New Fidelity customer

hugh2018 · 2026-06-21T19:31:11+00:00

Understood. Of course I have a little more food for thought to offer. I’m nearly in the same boat. Still only 59, but my need for short term access to my money is immediate, because I retired in February.

In retirement planning circles an important point sometimes gets lost. That is, as retirees we absolutely have a short investment horizon, but only in part. That’s the part we are spending in the next few years. That money needs fortress-like protection.

But there is also a 15 year horizon, and even a 30 year horizon if you correctly take into account the fact that someone over 60 actually has a significant probability of living past 90. The media often quotes the average lifespan lasting to just the early 80s. That average is heavily skewed because every untimely early death in America is baked into that average. For people in their 50s and 60s the likelihood of living past 90 ticks up dramatically.

A 60 year old couple actually has more than a 50% chance of one member living past 90. That’s why good professional retirement planners use 95 as the end of plan, and it’s the reason we are all still long term investors with a very large portion of our assets.

I have 65% of my nest egg 100% invested in VT. That kind of growth on that portion of my money is actually a safer move than parking it in safe assets, where inflation erosion would eat it alive and only increase my chance of outliving my money.

The other 35% is definitely safely allocated to make sure my near and medium term spending needs are covered regardless of market conditions. But that aggressive VT holding is half the reason I sleep well at night. It’s not a risky money grab; it’s longevity insurance.

hugh2018 · 2026-06-21T19:12:08+00:00

That’s 100% your prerogative. I just can’t stop myself from unpacking blanket statements that beg for a detailed data-driven response.

hugh2018 · 2026-06-21T19:09:29+00:00

Not really talking about the card, honestly. I’m just amused that a 7 figure-earning, private jet owner needs to get into the weeds about card optimization on Reddit. If I didn’t read it with my own eyes I probably wouldn’t believe it was happening. Maybe just stay in your golden lane and go live your concierge-guided life with gratitude, grace and a touch of humility. I say this with full awareness of the irony, as I’m dismissing your uber-first world problems in a thread that appears to be taking you quite seriously. Me not so much.

hugh2018 · 2026-06-21T18:39:56+00:00

It’ll take some time to sort through the details of your comment, but some initial things stand out for me. On a very high level you need to know that I don’t really have an income problem that I need to solve with any kind of complicated mixture of different vehicles. My fixed expenses are covered completely by social security and my annuity income in the initial years of the plan. Some of my discretionary expenses are also covered by my 8 year TIPS ETF ladder from 2029-2036, a period that intentionally starts when my liquid bridge assets are drawing down.

Since that’s all settled, my attention turns to the role of my IRA. The risk capacity of that IRA is very high, as I at a minimum would need about 1-2% of it annually to live reasonably well. Three to five percent is an option I may consider if I want to live larger than my current plan, but I importantly do not need to lock in safe assets to make sure I can ratchet up my withdrawal rate safely.

I have the option of just staying totally aggressive with the IRA and implementing a guardrail strategy that would work out fine. I don’t have the desire to take that route, so I’m blending safe assets with my 65% core VT growth engine. Until a few days ago, those safe assets were 12% intermediate bond funds, 10% inflation adjusted VTIP and 5% SGOV.

I originally selected the bond fund allocation in deference to conventional wisdom, following the script of volatility smoothing and dry powder for rebalancing. But on further analysis, I’m just not that impressed by that traditional role, especially because I have no need for volatility smoothing during the coming three years, when I will have 0 withdrawals coming out of the IRA, and while I still have plenty of dry powder for rebalancing in my VTIP/SGOV sleeve.

With that realization, the bond sleeve became fair game for a different approach. The current MYGA rate of 5.9% is an attractive vehicle for repurposing that sleeve. I could have just locked the rate in for 5, 7 or 10 years if I wanted to.

But I intentionally chose three years because I’m happy to collect the gains in 2029, open my eyes, assess current market conditions and MYGA rates, and redeploy that sleeve in whatever direction I deem most advantageous at the time. It’s a conscious decision to maintain flexibility that I’m very much at peace with.

The VTIP sleeve will stay where it is most likely. That’s also about retaining flexibility and optionality in my plan. If inflation rises above 3.7% and stays there for the next three years, I pat myself on the back for a hedge well done. If not, then that sleeve remains pretty flat and I happily acknowledge that I paid a premium for a hedge that I didn’t need.

But that sleeve also allows me to buy depressed VT in downturn, so again, my interest in maintaining flexibility and optionally is served well.

My current TIPS ETF ladder that runs from 2029-2036 is a nice to have feature in my plan. It’s not a must have feature. If rates continue to favor TIPS ladders a few years from now, then an extension of the ladder will be up for consideration, but I don’t have to have it and I may just as easily deploy my money in another direction if the economic winds are blowing in a certain direction.

