How much money do you think you would need to be able to retire?
It's a question that a lot of people have asked their financial advisers and it's one
that seems to have a different answer for just about every time it's asked.
And the reason for that is simple the amount of money that you need to be able to retire
depends entirely on how much money you think you can earn in retirement through interest
and dividends and maybe even a part-time job if that's your thing, and perhaps even more
importantly how much money you're actually going to need to survive in retirement.
And that number seems to change each and every time you ask as well because projections of
things like medical expenses change as time goes on.
And I'm sure those of you who are nearing retirement watching this video know medical
expenses just seem to be going through the roof, particularly for retirees.
But that doesn't really help us it doesn't give us a goal to strive for as we're going
through our working careers.
We may not be able to come up with an exact number that we'll need but can we come up
with something that's at least going to be close?
Well today I'm going to talk about something called the 4% rule and how it gives us that
goal to shoot for.
I'm also going to be talking about some other factors to keep in mind when you're using
this rule of thumb as well as some situations where you're going to want to avoid the 4%
rule in entirely.
Let's get started.
So what is the 4% rule?
It's a rule of thumb that's used to determine the amount of funds that you will withdraw
from a retirement account each year.
It's also sometimes called the safe withdrawal rate because the money you take out usually
consists mostly of interest and dividends, and thus your principal either stays the same
or goes down a little bit but not too much.
In fact in 1994 a financial advisor named William Bengan did an exhaustive study of
historical returns in the market focusing heavily on the severe Market crashes of the
great Depression and the early 1970s and concluded that even during those hard Times no historical
case existed where the safe withdrawal rate exhausted a retirement portfolio in less than
33 years.
And for most of us 33 years would easily cover our retirement.
The idea behind the rule is that once you have approximately 25 times your annual expenses
saved for retirement you should be able to retire with reasonable certainty that you
could survive until death on your savings.
Because at that point the amount that you take out for your annual expenses would be
approximately 4% of your retirement savings.
And when I say 4% of your retirement savings I mean your entire retirement savings anything
that's been earmarked to use only in retirement this includes 401ks IRAs and any other ways
you've saved a nest egg for retirement.
For example if you had $450,000 in your 401k and $50,000 personal IRA then you would have
$500,000 in all of your retirement accounts and your initial withdrawal on the first year
retirement would be 4% of that $500,000 or $20,000.
So some other factors that you're going to want to keep in mind when using the 4% rule
in addition to keeping an eye on your expenses, is to account for inflation.
The 4% rule believe it or not actually allows you to increase the amount you withdraw to
keep Pace with inflation.
You can account for this either by just setting a flat 2% increase to your withdrawals each
year which is the target inflation rate by the Federal Reserve or by just looking to
see what the inflation rate was for the current year and adjusting based off of that.
Now you might be wondering how this could possibly be I mean if you increase how much
you would withdraw to keep up with inflation won't you eventually run out of money?
It's a legitimate question but as it turns out no.
And it's because over the long term the market goes up.
Now there are a lot of numbers that are thrown around by financial advisors about how much
the market actually goes up I've heard anything from 6 to 10% a year on average.
I'm going to be conservative here and go with the 6% end of the scale.
So let's go back to the example I've been using in the video you start off retirement
with $500,000 in savings, and in the first year of retirement you withdraw $20,000 or
4% of your savings.
And I'm also using a compound interest calculator here, and it assumes that whatever you withdraw
is withdrawn right at the start of the year.
So the $20,000 is going to be withdrawn on January 1st of every year.
I'm only noting that because it makes it a worst case scenario you were to say withdraw
$20,000 over the course of an entire year but you did it in installments of $1,600 each
month you would be able to earn interest on the rest of the money that you hadn't yet
withdrawn throughout the rest of the year and thus you're ending net worth would end
up being a little bit higher than it will be in this example.
So on January 1st you withdraw $20,000, meaning you only have $480,000 left in your nest egg.
But over the course of the year the market goes up by 6% which means the value of your
portfolio at December 31st would be $508,800.
Now in year two of retirement you increase your withdrawal by 2%.
So on January 1st of the second year of your retirement you withdraw $20,400.
That brings your portfolio value down from $508,800 to $488,400.
But again the market goes up 6%, which by December 31st brings the total value of your
portfolio up to $517,704.
If you were to continue to calculate this out for 30 years you're ending net worth would
be $787,716.90, almost $300,000 dollars more than what you started with in retirement!
But of course this is just a rule of thumb so there are situations where you're going
to want to avoid using this all together.
One of those situations would be if your portfolio consists of a lot more higher risk Investments
then say your typical index funds and bonds that are usually in a retirement portfolio.
This is because obviously a higher risk investment can go down a lot faster than your typical
retirement portfolios, which can be extremely devastating especially early on in retirement.
Also this rule of thumb only really works if you stick to it year in and year out.
And if you're not going to be able to do that then you don't want to use this as your retirement
goal, because even violating the rule for one year to splurge on a major purchase can
have a severe effect on your retirement savings down the road because the principal from which
the interest and dividends that you get to survive is compounded from gets reduced.
Let me give you an example of how this works: Say that in addition to taking out the $20,000
your first year in retirement, you decide to treat yourself with a new car and figuring
that you'll be traveling a lot during retirement you want to get one that's good, big, and
comfortable as well as reliable.
So for this example let's say you get a new Toyota 4Runner for about $35,000.
Now I know that you could probably find it for cheaper used, but not everybody likes
to buy cars used I know my dad didn't and besides this is just an example.
So you drop $35,000 on a new car and you still have to have money to live so the $20,000
still does come out of your retirement, meaning that you only have $445,000 leftover.
Now admittedly the market still does go up about 6% leaving you with a nest egg of $471,700
at the end of the year.
And even if you were to stick to the 4% withdrawal rate for the rest of retirement which, would
be 30 years in this example, by the 27th year you would be taking out more than you earned
an interest and dividends as well as how much the market went up.
And by the 30th year of retirement you would withdraw $35,516, but with interest, dividends,
and Market appreciation your portfolio would have only gained $33,209 in value.
And that could put you in a pretty dangerous position should the market go down for a couple
years, or if you have some kind of medical emergency.
Now I don't want to make it seem all bad, I mean unless you retired early, after 30
years in retirement you're probably in your 90s and don't need the money to last very
much longer and even in this example you still do end with $586,000.
It could be worse right?
However I do want to bring your attention to the difference that this made.
This one purchase made your ending net worth that you could have left as inheritance to
your children or grandchildren or even donated to charity go from $787,000 all the way down
to $586,000, that's a difference of over $200,000.
And all that's with just one splurge.
But that'll about do it for me I hope you enjoyed the video and if you did or if you
learned something be sure to like And subscribe I've got a lot more of these Finance coming
out in the near future as well as some more book summaries and other fun stuff.
But with that being said, thanks for watching and have a great day.