Nords, thanks for the bit of a reality check about your ILs living on fixed investments (as well as the reminder that stocks have always performed better than any other investment over a decade---here's to 2009-2019! Never been one for New Year's Eve, but 2009 can't get here soon enough at this point!), but are your ILs really struggling---or just being overly cautious, as older people can become? My parents would go on travel tours where the older people had the money for the all-inclusive trip, but would still sneak food into their purses and pockets for snacks that weren't part of the deal!). And if someone has a high enough net worth and a low enough SWR, wouldn't it be (theoretically, at least) possible to live on the fixed income investments?
FD, yeah, I agree that 1.5% is pretty paltry, but I think we all know that any friend of W2R would be smart enough to at least be in muni bonds or CDs paying a (slightly) higher amount? And while I would be thrilled with a 20% return of the market, if at this point I/we all have lost over 40%, aren't we still behind over 21.5% (not getting the 1.5 percent of the Frank's checking account and still being down the 20% that the past months have brought)
YrsToGo, with your comment about the tortoise and the hare....didn't the tortoise win the race by being slow and steady? Yet you commented that "Cash sitting in a bank account may feel very good today, but it has about a zero percent chance of getting me to the finish line 60 years hence." So---maybe in this crazy new economy, we need to rewrite the fable and let the hare win....albeit after many sprains and dislocations and time-outs?