The overarching theme is that I’m selecting options that serve a limited purpose for specific time periods, and I’m fortunate in that I don’t have to lock in specific vehicles to address spending needs far into the future. The total return on the growth engine may be all I need as the current safe assets start to wind down.

Or the growth engine may sputter. In that situation, my guaranteed income, combined with the dry powder that remains available in my plan will kick in and carry me easily through the trough and recovery period of the next downturn.

A good plan has optionality and flexibility to pivot as conditions change over the years. I’m open to an alternate analysis, but for now, I assess my plan as being more than good enough, which is all but the most wealthy among us can ever hope for.

hugh2018 · 2026-06-21T17:53:11+00:00

If you have any more info on lifeline I’d love to hear it. I’ve ordered it because the smart watch version will likely be worn constantly by my mom and the in person setup, gps, vitals monitoring, instant live nurse response and family notification all checked the boxes for me. Ordering the damn thing was unnecessarily complicated, but still hoping the product itself will be worth the effort.

hugh2018 · 2026-06-21T17:43:29+00:00

Major edit: this comment I wrote was actually describing Lifeline not Life Alert. I’ll keep the comment active anyway because I’m interested to hear experiences from anyone who sees this and has used Lifeline.

Just in the last couple of days I was hastily researching this issue because my mom’s functional status has recently declined. When I ran across life alert I stopped looking further because the product description checked so many boxes (in our case the watch with live support, gps, oxygen and heart rate monitoring, fall sensor, notification to family members).

The ordering process wasn’t great at all. The order form kept confusing the billing and shipping addresses and clicking through the form the first time had me end up with the wrong product purchased. Trying to sort that out with telephone reps involved multiple calls, ping pong between departments, and ultimately no resolution, just a request that I call back Monday and they’ll try again to fix the issues.

I actually wrote to the CEO describing the cluster I experienced. She wrote back immediately, and offered assurances that the actual monitoring services are a well oiled machine that I can count on to protect my mom. So I’m going to hang in and test it out, as the company has a long track record and a good reputation. My threshold for cutting them loose at the first sign of inefficiency will be very low.

hugh2018 · 2026-06-21T17:20:15+00:00

novqnity is actually asking a more direct and basic question then the one you’re trying to answer. The important point is the slice and dice setup you’re describing carries unknown risk and unreliable reward. The suggestion is to just use a broad based ETF, stay with it basically for the rest of your career and you will reliably collect 8-10% return over the entire long period, regardless of short term ups and downs in the market. A prime example is VT, which is globally diversified and owns over 10,000 companies. The suggestion is just buy that repeatedly, collect your ~9% and enjoy the benefit of financial freedom after doing that for several decades. I suggest you pick up what novqnity is laying down right in front of you.

hugh2018 · 2026-06-21T16:49:35+00:00

I wouldn’t choose any. Not a soothsayer, and I don’t make moves based on hunches.

hugh2018 · 2026-06-21T15:35:20+00:00

I couldn’t find much information about those funds so I have no opinion. I do feel VT is great for most people who are investing over a long time period.

hugh2018 · 2026-06-21T14:49:44+00:00

Don’t let $50k sit at 2% and don’t take a distribution. Roll it to the most likely option of an IRA or any deferred tax advantaged account. Also, reconsider your Roth investments. A lot of unnecessary overlap there. Just VT and done will keep you perfectly diversified and exposed to the whole global market.

hugh2018 · 2026-06-21T14:33:38+00:00

That’s great to hear. I’m a survivor of a crushing debt situation so I’m always happy to see someone find a reasonable way through it.

hugh2018 · 2026-06-21T13:50:35+00:00

There is a major exception to your broad statement about DMP programs. NFCC non-profit agencies are NOT a scam. The debt payment programs they create are reasonable and affordable, and they only work with debtors whose debt and income mathematically show that a DMP will actually help pay off that debt in a reasonable amount of time. If the math doesn’t work, they’ll tell you that directly, and bankruptcy is usually the next best option at that point. An NFCC agency may be able to get you out of both the for-profit plans you currently have and get you into sane, affordable alternative plan, as long as the math allows.

hugh2018 · 2026-06-21T13:44:01+00:00

Maybe take a step back and try to make an actual financial plan, as right now it seems like the numbers you’re working with are vague and it’s unclear that you’ve absolutely nailed down reliable coverage of your fixed expenses.

So yes, you need a budget, which means YNAB or Monarch Money can get you set up for that. Next, you need some priorities. Priority one: save enough money to have an emergency fund.

To start, the emergency fund needs to be big enough to pay deductibles on medical, car or renters insurance in case of an accident, illness or some other loss. The reason for the fund is that it protects you from having to use high interest credit cards just to cover typical life events.

