Enrich Your Future 16: The Estimated Return Is Not Inevitable

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Quick take

In this episode of Enrich Your Future, Andrew and Larry Swedroe discuss Larry’s new book, Enrich Your Future: The Keys to Successful Investing. In this series, they discuss Chapter 16: All Crystal Balls are Cloudy.

LEARNING: Estimated return is not always inevitable.

“If returns are negative early on, don’t withdraw large amounts because when the market eventually recovers, you won’t have that money to earn your returns.”

Larry Swedroe

In this episode of Enrich Your Future, Andrew and Larry Swedroe discuss Larry’s new book, Enrich Your Future: The Keys to Successful Investing. The book is a collection of stories that Larry has developed over 30 years as the head of financial and economic research at Buckingham Wealth Partners to help investors. You can learn more about Larry’s Worst Investment Ever story on Ep645: Beware of Idiosyncratic Risks.

Larry deeply understands the world of academic research and investing, especially risk. Today, Andrew and Larry discuss Chapter 16: All Crystal Balls are Cloudy.

Chapter 16: All crystal balls are cloudy

In this chapter, Larry illustrates why past returns are not crystal balls that predict future returns.

According to Larry, the problem with all forecasts that deal with estimations of probabilities is that people tend to think of them in a deterministic way. He says that as an investor, you should think about returns with the idea that distribution and estimate are only the middle points.

Your plan has to be prepared for either the good tail to show up, which is easy to deal with and usually will allow you to take chips off the table and reduce your risk because you’ll be well ahead of your goal. But if the bad tail shows up, you may have to either work longer, plan on saving more, or rebalance, which means buying stocks at a tough time.

The threat of sequence risk

To demonstrate the danger of sequence risk, Larry asks us to imagine it’s 1973, and stocks have returned 8% in real terms and 10% in nominal returns. We’ve had similar results over the next 50 years. Say an investor in that time frame decides to withdraw 7% yearly from their portfolio in real terms because they know with their clear crystal ball that they will get 8% for the next 50 years.

This means if they take out, say, $100,000 in the first year, and inflation is 3%, to keep their actual spending the same, they have to take out $103,000. According to Larry, this investor will be bankrupt within 10 years due to the sequence of returns, which is the order in which the returns occur, not the returns themselves.

As you can see in the table below, despite providing an 8.7% per annum real return over the 27 years, because the S&P 500 Index declined by more than 37% from January 1973 through December 1974, withdrawing an inflation-adjusted 7% per annum in the portfolio caused it to be depleted by the end of 1982—in just 10 years! (Note that from January 1973 through October 1974, when the bear market ended, the S&P 500 lost 48%.)

Sacrificing expected returns

Larry says this example shows the danger of sequence risk and illustrates that the order of returns matters significantly in the decumulation phase because systematic withdrawals work like a dollar-cost averaging program in reverse—market declines are accentuated. This can cause prin