VPW - Best Withdrawal Calculator I've seen to date.....

[Lsbcal]

Quote:

Originally Posted by longinvest Hi, Cut-Throat invited me to join this thread. I've been reading some of the latest posts, but I haven't read the entire thread, yet. I'll try to answer some of the questions in my next few posts.

Hi Longinvest, I like your VPW creation. I read your posts on Bogleheads and was impressed that you were very open minded about suggestions.

[longinvest]

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Originally Posted by Lsbcal Perhaps I should have said "a financial nightmare". To me having the real value of my portfolio cut in half 7 years from now would be very upsetting. Particularly since at that point I would not know where the bottom is going to be.

For retirements starting in 1966, there was simply no place to hide, even if one knew the future! One would have lost near half his portfolio, whether he used a constant-dollar withdrawal, VPW, or a constant-percentage withdrawal.

Both stocks and bonds significantly lagged inflation. Even keeping it in cash wasn't an escape from the inflation blood-bath! As for TIPS, they didn't even exist.

Worse: Buying a nominal Single-Premium Immediate Annuity (SPIA) would have been a disaster! As for inflation-adjusted SPIAs, I don't think they even existed at that point.

As for today, I don't know what the future has in store for us. VPW is a plan for spending a portfolio using market-adjusted withdrawals, based on a retirement horizon and an asset allocation. It's probably not the best of plans for our exact future (hard to know in advance), but it is intended as a robust yet simple plan.

[longinvest]

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Originally Posted by Huston55 Or, you could use one of the other many variable withdrawal methodologies. VPW is only one of them. And, as Cut-Throat and others have pointed out, VPW is designed to 'deplete your portfolio.' So, if that's not for you, another variable withdrawal methodology is probably better for you.

As I explained somewhere on the Bogleheads forums, if you don't want to distribute your extra wealth during your lifetime, and enjoy the process, you can simply set VPW's target depletion age to 120 years old. By then, even your grandchildren should be in their 60s, so if you survive to 120 and you don't leave a legacy, it shouldn't matter too much. If you die before 120, you'll leave a respectable legacy.

Why chose a more complex plan, when a simpler one is good enough?

[longinvest]

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Originally Posted by Zorba What is the equation that is used for VPW? You have a return (based on historical returns and asset allocation) and you have an investment period (a rough estimate of longevity). Is VPW using something like an annuity payment equation like this?: Annuity Due Payment - PV

Yes, VPW is based on a simple bare-bone annuity payment formula. It uses the asset allocation to determine a portfolio growth trend (which is NOT a prediction of future return from the time of retirement) to use in the formula.

There's nothing really new in VPW, except maybe:
1- the choice of a fixed growth trend based on asset allocation. (The "fixed" part is also very important to make sure not to hurt the portfolio in bad times),
2- the use of a retiree-specific target depletion age (instead of a fixed 30-year depletion target),
3- the availability of a free back-testing spreadsheet with two data sets: U.S. (1871-2013) and Canada (1970-2013).

[Lsbcal]

Quote:

Originally Posted by longinvest For retirements starting in 1966, there was simply no place to hide, even if one knew the future! One would have lost near half his portfolio, whether he used a constant-dollar withdrawal, VPW, or a constant-percentage withdrawal. Both stocks and bonds significantly lagged inflation. Even keeping it in cash wasn't an escape from the inflation blood-bath! As for TIPS, they didn't even exist....

This is OT and I'm reluctant to go into too much detail because I think you'll agree we want to focus on VPW.

I'll just add that I'm not a pure buy-hold investor. In the 1975 we bought our first house in the Bay Area. That real estate portfolio benefited from inflation. But focusing just on stocks/bonds/cash, moving out of stocks and more into short term bonds would have been much better comparatively. Real returns for 3 year Treasuries were negative in some of the 1970's (as low as -4% in 1977) but not nearly as bad as stocks. Just some thoughts.

