John Oliver again tackled personal finance on his HBO show Last Week Tonight, this time exploring retirement savings. (He previously covered credit reports.) Here is the full video link, embedded below:

It is truly hard to present this stuff in an entertaining manner, so I was interested to see how they would approach things and who’d they pick on. It’s not bad considering it runs 20 minutes – quite long for an internet video. If you skip to roughly the 17:55 mark, you’ll get the best bits – a satirical reply to widely-promoted Prudential commercials (one, two) and his top 5 retirement savings tips:

1. Start saving now.
2. Invest in low-cost index funds.
3. Ask if your adviser is a fiduciary.
4. As you get older, gradually switch some of your stocks into bonds.
5. Keep your fees under 1%.

Nothing new to most financially-savvy folks, but hopefully it helps steer some people in the right direction.

This is becoming a recurring theme around here, but I came across an interesting tidbit in this ProPublica article on how your brain plays tricks on you. Emphasis mine:

Fidelity did a study of all their accounts to see what types of investors performed the best. They found that the best investors were the people who had either forgotten they had an account in the first place — or were dead! In other words, most investors succeed in doing the exact opposite of what they set out to do with their money (presumably, make more of it).

In other words, the best investment performance came from doing nothing. That means no buying what looks obviously good, no selling what looks obviously bad, no “taking profits”, no “taking money off the table”.

If doing nothing is best, then you should probably invest in something that encourages inactivity. That’s exactly what a Target Date Fund (TDF) does, manage your asset allocation in an emotionless manner as you age. Auto-pilot.

This Morningstar article appears to confirm this idea: Target-Date Funds: Good Behavior Leads to Better Results. Emphasis mine:

Investor returns, a dollar-weighted return that takes into account cash inflows and outflows to estimate the returns that investors actually experience, gives clues to how target-date investors have fared according to these concerns. The news is good. Whereas most other broad categories show the effects of poor timing–investors tend to buy high and sell low–target-date investors largely avoid that fate.

Investors of target-date funds tend to invest part of every paycheck into employer plans like 401(k)s, and are either (1) lazy and put there by default, which suggests future laziness, or (2) actively chose to be invested in an auto-pilot fund, which suggests they accept that inactivity on their part is a good idea. (I should admit that I did neither and use the self-directed brokerage option… but only to buy TIPS. Honest!)

There is nothing wrong with focusing on your savings rate and using the auto-pilot!

The Department of Labor has released their final rule on reducing conflicts of interest on retirement savings advice. As expected, the new rule now requires any person who provides investment advice on retirement accounts like 401(k) or IRAs to act as fiduciaries and put their client’s best interest first. The goals are to save investor money otherwise directed to hidden fees and commissions, while helping even the playing field for the financial advisors have been acting as fiduciaries all along.

Commentary. Lots of people have most of their retirement savings in 401k plans, which are often eventually rolled over into IRAs. There are entire firms of salespeople who try to capture this money and skim off huge commissions, and now they will have to act as fiduciaries.

While it can be touted as an overall “win” for consumers, there are still plenty of grey areas. The final rule requires firms to be compliant on several broader provisions by April 2017 and fully compliant by Jan. 1, 2018. Existing investments are grandfathered in. Small 401(k) plans are exempt from some of the rules. Firms can still technically sell you things like high fee variable and indexed annuities in IRAs and brokers can continue to recommend proprietary products, there just has to be a believable shred of reason behind it.

I’m going to be honest, I read about 20 articles on this subject and my head hurt with all the little details. This rule could have really blown up large parts of the industry, but you can tell they really tried not to disrupt anything significant. Try reading some for yourself:

Department of Labor Official Page
Department of Labor Press Release Fact Sheet
White House Fact Sheet [PDF]
NY Times 1, NY Times 2
WSJ 1, WSJ 2

In other words, the nastiest stuff with the highest hidden fees and commissions will probably go away. So it’s a win around the edges. For the savvy DIY investor or the person with their money with a trustworthy registered investment advisor (RIA) that was already a fiduciary, the effect will likely be small if anything.

Hopefully, if you decide to have someone help you manage your investments, they are already a fiduciary, have been for a while, and don’t need someone to tell them to act in your best interest.

