michael Finke, and Wade Pfau.  The spark for this discussion was Dave Ramsey’s silly assertion that an 8% withdrawal rate is safe .  From there the podcast became a wide-ranging discussion of important retirement spending topics.  I highly recommend having a listen. Here I collect some questions I would have liked to have asked these experts. 1. How should stock and bond valuations affect withdrawal rates and asset allocations? It seems logical that retirees should spend a lower percentage of their portfolios when stocks or bonds become expensive.  However, it is not at all obvious how to account for valuations.  I made up two adjustments for my own retirement.  The first is that when Shiller’s CAPE exceeds 20, I reduce future stock return expectations by enough to bring the CAPE back to 20 by the end of my life .  These lower return expec...

My investment return for 2023 was 13.0%, just slightly below my benchmark return of 13.2%.  This small gap was due to a small shift in my asset allocation toward fixed income.  I use a CAPE-based calculation to lower my stock allocation as stocks get expensive .  This slight shift away from stocks caused me to miss out on a slice of the year’s strong stock returns.  Last year, this CAPE-based adjustment saved me 1.3 percentage points, and this year it cost me 0.2 percentage points. You might ask why I calculate my investment returns and compare them to a benchmark.  The short answer is to check whether I’m doing anything wrong that is costing me money.  Back when I was picking my own stocks, I chose a sensible benchmark in advance, and after a decade this showed me that apart from some wild luck in 1999, the work I did poring over annual reports was a waste.  Index investing is a better plan. The next question is why I keep calculating my investment re...