Did you retire in 2000?

[walkinwood]

Hello,
Those that retired in 2000 have had to deal with a tough bear market in the first couple of years.

How did you manage? Did you stick with your calculated Safe Initial Withdrawal rate with inflation adjustments?

Or did you improvise? If so, what did you do?
What was your planned withdrawal strategy and did you modify it?

I would really appreciate you sharing your experience since it will help those like me planning to retire early in the next few years. My target is 2010 at 50.

Thank you.
c.

 

[audreyh1]

What I did was appropriate for someone is able to retire because of a "lump sum".

I retired in 1999. I was able to retire because I owned a large amount of one company stock. I sold most of it, and then averaged it into the market over the next couple of years. This turned out to be a good move, as the market kept going down the whole time I DCA'd in. It was a good thing I picked two years as the interval, not one as normally is suggested. In fact I stretched it out to 2.5 years, as by late 2001 things continued to look pretty bleak!

I also did not withdraw from the stock portion of the portfolio at the time. In addition to the portfolio, we had set aside some extra funds in cash for short term living expenses. We knew that we wanted to travel quite a bit the first couple of years, so we had set aside "extra" for this. Having these extra monies meant that we did not feel financial pressure from the stock market downturn but were able to go ahead and do the things we looked forward to.

Now, if I had already owned a set of mutual funds (instead of investing a lump sum in the market), I would have had a different strategy. All I could have done at the time was to make sure our investment portfolio was balanced with the set of investments I considered appropriate for retirement, with perhaps a few years living expenses set aside in cash.

Hope this helps.

Audrey