Right now, there is a big debate in Congress about whether the fiduciary standard should be required for all financial advisors that manage retirement accounts. A fiduciary requirement would include the following:

• They must exercise best efforts to act in the best interests of the client.
• They must provide disclosure of any conflicts of interest.
• They must clearly explain how they make their money (upfront fees, asset-based fees, commissions, etc.)

Most people probably think “Wait, don’t they do this already”? Nope. Even so, many still violate the current lower standards! Barry Ritholtz has some scary numbers in his Bloomberg article Brokers Behaving Badly:

• 1 in 13 brokers have committed misconduct that resulted in disciplinary action.
• Half of those brokers are fired, but nearly half simply move on to work for another firm within a year.
• About a third of brokers are repeat offenders (multiple events of misconduct).

(Use the FINRA Broker Check tool to look up regulatory actions, violations or complaints for a specific person or firm.)

The worst part is that much of the financial industry continues to fight against the fiduciary standard. Even popular “guru” Dave Ramsey opposes the fiduciary proposal, and has been called out on Twitter for it. They claim it will “limit middle-class access to financial advice”, which roughly translates in my mind to “if we can no longer suck huge 8% commissions from small accounts, then we might not bother anymore”.

I enjoy managing my own investments. I also believe that hiring a good financial advisor would work well for many people. A “good” financial advisor needs to have hard knowledge, soft communication skills, and the proper alignment of interests.

Whoever wins this political fight, you as an individual still have the right to demand that your financial advisor be a fiduciary. Those letters after people’s name don’t all have the same value. Certain designations like Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) include a fiduciary standard component. You may also show them this Fiduciary Pledge and see how they respond. Being a fiduciary alone is not enough to find an appropriate advisor, but it does serve as a very simple and basic filter.

I’m a fan of the Vanguard Target Retirement 20XX Funds. These Target Date Funds (TDFs) may not be perfect, but they are a low-cost, broadly-diversified, “set-it-and-forget-it” fund that I feel are consistently under-appreciated and easily maligned due to their inherent “one-size-fits-most” nature.

In a recent Vanguard blog post titled “TDF investors are not rotisserie ovens”, senior product manager John Croke felt the “set it and forget it” description “fuels the misperception that many investors in TDF strategies are disengaged, disinterested, and generally unaware of what they’re invested in.”

The subsequent points he makes are certainly valid, but I happen to think the rotisserie oven analogy should be worn as a badge of honor! As Jason Zweig writes in the WSJ article “Radical Investing Advice: Do Nothing, Nada, Zilch, Zippo”:

Target-date investors, says Jeff Holt, an analyst at Morningstar, “are less prone to take matters into their own hands and move their assets around when markets are gyrating.”

[…] research by Financial Engines found that participants with little or no money in target-date funds underperform them by an average of 2.1 percentage points annually.

You won’t see Vanguard Target Retirement funds being touted very much in the financial media. Their returns are rarely at the top since they are index-based, so magazines and newsletters won’t write about them. Most advisors are supposedly charging you for their “expert” advice, so they will of course recommend something more complicated. Even index fund enthusiasts like myself often don’t invest in them because we like to fine-tune and tinker (sometimes to our detriment). They never seem to be the “best” move, just something you settle for when you can’t think of anything better. I think this cartoon describes the situation well (found via @michaelbatnick):

It is an unpleasant truth that most people would be better off just focusing their energy on savings rate and leaving the investing to a Vanguard Target Retirement Fund. Another example of the power of inaction: A person who bought the 30 largest US companies back in 1935 and did absolutely nothing after that would have outperformed the S&P 500 over the last 40 years.

Now, I should throw in a few quick points from the Vanguard blog post about what investors shouldn’t forget about:

• TDFs will continue to hold a certain amount of stock risk after you reach your target retirement age.
• Along the same lines, TDFs do not provide guaranteed income in retirement.

To summarize, don’t be insulted when being compared to a Ronco rotisserie oven. Be proud to “Set it and forget it”. Vanguard Target Retirement Funds even perform the chore of rebalancing between stocks and bonds for you automatically. Perhaps Vanguard could even use some tips from Ron Popeil about marketing their low, low pricing 😉

Reading Warren Buffett’s Annual Letter always reminds me that stocks are not just some numbers that bop up and down, but are shares of real businesses with land, factories, knowledge, and hard-working people. This helps reassure me that the value of those companies taken together will never go to zero, and will eventually rebound and grow over the long term. At the same time, once you stop working and start selling shares, the prospect of going to zero is real. If you combine a prolonged bear market and forced withdrawals at depressed prices, you risk permanently impairing your portfolio.

