Both the February and March 2015 issues of the Journal of Financial Planning include articles which address and extend the work on
rising equity glidepaths during retirement, which Michael Kitces and I published in the January 2014 issue.
-LSB-...] see, a lot of my safe withdrawal rate simulations assume either constant equity weights (e.g. 80/20) or a rising
equity glidepath in early retirement -LSB-...]
It does indeed seem that retiring at times with particularly low bond yields, which can be expected to increase over time, may not favor rising
equity glidepaths during retirement.
Meanwhile, David looks at the lower interest rate component without specifically considering the high stock market valuation component (his capital market expectations are described in Appendix 1, and his stock returns are not related to past stock returns), and he concludes that
declining equity glidepaths are best.
This is a follow - up from last week's post
on equity glidepaths to address a few more open questions:
The more downbeat the return assumptions1, the less difference a rising
equity glidepath makes in comparison to conventional strategies.
As we wrote, our results suggest that the valuation - based approach is generally superior to the rising
equity glidepath approach and the fixed equity allocation portfolios, as the valuation - based scenarios produce comparable - to - slightly - better results across the board.
Admittedly, the March one is also by us, and I'll get to that it an moment, but the February article challenges the rising
equity glidepath concept and is by David Blanchett.
Michael and I look at the market valuation component without specifically considering the interest rate component, and we determined that this is the time when
rising equity glidepaths have tended to provide the best results for historical retirements.
The authors suggest that the rising
equity glidepath can be managed using a rule like rebalancing 1 % of your portfolio per year from fixed income to equity.
I've chosen this plus
an equity glidepath with having a bond / cash allocation to start and weening up to an all - equity, efficient frontier weighted portfolio.
Notably, a strategy that builds up extra bonds in the years leading up to retirement is what many target date funds already do, with an «
equity glidepath» that gets incrementally more conservative each year before retirement anyway.
With a 4 % withdrawal rate, he finds that declining
equity glidepaths in retirement support higher probabilities of success than fixed equity glidepaths, which in turn supports higher probabilities of success than rising equity glidepaths.
This is not to say that rising
equity glidepaths are never a good idea, though.