Finally got my copy of Lucia's book. I think his buckets are a very useful mindset for retirement.
Lucia sure seems to like annuities and sure seems to feel we all need personal financial advisors. This alone would make him suspect on this board, yet he is received in a surprisingly generous way around here!
I am playing around with some pretend models as to how I might implement 3 buckets and had some questions:
1. Wellesley seems like a great bucket 2 vehicle to me. Or is it too aggressive (40:60)?
2. I am confused as to how much play he advises in bucket 2. On the one hand, he suggest simplistically that you empty bucket 2 after you deplete bucket 1, total 14 years. Then he backs off and says, well you can tap bucket 2 to troll for some bargains after a downturn in stocks, but don't literally deplete bucket 2; or you can prune back bucket 3 in order to shore up bucket 2 during an upturn.
My intuition is that if you are a bucket-lover, you'd do well to just tweak bucket 2 here and there, but basically leave it intact - maybe allow yourself 1 years expenses worth of bargain hunting money play with, but otherwise keep it loaded at the 6-7 year level more or less.
3. His rationale for using a financial advisor is to present complicated tax situations, tracking of managers in active mutual funds, surveillance of rebalancing, etc. Yeah, yeah. Would you agree that this is bogus for most of us who get it, and primarily use index funds?