Posts tagged with "projections"
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Year In Review - 2023 Returns
The last update in the year in review series is on my returns in 2023. In the short run, the returns might seem high or low, but in the long run it should match my expectation of 10%. That was the assumption I used when I decided to retire early. As long as I can keep my expenses inflation to around 6% and my returns to around 10%, I should be able to manage to live a decent retired life. Since it has only been about six years since my financial independence, there isn’t a lot of data to go with. But as you saw from my update on expenses, we have managed to keep our inflation to below 6%. Now the question is, were we able to keep our returns to above 10%? Lets find out.
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Year In Review - 2022 Returns
Continuing on in the year in review series, I now take a look at my returns in 2022. Although this is not really important since investments are for long term and there is no point looking at returns every year, I like to review it nonetheless. Last year, the stock market contrary to its general nature, did nothing interesting really. It was mostly flat with the market touching the peak around January and went down to the lows in June and back up by December. In the end, most of the indices that I track have ended slightly higher than where they started the year. My corpus performed inline with the indices, nothing too high or low. Enough talking lets start by comparing my portfolio returns with some of those indices.
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Expenses Revisited: 2022 Edition
Hopefully you understood how I funded the purchase of a new car. The summary of it is that I already anticipated all kinds of expenses I might encounter in retirement and then some (called as miscellaneous). Based on those expenses I figured out a corpus big enough to handle not just our living expenses (called as monthly expenses), but the major expenses such as buying a car or laptop or new furniture etc called as annual expenses. I will get to that number in a minute. So using my investments, I was able to fund my car. Basically, I sold a few units of my debt mutual funds and paid for the car in full. In this post I would like to revisit our cumulative expenses and corpus as on date after the major car purchase expense.
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How Is 4% Rule Working Out For Me?
I ended the previous post with a resounding “yes” for the question on whether 4% rule works in India or not. I also mentioned that given what we know about current inflation and return expectations in India, we can assume that the investment will last about 50 years assuming a conservative 30% asset allocation. In this article I want to show you how my portfolio was performing because I retired based on 4% rule with a bit of a buffer. So how is that working out for me? Given the market correction in the past few months and the increasing inflation, am I draining more money than I expected and am I at risk of out living my corpus? Lets find out.
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4% Rule In Indian Context
I have already written a few posts on 4% rule, but some readers were not sure if it really works in Indian context. We don’t have the equivalent of the Trinity study (which resulted in the 4% rule) done here in India. Or at least I am not aware of one. For those of you who don’t know the Trinity study, I will brief you on it. Basically the study found that if you withdraw 4% from your retirement account every year after accounting for inflation your retirement fund should last 30 years or more. But the study was done in the US using bond, inflation and equity market data from 1925 to 1995. It is really not a rule as much as a thumb rule. While I don’t have the luxury of such nice data for India, in this post, I will attempt to use some crude data loosely based on the same notion.
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Year In Review - 2021 Returns
Continuing on in the year in review series, I now take a look at my returns in 2021. Although this is not really important since investments are for long term and there is no point looking at returns every year, I like to review it nonetheless. Last year the stock market had a real crazy bull run. Those kind of dream runs rarely happen, so congratulations on living through one of them :). It does not matter which index you look at, all of them were in the green. So lets start by comparing my portfolio returns with some of those indices.
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Real World Application of 4% Rule
I have not even completed 4 years into retirement, yet I wanted to check how the 4% rule is working for me. Please keep in mind that this is such a short time in retirement that we can’t make any conclusions about whether 4% rule really works in this day and age at all in India. We will only know its usefulness in a much longer duration like a decade or so. This exercise is to understand how a 4% rule will work with and without the 20% buffer I usually talk about. Lets get started.
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Year In Review – 2020 Returns
At the start of every new year I review my portfolio and take stock of my expenses, returns and net-worth. So just like last year I am reviewing my returns for 2020. This is the first of the year in review series. I will also post my expenses and net-worth reviews in upcoming posts. Without wasting too much time, lets get right to it.
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Risks Of Wrong Financial Planning
It is now more than 2 years since I officially retired. But unofficially I have retired in Jan 2018. I had accumulated the required retirement corpus by Dec 2017 and I could retire at the beginning of 2018. But for reasons best described in one of my earliest posts, I decided to delay my retirement date by 6 months. The way I decided when I was ready to quit was based on the 4% rule. Since it's been only 2.5 years, I can't say for sure if the 4% rule is working or not. We will have to wait and see at least 10 years really. But ideally you will have to wait until I am dead to see if the corpus really lasted that long.
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Year In Review - 2019 Returns
It is that time of the year again when I do a review of my investments, expenses, net worth and also plan for the upcoming year. This year is special because I also have to do my 10 year planning as this is the start of a new decade. Anyway, enough banter, on to the good stuff. As usual, this will be a series and this is the first of them which covers my returns in 2019.
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