[longinvest]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lsbcal This is OT and I'm reluctant to go into too much detail because I think you'll agree we want to focus on VPW. I'll just add that I'm not a pure buy-hold investor. In the 1975 we bought our first house in the Bay Area. That real estate portfolio benefited from inflation. But focusing just on stocks/bonds/cash, moving out of stocks and more into short term bonds would have been much better comparatively. Real returns for 3 year Treasuries were negative in some of the 1970's (as low as -4% in 1977) but not nearly as bad as stocks. Just some thoughts.

OT

You're most probably right that one could have switched money into directly-owned real estate. Talk about some awesome market timing!

I was a child, at that time, so I wasn't aware of any of this.

/OT

[Lsbcal]

We were young and had to live somewhere.
I don't want to overstate my skills.

[longinvest]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lsbcal Hi Longinvest, I like your VPW creation. I read your posts on Bogleheads and was impressed that you were very open minded about suggestions.

Thanks. Feel free to suggest improvements if you think that the spreadsheet presentation is not intuitive. It is difficult to find the right balance; there is so much data available to show, but it would overwhelm new users.

The nice thing about the spreadsheet is that it should be easy to use, for new users. But, it can also be modified by spreadsheet and financial wizards, not afraid of complexity, to show any additional data they seek.

[Lsbcal]

I would suggest showing real spending and real portfolio balance on the summary spreadsheet, not nominal. See my post on this today.

[FUEGO]

Hey LongInvest,

I've been enjoying the VPW tool immensely. I thought you might enjoy a tweak I added to give me confidence intervals. I'm down with "living stochasticly" and don't mind a bit of variability to outcome as long as I know the odds are in my favor (or maybe I embrace the randomness of life better than others that thing they can erroneously control the future ).

I set up a range of confidence intervals showing what different percentiles of withdrawals look like throughout all the years of the model. The percentiles I used include min, 5%, 10%, 25%, 50%, 75%, 90%, 95%, and max.

So I can say that the 5th percentile withdrawal in year 10 is $37,398 and 95% of the withdrawals for year 10 are higher than that. The 50th percentile, for example, is $78,362, and 50% of the withdrawals for year 10 are higher than that.

The purpose of looking at the percentiles for the result are to gauge just how bad the "worst case" might be. It gets away from the concept of "portfolio failures" (like in firecalc when your portfolio goes to zero) and gets to looking at the question of "how bad is bad?" if we end up on one of the model run years where investments did very poorly.

I can forward you my thrown together modified version of the VPW spreadsheet if you want to see an example of what I'm talking about.

[longinvest]

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Originally Posted by Lsbcal I would suggest showing real spending and real portfolio balance on the summary spreadsheet, not nominal. See my post on this today.

This data is shown in details on the "Path" sheet.

I personally think that looking at inflation-adjusted* data is misleading, because CPI is much more volatile than how inflation is felt by us. *(Even if the spreadsheet says "inflation", it's actually a CPI-adjusted amount. In economics, CPI is an indirect measure of inflation).

My salary is in nominal dollars. It doesn't adjust every month. While it adjusts yearly, adjustments sometimes lag CPI and sometimes are ahead of CPI.

Looking at withdrawals in nominal dollars is really how one gets to live through it. We live, everyday, in nominal dollars. It's the cost of goods that goes up. Sometimes (often) we can soften the blow of inflation for a while.

What's important to worry about is the longer-term trend of the cost of living, and whether withdrawals are able to keep up with it. That's why the VPW spreadsheet shows both withdrawals (blue line) and the cost of goods that could be bought by the CPI-adjusted initial withdrawal amount (red line).

Going back to your example of a 1966 retiree. In nominal dollars, he never saw a 50% loss in his portfolio (or withdrawals). Actually, had he used a 50/50 portfolio, he would have barely seen any significant reduction in portfolio value before age 90, even while taking withdrawals all along. Starting with $1M, the lowest portfolio value was $830K in January 1975. Not so bad, psychologically!

