If we had the following, we could create a spreadsheet and tell you exactly how much you could spend each year in retirement. The current value of all your assets How the value of each asset will change year by year How much cash will be wanted/needed each year We can get reasonably close to #1. So far so good. #2 includes not only your investments, but also your real estate and any other item that shows up on your balance sheet. We’ve misplaced our crystal ball, so unless yo

My next read will be Emily Guy Birken’s The 5 Years Before You Retire: Retirement Planning When You Need It the Most. Not 30 years. Not 6 months. What do you need to know and do if your timeline for retirement is roughly 5 years out? If you would like to get your own copy and read along with me, please let me know! Sometimes we get people who come into our office and say, “I just retired! I’d like to talk about what I need to do.” It’s not uncommon that what they need to do i

Perkins offers one final charge, and a summary of his book: “Chase memorable life experiences, give money to your kids when they can best use it, donate money to charity while you’re still alive. That’s the way to live life.” Perkins admits, “I’ve given you an impossible task: to die with zero.” While he would like for everyone to perfectly optimize for this, he knows there are too many unknown variables for each individual, and he is okay if nobody does this perfectly. In hi

Between the years 1800 and 2000, roughly 15 billion people were born. Consider how different the world would be if the following 0.00000000004% of those 15 billion had not been born. Adolf Hitler Joseph Stalin Mao Zedong Gavrilo Princip Thomas Edison Bill Gates Martin Luther King As we read in chapter 6 regarding tail events, there are a very small number of things that have an outsized impact. This is true with financial markets, and as we study the history of investing, we