The 4% withdrawal rule was established as a safe way to approach retirement withdrawals from your accounts and avoid depleting your portfolio too early.
If you have read retirement articles or books, you must be familiar with the rules by now.
To understand the danger of the 4% withdrawal rule, you must understand what happens in retirement and be fully aware of which camp you fall into. Here are the possible retirement options:
- Pension Plan: Your retirement income is covered based on a percentage of your earned income and years of contributions. Those with a full pension plan don’t have to worry about any 4% withdrawal rule. It’s the gold-plated retirement plan.
- Defined Contribution Plan: Your retirement contributions are matched by your company but investing it is usually left to you to manage. A fee advisor could help you out if you are stuck here.
- Personal Savings: Like the defined contribution plan, you are left alone to manage everything. How much you use in retirement is a very important factor. This is your money in your RRSP, TFSA or non-registered account.
You might be retired but still work part-time to keep busy and earn an income, but how do you know if you don’t have to work? How much do you need to have? Is the 4% withdrawal rule safe?
Avoid outliving your retirement portfolio!
DANGER of the 4 Percent Rule
What I find missing from the 4% withdrawal rule is that it is not stress-tested against market crashes and a low interest-rate environment. How many soon-to-be retirees had to keep working in 2009 because their portfolios got decimated?
If the 4 percent rule is the rule of thumb, what can you do to protect yourself against a market crash? Do you simply move your equity investment to bonds? If so, you lose the potential equity market appreciation that the 4% withdrawal rule is expected to cover to avoid running out of money.
If your portfolio doesn’t grow, your 4% will decrease. Retirement needs have a fixed minimum of funds, not just a portfolio’s percentage value.
Avoid the 4 percent rule
Considerable equity exposure can work in retirement. I have seen it, and readers have also told me about it.
They make it work by investing in income-producing assets. That’s why the cornerstone of my retirement strategy is Dividend Income, not a 4% withdrawal rule.
Let’s be clear that I think there is a big difference between getting a 4% dividend income versus withdrawing 4%. Even when you assume the initial amount of money is the same, the dividend income doesn’t require you to sell any investments, whereas the 4% retirement withdrawal rule might.
It’s true that both reduce your network by 4%, but not in the same way, and the consequences of the action are very different for future income or growth.
As soon as you have to sell investments, you become at the mercy of the markets. Let’s assume you are 70, and you have a portfolio with 70% in a bond index and 30% in equities. With both of the indexes paying less than 3% in income, you have to make up for the shortfall by selling.
Every time you sell, you reduce the future income you might earn. As you get older, you earn less but shift more into bonds if you don’t believe in holding equities. By the time you are 80, you spent 10 years selling 1% of your portfolio to cover the shortfall of the income.
The only way to avoid that is to have more savings so that the 3% or even 2% satisfies your income needs or that you have another source of income. There are so many ways the 4% withdrawal rule can play out, but in the end, you always end up selling a portion of your investment to have the money, which consequently impacts future growth for however many years you might need, which is also unknown.
Stress-Free Retirement Is About Income
As you can see, successful retirement is all about income. Even the young retirees have many sources of income.
Early retirement is a form of Financial Freedom, but “normal” retirement is no different. Rather than being self-employed or having businesses that generate the income feeding your financial freedom, you have a portfolio to do just that.
How much you need is a different but relatively easy question to answer – check my retirement number.
I believe the 4% withdrawal rule is a good guideline to help with calculation, but there are major risks in applying this rule blindly. If you can find a way to need less than 4% of your portfolio in retirement, you are doing well by restraining your spending, but you also need to find a way to ensure your portfolio is doing its work.
90% of my portfolio holdings increase their dividends annually. Not only can I keep up with inflation, but I also get a raise!
Retirement’s Unknown Variables
Life expectancy is a big problem in retirement as we can’t predict when our last day will be.
The experts got it wrong for the major pension plans in Canada as many were, and still are, underfunded.
Furthermore, a low-interest rate market compounded the effect of longer age expectancy. If you take money out, how do you think you can sustain your retirement in those conditions?
Risks when investing are attributed to market fluctuations. If the market fluctuations don’t affect your income, which is the case with dividends, then what’s the risk? The risk becomes inherent to corporations and their ability to stay in business and make profits.
Even in 2009, only some blue-chip companies stopped paying dividends and some others stopped increasing their dividends, but many continued not only to pay but also to increase their dividends, even when the shares were trading at a discount. In short, the dividend income was safe, while the portfolio value fluctuated temporarily.
Be careful what investment strategy you choose to grow your wealth, as it might not satisfy your retirement needs unless you have more than you think you might need. You need to stress test your portfolio with the following.
- Market fluctuation at different stages (1st year, 3rd year, 7th year and so forth)
- Low interest rates (which usually impact bonds)
- Percentage of dividend cuts (depending on your investments, it’s important to test this)
After you stress test your retirement plan, you should devise your own withdrawal rule.