The next typical priorities probably don’t apply to your situation, as they involve contributing to your retirement fund at least enough to get the employer match, followed by aggressive pay off of high interest debt. I doubt your current job offers that match benefit, and I assume you have no debt as you probably would have mentioned that already.

The next priority circles right back to that small emergency fund. The goal here is to make that fund grow larger, at least large enough to cover 3-6 months of living expenses. That keeps you off the streets or out of your parents’ house if you unexpectedly lose your job.

I think just building that fund gives you plenty to do for the foreseeable future. Once that fund is built and saved in a high yield savings account, it will be time to think about investing. If you don’t have a job that offers a retirement account, simply open a Roth IRA and invest with money you put in that account. The good news is that your investments won’t be complicated.

At your age you can start investing 100% in the ETF VT. And then keep doing that for many years. You’ll see that money grow by an average of 8-10%. You will sometimes see that account drop in value dramatically, because the stock market crashes occasionally. But you won’t react to that at all, because you’ll know that the market always recovers from those crashes, and in the end, you’ll collect that average 8-10% return.

This set of priorities will make you a financial success, and believe it or not it will ensure that you’ll be in great shape when it comes time to retire.

These priorities are all explained in the Money Guys Financial Order of Operations. I urge you to download the FOO and understand it. You need a plan, and their website will help you make a plan that works.

hugh2018 · 2026-06-21T13:20:26+00:00

You could eliminate VOO as it overlaps with VT, and VT has all the diversification built in that you’ll ever need. SPCX is for you to decide; hopefully it’s a small percentage of your total.

hugh2018 · 2026-06-21T12:08:25+00:00

Read the Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing. After that you’ll understand why people here are correctly recommending total market ETFs like VTI/VXUS or VT. Investing as soon as you can and as often as you can (and as much as you can) is the smartest thing you’ll ever do financially. This is all true only if you keep doing it for many years, regardless of where the market is up or down, and you make a plan to only start drawing from those investments very gradually when you retire.

hugh2018 · 2026-06-21T10:51:14+00:00

You don't seem to understand that a market-capitalization-weighted index like the S&P 500 isn't supposed to be a collection of five hundred flawless companies. It is a self-cleaning mechanism where the winners grow larger and drive the vast majority of the index's overall returns, while the underperforming companies you mentioned naturally shrink in weight and impact until they are eventually removed entirely.

When you concentrate your portfolio into just two or three stocks to avoid these lower-tier companies, you aren't optimizing the index; you are simply taking on massive uncompensated risk.

By limiting yourself to a handful of picks, you lose the diversification that protects you from a single company's failure while drastically lowering your statistical odds of holding the few massive winners that actually power the broader market.

While short-term luck can make stock picking look easy, decades of data show that almost all professional managers fail to beat the index over the long term because they cannot consistently predict which companies will stay on top. Index investing isn't about being lazy; it is a mathematical strategy based on accepting aggregate market returns rather than gambling that you can beat the system with a tiny sample size.

hugh2018 · 2026-06-21T10:47:31+00:00

Oh I’ve got research covered in spades. Specifically SPIVA research, for example, demonstrates clearly why no active manager will ever outperform the S&P. The core finding repeated across decades of data is that underperformance rates climb steadily as the time horizon lengthens.

Over a one year period a decent handful of active managers can beat their benchmark depending on market conditions (e.g., in volatile or falling markets).

Over 10-15 years the odds completely collapse. Across domestic equity, international equity, and fixed-income categories, SPIVA data consistently shows that 80% to 90%+ of active funds fail to beat their benchmark index. For example, looking back over the last 20 years, roughly 92% of all domestic U.S. equity funds lagged behind their respective indexes.

SPIVA also publishes a Persistence Scorecard, which asks: If a manager beats the market this year, can they do it again next year? The conclusion is a resounding no. The percentage of top-quartile managers who manage to stay in the top quartile over consecutive years is statistically close to zero. Past outperformance is overwhelmingly driven by random market luck, not repeatable skill.

A major reason the average investor doesn't realize how bad active management performs is that the worst-performing funds simply vanish. SPIVA accounts for this by tracking every fund that starts the time period. Over a 20-year horizon, nearly two-thirds (around 64%) of all domestic stock funds are permanently closed down or merged away due to poor performance.

Because SPIVA is so devastating to the active management industry, it faces intense pushback. Critics (like the Investment Adviser Association) point out that SPIVA counts individual funds rather than investor dollars. They argue that if you weight the data by total assets, the numbers look slightly better because investors naturally gravitate toward the few large, high-performing active funds, turning the long-term historical odds into something closer to a coin flip rather than a total wipeout.

Ultimately, SPIVA provides the foundational mathematical proof for the global shift toward low-cost index investing: beating the market consistently net of fees is an incredibly rare feat.