[Cut-Throat]

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Originally Posted by longinvest Looking at withdrawals in nominal dollars is really how one gets to live through it. We live, everyday, in nominal dollars. It's the cost of goods that goes up. Sometimes (often) we can soften the blow of inflation for a while. What's important to worry about is the longer-term trend of the cost of living, and whether withdrawals are able to keep up with it. That's why the VPW spreadsheet shows both withdrawals (blue line) and the cost of goods that could be bought by the CPI-adjusted initial withdrawal amount (red line).

I completely agree with Longinvest on this one. Nominal Dollars are more Important. You have more control over inflation than you think! I lived through this period of the 70s and 80s, and while prices were rising, it was not as dramatic living it than the numbers indicate.

[longinvest]

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Originally Posted by FUEGO Hey LongInvest, I've been enjoying the VPW tool immensely.

Thanks.

Quote:

Originally Posted by FUEGO I thought you might enjoy a tweak I added to give me confidence intervals. I'm down with "living stochasticly" and don't mind a bit of variability to outcome as long as I know the odds are in my favor (or maybe I embrace the randomness of life better than others that thing they can erroneously control the future ). I set up a range of confidence intervals showing what different percentiles of withdrawals look like throughout all the years of the model. The percentiles I used include min, 5%, 10%, 25%, 50%, 75%, 90%, 95%, and max. So I can say that the 5th percentile withdrawal in year 10 is $37,398 and 95% of the withdrawals for year 10 are higher than that. The 50th percentile, for example, is $78,362, and 50% of the withdrawals for year 10 are higher than that.

I had something like that, in some version of the spreadsheet, until I realized that there are 20 percentiles (5, 10,...,100), and for a typical 35 year plan, this made for less than 2 withdrawals per percentile, on average!

OK, for a 60-year retirement, you increase the average to 3. But, that's not very helpful. I finally came to the conclusion that the most helpful was to show the median (50% percentile) and minimum withdrawals, in inflation-adjusted dollars.

I think that the backtesting graph is more helpful in visualizing low-withdrawal periods. Summary numbers (like percentiles) do not convey information about whether low-withdrawals are all together in a lump or spread out through all retirement. The graph shows this.

[Huston55]

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Originally Posted by longinvest As I explained somewhere on the Bogleheads forums, if you don't want to distribute your extra wealth during your lifetime, and enjoy the process, you can simply set VPW's target depletion age to 120 years old. By then, even your grandchildren should be in their 60s, so if you survive to 120 and you don't leave a legacy, it shouldn't matter too much. If you die before 120, you'll leave a respectable legacy. Why cho[o]se a more complex plan, when a simpler one is good enough?

Precisely. That's why I will use another tool, because: (1) I don't want to plan to deplete my portfolio and, (2) I don't want the wild fluctuations the VPW method can produce. And, using a 120 yo depletion age, as you suggested, simply mutes out the early spending advantage of VPW, which seems to be the primary attraction in the first place.

Instead of trying to modify VPW to meet my goals, I'll use a tool that is designed to meet them; one that: (1) plans on preserving a significant portion of my portfolio and, (2) that allows higher spending early in retirement but without the wild fluctuations of VPW.

I get that it's attractive to you, Cut-Throat, and perhaps many others; and that's a good thing - for you. But, as I noted in my previous post, if planning on portfolio depletion and wild withdrawal fluctuations is not to one's liking, then VPW is not the proper approach.

[longinvest]

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Originally Posted by Huston55 Instead of trying to modify VPW to meet my goals, I'll use a tool that is designed to meet them; one that: (1) plans on preserving a significant portion of my portfolio and, (2) that allows higher spending early in retirement but without the wild fluctuations of VPW. I get that it's attractive to you, Cut-Throat, and perhaps many others; and that's a good thing - for you. But, as I noted in my previous post, if planning on portfolio depletion and wild withdrawal fluctuations is not to one's liking, then VPW is not the proper approach.

Huston,

Of course, you are free to pick the withdrawal method that suits you. I was simply trying to explain a possible approach to using VPW for those concerned with ultra-long longevity and bequest motives.