According to a Merrill Lynch survey of wealthy families with $5+ million (not just people on the street!), 39% of them thought you could spend 6% or more from your portfolio indefinitely. The reality is closer to 3%.

When you see the term safe withdrawal rate, it almost always refers to how much money you can safely withdraw from an investment portfolio each year without running out of money. Usually, this number is set during the first year, and is adjusted annually for inflation. The key phrase is “without running out of money”. You could start out with a $800,000 dollars, but as long as you end with at least $1 and never drop below zero, you’re considered “safe”. In the real world, having your portfolio nosedive while you’re still relatively young may cause you to panic prematurely.

Since I last mentioned PortfolioCharts.com, the creator Tyler has released a new tool called the Withdrawal Rates Calculator. It is quite cool, at least for an asset allocation geek like myself. You can enter your own custom asset allocation, and it will show both the historical safe withdrawal rate and the sustainable withdrawal rate. As defined there, a sustainable withdrawal rate is one where you must end the period with your initial principal amount, for example you must both start and end with $800,000 dollars.

Here are the results for the Classic 60/40 portfolio:

60% Total US Stock Market
40% Total US Bond Market

Here are the results for the Swensen Portfolio, on which my portfolio is loosely based:

30% Total US Stock Market
15% International Developed
5% Emerging Markets
15% 5 Year US Treasuries
15% US TIPS
20% US REIT

For the Classic 60/40 portfolio, the rough numbers for a 40-year period are 4% for Safe WR and 3.4% for Sustainable WR. For the Swensen portfolio, the rough numbers for a 40-year period are 4.6% for Safe WR and 4.2% for Sustainable WR. If you were to focus on the sustainable numbers, that’s a surprising result of 24% higher withdrawals with the Swensen portfolio (and other asset allocations do even better!)

Can you depend on these historical differences to persist into the future? I would be careful about looking at things too finely, as correlations are always shifting. However, I do prefer using the sustainable withdrawal rate number for my own early retirement planning, and I am thankful to have this tool to tinker with.

(You may also be interested to know that a 100% US stock portfolio, despite its higher historical average returns, has a slightly lower 30-year sustainable withdrawal rate that either of the options above.)

As a follow-up to my last post on 100% stocks forever, the referenced NYT article had some neat data that I hadn’t seen anywhere else. This chart shows how the overall asset allocation of IRAs held by Vanguard change according to the age of the investor. The glide path of Vanguard Target Retirement mutual funds is also included for comparison.

Eyeballing things, it appears that past age 65, Traditional IRAs settle at roughly 58% stocks, while Roth IRAs settle at roughly 67% stocks. This “real world glide path” declines much more gradually than ones from the major all-in-one fund providers, and also stays flat from retirement age onward. For comparison, here are additional glide paths for Fidelity, T. Rowe Price, Blackrock, and American Century, taken from a Morningstar paper. (For this chart, retirement age would be roughly 2015.)

I don’t know any studies that have found the real reason behind the “real world” numbers. I would suggest as a possible explanation that the average percentage must be asset-weighted, and “rich” people have more assets in aggregate. The “rich” don’t need to make big withdrawals (unless required by law), and so they don’t need to spend every penny before they die. They will leave a chunk of money to heirs and thus have a long time horizon. In turn, this longer time horizon would support the holding of more stocks. Roth IRAs are especially useful as an inheritance vehicle as they don’t have required minimum distributions (RMDs), which could also explain why they are even more strongly weighted in stocks.

Meanwhile, if you need to spend down your assets during retirement, then the asset allocation suggested by Vanguard Target Retirement funds (and all the other major target-date funds) would make more sense. But it’s certainly a good point that these one-size-for-all solutions will not apply to everyone.

If you like low costs, diversification, and simplicity but want more control, I would suggest the option of switching to a Vanguard LifeStrategy all-in-one fund that stays fixed at 40%, 60% or 80% stocks. I use the 60/40 LifeStrategy Moderate Growth Fund (VSMGX) as a benchmark for my own long-term portfolio asset allocation.