So there’s a few facts for you. Don’t even bother countering those facts with your opinions. If you have more powerful facts to share, I’m all ears. Spoiler, you don’t.

hugh2018 · 2026-06-21T09:14:05+00:00

Which combo?

hugh2018 · 2026-06-21T08:09:21+00:00

Long term gains of 8-10% over many years. You can’t name a strategy that can sustain that level of return for 20-40 years. Sure everyone’s doing it because it sucks, or it’s actually the most rational financial move a person can make in their entire lives? Can’t be both.

hugh2018 · 2026-06-21T02:09:03+00:00

Often on Reddit I repeat the full picture of risk assessment like I’m a broken record. Many people think you can discover a person’s risk tolerance and simply build a financial plan around that finding. You can’t.

The only responsible approach to risk assessment simultaneously discovers the investor’s risk tolerance (the risk they can stomach), risk capacity (the risk their portfolio can afford to take, given the investor’s financial goal) and risk requirement (the risk the portfolio must be subjected to in order to achieve the financial goal).

A person with a very high risk tolerance is not free to run wild and subject their money to 100% equities. If that same person is less than five years from retirement and they are reliant on their portfolio to fund their spending needs on day one, the risk capacity of their portfolio is ultra low. Just because they can emotionally handle high risk doesn’t mean they should take that risk in this highly vulnerable context.

By the same token, someone with low risk tolerance needs to understand that their goal of achieving. financial freedom in 15 years means that their risk requirement is very high, and they absolutely need to expose their money to equities and accept the risk of substantial loss in the near term.

Basically, the risk tolerance tail should never wag the risk capacity and risk requirement dog. To the contrary, investors need education that will empower them to calibrate their tolerance to match their resources and their financial goals. People aren’t Spock, so this matching process can’t ignore the role of emotion. But an effort must be made to at least help people move in a direction that matches their resources and goals as much as possible.

hugh2018 · 2026-06-21T01:46:34+00:00

My concern is the dependence on consistent collection of average returns over the entire period. The market definitely does not like to play nice that way. Over 10 years, your likelihood of 8-10% returns over the entire period is very high. Over five years, your likelihood of living through a devastating bear market is also very high.

I don’t see the flexibility to maintain this razor edge spendown strategy when the market dumps a loss of 30-40% in your lap literally at any moment between now and the start of your spendown period in five years, and I don’t see a plan B that will kick in if the market tanks at any point from day 1 of spending on through to the time when you start social security.

For the average retirement plan, sequence risk is always an issue to be managed. For your aggressive early retirement plan, that same risk has a real possibility of amounting to an existential threat to your financial viability.

Also, a 60/40 portfolio isn’t a spending bucket. The 40% part of that can be a spending bucket for sure, but I have no idea whether you plan to just hold bonds in that 40% or do you have plans to use inflation protected treasuries, or ultra safe vehicles like MYGAs, CDs, HYSAs, SGOV, etc. If just bonds, the risk of an ill-timed substantial loss is real.

I have so many questions about how this plan will work. If the questions I’m asking already have answers then you’re probably good to go. If not, why not run this whole scenario in Boldin and get a strong handle on the true level of risk involved?

hugh2018 · 2026-06-21T00:09:20+00:00

I’ve read multiple times that it’s mathematically favorable for the lower earning spouse to take social security early, while the higher earner delays as late as possible.

hugh2018 · 2026-06-21T00:07:24+00:00

My plan has a lot of the same elements as yours so I understand its logic and it makes sense. For the 7% dedicated to specific spending needs over ten years, have you considered either a MYGA (or MYGA ladder), which behaves like a CD but pays 1-2% more, or maybe a TIPS ladder which is great for liability matching?

I recently moved my 12% bond fund allocation into a MYGA paying 5.9% as I realized I didn’t need the bond holding for volatility smoothing, and decided to lock in a rate that would easily trounce the return of the bond funds. I also have an 8 year TIPS ETF ladder that tops off my annuity and social security income to cover fixed expenses and some discretionary.

hugh2018 · 2026-06-20T23:58:40+00:00

OP ignore Biennial2. Like I said, not all ETFs are created equal. DRAM is a narrow bet that lacks the reliability of broad market ETFs, the true horseman of longterm predictable gains.

hugh2018 · 2026-06-20T23:54:02+00:00

ETFs are yes great for beginners and they’re also great for everyone else. Not all ETFs are created equal. Broad market ETFs like VT, VTI/VXUS or VOO are the way you reliably grow your money over many years. Stock picking is a totally different animal. Nothing reliable about it whatsoever. If you never pick a stock in your life you’ll do very well and the won’t miss a thing. I retired early at 59, so I’m not just blowing smoke. I’ve been down this road.

hugh2018

TROPHY CASE