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RE Attempt -- thanks so much for pulling these updated numbers together. It is interesting to see what looks like a material added benefit from the full RIP Portfolio in the past few years-- sometimes complexity does help? To answer your original question, the risk of coming inflation (and...

Nords, the electricity bills are definitely climbing -- doing my part to make the Northeast the next Florida. 45 degree sunny January days are pretty nice! Actually the glass studio is fairly energy efficient with double panes and cellular pleated shades, but my main heating is from a wood...

The Work Less Live More "Sandwich Portfolio" managed to eke out a .72% positive return in 2011. Funds, weights, returns and weighted return for 2011 are: VFINX sp500 20% 1.89% 0.38% VTMSX Txmgsmal 8% 1.22% 0.10% VGTSX Tot Int'...

Thx LOL! Yes the EMGX is new this year and with only a few million in assets it may or may not make it, but we can hope: it tracks DFEVX very nicely. Thx for the EWX and DGS -- with those in place it looks like the final nail is in -- that DFA, while well run of course, is expensive and...

The 'never-enoughness' worry at the start of ER is a huge issue among some of us - (I too have the German thing in my family.) I think as long as the numbers look pretty solid (yours do) there will never be much more you can do to lay off the risk of unknown future events. The only thing I can...

ReAttempt, Thanks for your inquiry -- Yes I am becoming more and more a fan of ETFs for long term investors -- main reasons not always cited are tax efficiency (no cap gains taxes being thrown off every year by the selling a mutual fund does for redemptions) and second, no penalty for being in...

New Performance Data for Clyatt Work Less Live More Portfolios Great thread. Can't resolve the DFA question -- there are lower-cost advisors out there who can get you access - Evanson Asset Mgmt charges about 2k a year -- but that may still be a high % of assets. There are definitely good ETFs...

Rambler -- ah yes, the college expenses! Actually that explains a lot about wanting to stay put a little longer. With our first one finishing off his first year in college I have a visceral understanding of what those big checks can do to the brokerage account balance --- even though it was all...

Rambler, I understand the desire for comfort -- who wouldn't want to live off 2% SWR if we could? But the desire for more and more safety margin in the SWR can become a way (an excuse?) to keep working long past when we might need to. I'm all for having a margin of error and extra cash lying...

Aside from being very into arts in High School, all I ever did during 25 years of college/work was go to art museums and soak up the gallery scene. Then when I hit ER, one of the ten items on my "To Do" list was to take some sculpture classes if for no other reason that it was one of those...

Nords caught wind of this and urged me to post this here. If anyone is in NY this weekend and likes art, you can join me and see what at least one happily ER'd person is doing 10 years in. I'll be showing several new sculptures at the PooL Art Fair during Armory Arts week. March 5,6,7 from 3 to...

MB,happy to restart this as a separate thread if there is more to dig into. The combinations found are unlikely to be flukes as I avoided extreme combinations and just looked at ways to combine all (except metals - personal bias- lumped it in with commodities as it doesn't pay interest) of the...

MB -- this is a valid concern, and thanks for raising it. Anyone using historical data to make investment decisions is at some level guilty of 'data mining'. But my own bias is that data mining is on its thinnest ice when it involves looking back through data on stocks to try to tease out...

2009 Performance for Work Less Live More Sandwich Portfolio Here's the full 2009 update for the Work Less Live More Sandwich Portfolio which is on page 190 of that book. 8 funds plus a money market. 2009 return was a gain of 22.2% This more or less counters the 20.3% loss in 2008...

Good thread, By "factor exposure" Bernstein means that certain factors (e.g. smallness or book-value ratio, a way of classifying something on a value-growth continuum) have been shown through repeated historical research to generate excess returns which most researchers agree accrue to the...

Great posts. Reads like people comparing notes after a battle. We don't seem to be hearing from any casualties, though. Wounded, sure, but I wonder if there were people who threw in the towel, sold all their stocks in a panic, and if they ever got back into equities this year. They might not...

Thx, Kevin for the correction on the Standard Deviation of the PP -- it is about the same as a good slice-and-dice portfolio. One concern I have is that 25% of the portfolio (the gold part) has gone from $32 per ounce in the regulated environment pre 1970s to $900 or so an ounce today, or a 30x...

Have been intrigued by Kevin's post and the Permanent Portfolio enough to do some digging. It is certainly an intriguing option, but most of its appeal may be a matter of timing: we've just come off a meltdown year (2008) so we're drawn to anything that survived that perfect storm year with a...

WLLM Sandwich Portfolio Performance: 2007, 2008 and ytd 2009 Thanks for your inquiry, and thanks REWahoo for pointing me to this question. I don't have the full Rational Investing Portfolio results as they need to be calculated for me by a research firm using proprietary databases (ie. it...

Envious of all you who've already filed and maybe even gotten a refund. I'm still waiting for one last &#@% K-1 from a limited partnership I'm in. I got into a bunch of exchange-listed pipeline master limited partnerships last year (I know, another dumb move, but I couldn't resist 10%...

Typically holding funds in a money market account has been considered 'cash'. They're also guaranteed by the feds now (I think it is the MM fund manager's choice to pay extra for that guarantee, but the big ones are in this program)

Agreed, All the studies that I have seen or used are built on total return, meaning capgains and dividends or yields on the various asset classes are included.

Ziggy, You've got a heavyweight agreeing with you that TIPS are a buy -- Bill Gross at Pimco is buying at these levels, but he is a trader. I agree -- I doubt you'll ever see real TIPS yields brush 4% again (they did for a little while when TIPS first came out and nobody quite understood or...

In a way, buying these annuities to guarantee ourselves a safe refuge or insurance from market gyrations is something like the financial institutions buying CDOs or bond default insurance from a company who itself was at risk of going belly up and not delivering the hoped-for insurance. Wait a...

Walkinwood, My feelings are that in your case I wouldn't go straight to the 5.2% withdrawal. You're in your first year of ER, things are in flux, budgets and expectations can be ratcheted around more easily, part time work can be taken on with fresh skill sets and contacts. The 95% Rule...