I should mention that I would not describe VPW withdrawals as widely fluctuating. Yes, VPW tries to deliver return-adjusted withdrawals to the retiree. But, it is up to the retiree to select an appropriate asset allocation to control the volatility of withdrawals.

In the default spreadsheet setup, I show the withdrawals on a 50/50 portfolio. For such a portfolio, withdrawals are quite stable (and usually increasing). Here is the sequence of withdrawals on a $1M portfolio for a retiree starting a 35-year retirement in 1966, one of the worst years, ever, to retire in the U.S.:

$48,405 (1966)
$46,458
$48,867
$50,680
$47,278
$50,391
$53,722
$60,414
$54,445
$47,664
$56,513
$61,736
$63,192
$68,164
$72,386
$81,832 (1981)
...

I do not see any wild fluctuation there. There are fluctuations (due to 50% stocks), but that's to be expected from any variable withdrawal method. You can easily reduce volatility further by increasing the allocation to bonds, at the cost of lower long-term returns (and smaller withdrawals due to VPW's calculations).

[Lsbcal]

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Originally Posted by longinvest This data is shown in details on the "Path" sheet.

Yes it is but many using this Excel file will only focus on the VPW sheet. Many do not want to explore the ins/outs of Excel. I had to spend some time to understand the relationships between sheets. Don't get me wrong though, you have done an excellent job on this.

Quote:

I personally think that looking at inflation-adjusted* data is misleading, because CPI is much more volatile than how inflation is felt by us. *(Even if the spreadsheet says "inflation", it's actually a CPI-adjusted amount. In economics, CPI is an indirect measure of inflation).

Good point as Cut-Throat has pointed out inflation to the retiree may be quite different then the CPI. But I do strongly feel I need to apply some sort of inflation adjustment after several years. I may be more sensitive to travel and medical inflation but much less sensitive to home and commute inflation. Tough to quantify.

Quote:

My salary is in nominal dollars. It doesn't adjust every month. While it adjusts yearly, adjustments sometimes lag CPI and sometimes are ahead of CPI.

In the 1970's you would be getting 10% raises but the taxation was not inflation adjusted so you were pushed into ever higher tax brackets and/or your inflation raise was reduced a lot. This was by design. Government was getting a bigger share of the pie. You had to live this to appreciate it. I think modest inflation is OK now with inflation indexation of taxes

Quote:

What's important to worry about is the longer-term trend of the cost of living, and whether withdrawals are able to keep up with it. That's why the VPW spreadsheet shows both withdrawals (blue line) and the cost of goods that could be bought by the CPI-adjusted initial withdrawal amount (red line).

I am just suggesting that it is easier on the viewer to not have to compare the red and blue lines. Maybe just add a line that shows how the spending is maintaining its buying power or not.

Quote:

Going back to your example of a 1966 retiree. In nominal dollars, he never saw a 50% loss in his portfolio (or withdrawals). Actually, had he used a 50/50 portfolio, he would have barely seen any significant reduction in portfolio value before age 90, even while taking withdrawals all along. Starting with $1M, the lowest portfolio value was $830K in January 1975. Not so bad, psychologically!

I revised the AA to be 50/50 (US stock/foreign stock/bond = 30/20/50). I now see that the 1975 portfolio is $759K nominal (or $499K CPI adjusted). Still seems to be a big hit to me. So somewhat worse numbers then you mention, not sure why. I think the real issue here is how much one wants to emphasize CPI adjustment numbers versus nominal. I'm still not convinced of the nominal argument.

[Cut-Throat]

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Originally Posted by Huston55 (2) I don't want the wild fluctuations the VPW method can produce.

In all probability, VPW will have less fluctuations than someone attempting to employ a 4% SWR adjusted for inflation. Once a bear market hits, they will naturally 'pull in their horns' and reduce spending on a level that will be far more severe than VPW calls for. It's human nature. Especially for the LBYM types on this forum.

