Re: Great Boom Ahead by Harry Dent
I read Den't book, and though it was good. OTOH, I do not believe in "single thread" planning. Dent's scenario might come to pass, and it might not. IMHO, the thing to do is to try to identify the N most likely scenarios, and have some kind of a plan to deal with each plausible possibility. Even this is not easy to do, of course, as plans are most often ruined by unpredictable paradigm shifts rather than the inability to project established trends into the future.
One technique that might help a little is to adjust your portfolio withdrawal rate each year, or every couple of years, based on market conditions, rather than draw a straight 4% (or whatever) of initial portfolio value adjusted yearly and forever for inflation. Various ways of doing this have been discussed on the forum. Also, some examples are given in the books by Henry Hebeler and by Stein and DeMuth (both of which books are quite good, in my view). Also in ESRBob's new book (which is quite good, also!).
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