FWIW, he does address the case where an investor sticks with the "buckets" and does not rebalance annually:Regarding Kitces, he is a smart guy but all his article proves is that if you rebalance every year then your results are the same as those of someone who rebalances every year. QED.
(Note the scale of the Y-axis of the charts is not the same).In fact, the chart below shows the results of just using the decision-rules approach without rebalancing along the way. As the results reveal, it is worse – so much worse, that the portfolio barely has anything left at the end with the decision rules alone, while the outcome is drastically better with rebalancing because it actually buys equities during dips!
In other words, not only are the decision rules actually irrelevant once the portfolio is regularly rebalanced, but eliminating the rebalancing is so damaging that the decision rules alone actually lead to a worse outcome for the portfolio!
He goes on to explain why this happens: not buying equities as the decline happens hurts later recovery a lot. OTOH, if a person believes they can predict how long a future downturn can last and wants to try to size the buckets accordingly--I wish them good luck.
I can understand the desire to have a safe, stable bridge to the eventual SS checks. If this were important to me from a sleep-at-night perspective, I would probably favor the approach suggested by Independent:
Why do you "need" to have money in stocks to outpace 4, 7, 9, or 12 years of inflation?
In theory, laddered TIPS will stay even with inflation, why wouldn't that be good enough for this time period?
Some people have also mentioned that they will coordinate their SS benefit start to the market: if the market heads down after they are eligible for SS, they will start their checks in order to reduce the spending from their equities while their share prices are beaten down, which may help them recover faster when the market rebounds. But if equities climb, they'll delay starting their SS checks and benefit from the higher checks and greater longevity insurance, taking a little of the sting out of things when the equities do eventually fall.