So, the question is: Do you want a Withdrawal Plan that you can actually employ and stick to with confidence, or do you want to 'Fly by the seat of your pants'. I don't believe anyone has stuck to the 4% adjusted for inflation method. I am retired and am actually employing VPW.

[photoguy]

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Originally Posted by Cut-Throat In all probability, VPW will have less fluctuations than someone attempting to employ a 4% SWR adjusted for inflation. Once a bear market hits, they will naturally 'pull in their horns' and reduce spending on a level that will be far more severe than VPW calls for. It's human nature. Especially for the LBYM types on this forum.

This is just conjecture. However, if one actually follows SWR then it will have no fluctuations the majority of the time.

Quote:

So, the question is: Do you want a Withdrawal Plan that you can actually employ and stick to with confidence, or do you want to 'Fly by the seat of your pants'. I don't believe anyone has stuck to the 4% adjusted for inflation method. I am retired and am actually employing VPW.

One issue I have with this thread (not with VPW) is that it is titled the "best withdrawal calculator". This raises the question what is meant by "best". If you think about withdrawals in retirement there are really multiple objectives that one may want to optimize:

- failure rate
- volatility of withdrawals
- size of legacy
- amount withdrawn
- minimum portfolio size during retirement (lowest portfolio drawdown)

These objectives are contradictory and you cannot have one method that is the best on all of the criteria (haha raised this point earlier). VPW is at one end of the spectrum of withdrawal methods with 0% failure rate and higher volatility whereas Trinity SWR trades an increase in failure rate to achieve 0 volatility.

One method is not "better" than the other unless you value one objective more than the other. And of course there could be solutions in-between those two that yield a better trade-off for any given individual.

[samclem]

VPW and other "% of end of year balance" withdrawal methods >do< have failures, it's just a different failure mode than the "x% plus inflation" withdrawal method (which fail as "now you are flat broke").

The failure mode of VPW and other "% of end of year balance" withdrawal methods is when/if the prescribed withdrawal does not meet the required minimum spending of the retiree. With these systems, this generally happens if the annual withdrawal percentage is too high (e.g. if it exceeds the real growth of the portfolio for too long). A "% of end-of-year balance" model that projects withdrawals in "future-year dollars" (each of which has been diminished by inflation) rather than "present year dollars" will go some distance toward masking this failure mode. In addition, a withdrawal method that accelerates early withdrawal percentages also increases the likelihood that the prescribed allowable withdrawal amounts (as a percentage of the portfolio) in later years will not keep pace with inflation. If you injure that golden goose, she lays fewer eggs. This is particularly troublesome if you're counting on the wounded goose to lay eggs at a fairly precise rate--based on other species of geese feeding in different pastures with different weather a long time ago. Because we are counting heavily on those eggs well into the future, it seems prudent instead to take good care of the goose and make allowances for the case that your single goose, for the coming decades, might lay eggs at a rate significantly different than those other geese did.

I do intend to use a "% of year end portfolio" withdrawal method.

[Chester_A._Riley]

I have been fascinated by the VPW for the past several weeks and I have made numerous runs using a number of spending paths. The look-back feature is quite instructive. I think this an essential tool for a retiree drawing on a portfolio.

Also, the comment by Cut-Throat is spot on.

Quote:

In all probability, VPW will have less fluctuations than someone attempting to employ a 4% SWR adjusted for inflation. Once a bear market hits, they will naturally 'pull in their horns' and reduce spending on a level that will be far more severe than VPW calls for. It's human nature. Especially for the LBYM types on this forum.

I have looked back at my own experience, with nearly seven years in retirement, and my varying 'seat of the pants' withdrawals & spending (and investment 'tweeks') inadvertently track the markets rather closely. I think that using VPW would have assisted immensely.

This spreadsheet will certainly be added to my future financial planning, (but of course one should never be unprepared to adjust spending and withdrawals as demanded by portfolio growth and depletion.)

Again, thanks for a great tool.