cardude
Full time employment: Posting here.
- Joined
- Feb 21, 2006
- Messages
- 599
This came off the Motley Fool Berkshire board. Think it would work? What about having 25% cash and 75% Berkshire instead of using leverage like in this example, and only selling the Berkshire stock when it is not undervalued and using the cash to live off of when it is undervalued. Only rebalance when the price is right as well. If I was 25% cash it would last me about 10 years. I wonder if that's long enough to ride out a nasty bear market?
Here's an interesting calculation for you:
Imagine a portfolio of nothing but Berkshire for funding a retirement,
purchased today at $92,000 per A share.
If the price is low, you don't want to sell---you're willing to use
a tiny bit of margin for your living expenses so that you can wait, and
your next sale as after a new high. You sell enough to pay off the
small margin amount. Presumably a year or so of living expenses is a
small fraction of your portfolio's value, so the margin level will be small.
If you can't wait for a new all-time high, you at least promise
yourself to wait till a new one-year high.
(actually Berkshire tends to hit long strings of new all-time highs, so
in the past it has statistically been worthwhile to wait till it drops
3% from its all time high before selling, but I digress).
Further, you're going to keep working till the stock hits $130,000.
No sales or withdrawals before then, in other words---just hold your breath.
In this scenario, I estimate you could withdraw 10% of the original
dollar amount every year for the next 30 years and still have more
dollars worth of stock than you started with. Well, with a 99.3%
probability in my simulations. How's that for a safe withdrawal rate?
At a nice round $10,000 per A share withdrawal rate (never increasing
with the portfolio size or inflation), or 10.87% of initial portfolio
value, you would have over a 98% probability of a higher dollar balance
in each of years 10, 20, and 30.
This is a very long and involved simulation that I've described before,
so I won't go into the boring details. Suffice to say that the
assumptions going into it are not crazy: I assume that Berkshire
gradually loses its ability to outperform the broad US market, and that
the range of discounts to IV is somewhat broader than historically seen"
Here's an interesting calculation for you:
Imagine a portfolio of nothing but Berkshire for funding a retirement,
purchased today at $92,000 per A share.
If the price is low, you don't want to sell---you're willing to use
a tiny bit of margin for your living expenses so that you can wait, and
your next sale as after a new high. You sell enough to pay off the
small margin amount. Presumably a year or so of living expenses is a
small fraction of your portfolio's value, so the margin level will be small.
If you can't wait for a new all-time high, you at least promise
yourself to wait till a new one-year high.
(actually Berkshire tends to hit long strings of new all-time highs, so
in the past it has statistically been worthwhile to wait till it drops
3% from its all time high before selling, but I digress).
Further, you're going to keep working till the stock hits $130,000.
No sales or withdrawals before then, in other words---just hold your breath.
In this scenario, I estimate you could withdraw 10% of the original
dollar amount every year for the next 30 years and still have more
dollars worth of stock than you started with. Well, with a 99.3%
probability in my simulations. How's that for a safe withdrawal rate?
At a nice round $10,000 per A share withdrawal rate (never increasing
with the portfolio size or inflation), or 10.87% of initial portfolio
value, you would have over a 98% probability of a higher dollar balance
in each of years 10, 20, and 30.
This is a very long and involved simulation that I've described before,
so I won't go into the boring details. Suffice to say that the
assumptions going into it are not crazy: I assume that Berkshire
gradually loses its ability to outperform the broad US market, and that
the range of discounts to IV is somewhat broader than historically seen"