Cheesehead:
First grats on having the guts to put it out there.
My investments have also kind of sucked this year and it makes me question similar ideas.
There's also a ton of great suggestions of how to get decent returns at low costs and probably any of them would over the long run get you to your 3% swr.
I see your problem as different. You mentioned early in your DW gets nervous when the account goes down. That's a huge problem... If your motication is to never see it go down you're either falling for a ponzi scheme or you're getting way less than 3%/yr.
So you have to get your DW to understand that. I know easier said than done.
Second... The entire financial industry is based on toll bridge transactions. You walk around with a million bucks asking people if they can help you with it and they will be the nicest person in the world. It's 99% BS. So you have to look at your 1m as a historically safe 30-40k/yr job that you don't have to work at. So the way to calculate the value of a financial professional is to subtract their cost from 30k/year... Not from 1M.
My thought is never to pay more than about .3%. If it's more I'd rather pay someone hourly. It's statistically impossible for an FA to beat the market by 1.5% annually with near 0 volatility. If the FA is offering other services... Those should likely be per hour on demand.
It's way easier for them to change a fee and convince you why that's so cheap and how safe you'll feel and how much happier you'll be because you're not worrying anymore. But would you cut your pay in half at work to not worry about how to spend your income? I sure wouldn't.
The most you should pay for total management is probably around 3k/year. That should include taxes, estate planning, investment advice... Anything that involves managing that 1m. More than that and the costs eat into your income so much they can't overcome the impact.
Third... You are approaching your investment income stream based on need and not what it can do. Just because you need a smooth 30k/year from 1m doesn't mean the market will give it to you
. So really you have to consider volitility and flexibility which are personal choices.
Personally in targeting something like this:
33% VTI
33% VXUS
34% BND
That has about a 2.4% yield right now which is most of the way to 30k. Of course the market could drop 50% next year or next month
or it could double next year.
The other thing I'm doing is keeping 2 years in cash in ally returning 1%. I like this more than current short term bond funds. My rationale is if the market tanks I have 2 years to live worry free which is historically fairly safe. You can extend that to 3 or 4 and use it to get your DW less nervous. So lets say you have 900k, you can still get around 22k/year in dividends fairly reliably and now you have 3 years of cash.
If you get to year two and the market is still crashed you can then give yourself 1 year to find a replacement for the caahflow you need... Even if it means getting a job. If it gets worse than that I guess we can all hang out together on the bread line talking about the failed theory of SWR.
So I think
1) give yourself a time buffer to help your DW rest easy and not look so closely at returns
2) put a hard cap on what % of your 30-40k income you're willing to pay anyone to keep the rest
3) find the simplest investment strategy you feel comfortable with and then forget about it except once a year
4) pay hourly for tax, estate, legal advice but only after you come here and get it for free
Good luck!
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