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Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2005 7:27 am
by unclemick
Yawn

Max your 401k, IRA's and save even more if you can. Buy index funds for your age vs your tartget ER point.

Don't carry a credit card balance.

Emotional aspects - we don't need no stinking emotional aspects.

Heh, heh, heh heh

Watched Bogey and Bacall last night in Dark Passage - first movie after they were married - not as good as the first two.

Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2005 7:58 am
by JWR1945
unclemick wrote:Emotional aspects - we don't need no stinking emotional aspects.
It would help in many cases.

People start retirement for a variety of reasons. Many find retirement thrust upon them. In my case, I did not want to continue working for another full decade. But it would have been necessary for me to reach my work-related objectives. Leaving earlier would have meant leaving a job half-done (and most likely, these days, never to be completed).]

But there are others. Those who aspire to living their dreams. Hocus helps a lot in this department.

Have fun.

John R.

Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2005 8:04 am
by JWR1945
unclemick wrote:Yep

JWR's - --'Initial and Current Valuations' thread seems to be on to something.

Look forward to your general conclusions/feelings as to offense/defense for someone taking the ER leap in the current environment. Hmmm - at a stretch - perhaps some thoughts/considerations for someone ten years or less from ER. I've always thought the transition phase 'could' be the most chewy. I was lucky - historical tailwind plus bare(white???) knuckled cheap the first ten years of ER.
I put up some ideas just a few minutes ago.

I think that we can narrow the range of suitable withdrawal rates considerably. You start out in the right ball park (at 2.9% today) and make minor adjustments as you go.

This helps us when looking at alternative strategies. Today, for example, I think that you can do better than 2.9% safely with a dividends-based approach.

Have fun.

John R.

Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2005 11:07 am
by unclemick
We don't need no stinking emotional aspects! - heh,heh,heh - being human that's difficult - hopefully there will be some common sense to grasp in times of stress.

Safely in the dividend strategy world might be viewed differently than some might suspect.

Lets say - I have a 2.9% dividend portfolio and Mr Market has a bad day at Black Rock. The market value of my portfolio nose dives - but the current yield goes up. If the prospects for the dividends remain good - I'm still 'safe' in my strategy. We don't need no stinking emotional aspects! - me and POGO have long talks on those occasions - Dreman's Contrarian thoughts also come to mind.

With a balanced index and variable withdrawal - safely - might be viewed slightly differently.

Anywise - the thread confirms my idea of common sense in today's environment - but then I'm prejudiced.

Posted: Fri Mar 11, 2005 2:05 am
by hocus2004
Here's one by Dory36 from the same thread.

http://boards.fool.com/Message.asp?mid= ... t=postdate

Dory36: "Preparing to retire early is all about taking care of the arrangements and things that we need to do individually prior to the new adventure. Political discussions are removed a bit from the topic of early retirement, if only because our inability to directly and immediately influence what will happen to impact our early retirement.

"So I was inclined to join the bandwagon, and perhaps discourage some of the political threads -- and then I remembered responding to almost exactly the same issue about a year ago. I reread my comments from then, and talked myself out of joining the bandwagon.

"Here is what I said then, under the subject line KEEP the off topic posts::

"What I have found in this forum is a group of folks I can carry on conversations with, or sit back quietly and politely eavesdrop, on topics that are about as near and dear to me as they can be. I don't know how to describe it, but I somehow get more out of a single statement by ariechart or hocus because of their other posts, on or off topic, than I could ever get from the statement in isolation.

"I guess I'm trying to say that these off-topic posts somehow give a richness to the on-topic posts, just as the eloquence of one of hocus's better posts is so much more meaningful than a mere recitation of the facts and premises it contains. Since these all seem to be conversations to me, I have come to expect them to drift off the topic on occasion. So do most (electronic or non-) conversations among friends and colleagues. "

Posted: Fri Mar 11, 2005 4:49 am
by unclemick
Back to being off topic: hindsight being what it is, I practiced a lot of crash dieting - which BTY didn't work for me.

Financial dieting I mean - going to frugal extremes for periods of time to free up money for my next 'great' investment.

DCA slow and steady, max 401k, IRA, etc - and then adjusting lifestyle to live on the rest worked best. When I lost my job and got to ER sort of by accident - there was no major wrench in lifestyle other than joy of not working and the mental shift of going from being unemployed to "hey, I don't have to work anymore".

So - the nuts and bolts of practicing the lifestlye you aspire to -
is worth developing - as best you can given the pesty inference of working.

There are surprises - always RV'ed a lot and traveled during working years. In ER - without the ?subconscious need? to get away from the workplace - travel lost it's appeal. Not all at once but gradually.

The biggest shock financially was the money saved by not working.