Systematic Withdrawals: a year at a time or monthly?

[Options]

Quote:

Originally Posted by audreyh1 We pull out our entire annual amount at the beginning of the year. This is mostly drawn out of distributions most of which were paid out in Dec of the prior year. The withdrawal goes into a separate high yield savings account. We draw monthly off that savings account for monthly expenses. I never wanted to deal with the complications of monthly withdrawals directly from the retirement fund and the volatility of the fund during the year. Our X% of retirement fund calculation is done once a year - whatever the fund is on Jan 1, and that's what we withdraw. In fact - we keep at least two years of cash available in the savings account and some other very short term investments, so theoretically we could wait out a very bad market year if we needed to.

+1
My plan precisely. Call it laziness, but I don't want to deal with the complications/recordkeeping of monthly withdrawals either. I intend to sweep dividends/cap gains to a MM account throughout the year. If that doesn't fund the next year's expenses, I'll use the annual rebalancing exercise (in December) to make up the difference.

This year, I will also being working out the mechanics of tIRA to ROTH conversions until age 70.

[Alan]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Options +1 My plan precisely. Call it laziness, but I don't want to deal with the complications/recordkeeping of monthly withdrawals either. I intend to sweep dividends/cap gains to a MM account throughout the year. If that doesn't fund the next year's expenses, I'll use the annual rebalancing exercise (in December) to make up the difference. This year, I will also being working out the mechanics of tIRA to ROTH conversions until age 70.

+2

The first couple of years of retirement I had Penfed 5 year CDs maturing which topped up the dividends and cap distributions, since then I've been using our large IBond stash to both supplement the dividends and pay taxes on ROTH conversions.

[seraphim]

DW has RMDs we schedule for automatic distribution from Vanguard account. Chose a date in April because of the 'sell in May' mentality. Lol. The date can be changed at any time, if I think it's necessary. We also take a small amount out of taxable accounts in January or February. We don't collect dividends in a separate account, but let everything reinvest. We sell shares of whatever is doing the best at the time, whether it is an equity or fixed income. We also have a large cash holding in SV accounts at the moment, which I can draw from if stocks and bonds simultaneously crash.

This year, there was a big sell off first of January, so I waited until indexes rose again in February to withdraw from the taxable account. Probably wasn't a big deal, but...

Call it market timing if you wish.