Money, Life, Retirement – 8. Investment update

“It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.” John Maynard Keynes

I first published the Money, Life, Retirement series in June 2017. It’s been 4 years since that rather long winded series of posts about life, investing and bad jokes. I’m now a long way towards early retirement and if you put into action some of the things I mentioned 4 years ago I’m sure you are too.

In number 5 of the series How to get where you want? I described my investment approach. Since then my approach has changed a little. I’d like to share what it is now and why.

As a reminder my original investing approach was to save as much money as I could and buy diversified index funds through exchange traded funds (ETFs) such as those offered by Vanguard. Within that approach my intended asset allocation was the following:

	Stocks	Bonds
Australian	50%	20%
International	20%	10%

The reasons for this were discussed in the original post, link above.

I still maintain that this asset allocation is a good one. Over time I’m sure you would generate a mountain of wealth if you followed it.

But over time I kept thinking about how franking credits are a free kick in the Australian tax system. Considering that I’m frugal, when I retire I’ll be in a low tax bracket which will mean I get almost all of the franking credits back. That’s bonus cash and really amplifies the dividend yield of Australian stocks. It bumps them generally to above a 5% dividend yield.

I also read a book called Motivated Money by a guy called Peter Thornhill. He’s an old hand at investing who accumulated a really fat wad, somewhere in the order of $8M just working a normal job and regularly investing. His $8M fat wad spits out about $400k in dividend payments per year, which is probably more now (he has a great series of videos here).

He’s a big fan of investing for dividends and pointed out that over time the amount of dividends paid out generally increases at close to twice inflation. This is because generally profitable companies pay out some dividends, but also retain some profits to increase their profitability in the long run. So if you have enough dividends to live on now, in the future that’ll increase to be more and more without doing anything.

He’s also a big fan of Listed Investment Companies (LICs) over index funds. There are a few differences between index funds and listed investment companies:

Listed Investment Company	Index Fund (ETFs such as VAS and VGS)
The number of shares is fixed, so the price per share can move out of sync with Net Tangible Assets (sum of the price of the underlying shares)	There is a “market maker” which creates or destroys shares to keep the price close to the value of the Net Tangible Assets
A LIC can hold cash to smooth out dividend payments over time, or for other purposes such as to purchase other companies	Because of the trust structure an index fund must pay out all of the dividends paid by the underlying stocks (as a distribution)
LIC’s generally have some kind of active stock picking (however the ones I like are buy and hold investors with almost as much diversification as an index fund)	An index fund replicates an index, is very diversified and doesn’t buy and sell unless stocks move in or out of the index

Taking all of that into account here is what my approach has now changed to over time:

1. Keep an emergency fund that will cover at least 6 months of expenses in a high interest savings account.

You never know what is going to happen. Life is uncertain. The only certainty in life is that it will end. You and your offspring and your offspring’s offspring will eventually be forgotten and the universe will end in homogenous heat death. Emergencies happen, hence you need an Emergency fund.

2. Spread my cash between the following ETF / LICs with the following allocations, so that I receive a roughly equal dividend payment 10 months of the year.

Group	Stocks	Allocation
1	VAS	40%
2	AFI BKI	20%
3	ARG MLT AUI	20%
4	WHF	20%

Their general payment times are:

Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
VAS	BKI AFI	ARG MLT AUI	VAS		WHF	VAS	BKI AFI	ARG MLT AUI	VAS		WHF

All of the LICs chosen above:

• have a low management fee
• contain a diversified portfolio of stocks, not as many as an index fund, but almost
• have been around for a really long time (often over 50 years)
• have a strong track record of paying increasing dividends.

Over time the dividends will grow at a pace faster than inflation. For example AFI over a 24 year period has a CAGR on their dividends of 3.56% vs CPI of 2.45% over the same period, while BKI over a 12 year period had a CAGR on their dividends of 4.16% while CPI was 2.31% over the same period.

Generally during a stock market crash the price of the stocks crashes as the prices have increased to an unsustainable level. However dividends are generally related to company earnings, not stock prices. Earnings don’t have the same mania induced highs and subsequent crashes. So the dividends paid should remain reasonably consistent. To add to this Listed Investment Companies are free to not pay out all of their dividends and to maintain a buffer of cash to smooth out the dividend payments over time. For example in 2008 during the GFC both AFI and BKI still paid (and increased) their dividend.

3. When the LICS are at a discount to NTA, buy them. When they’re not buy VAS.

Listed Investment Companies can often be sold at a price that is a premium or a discount to the sum of the underlying net tangible assets (NTA). The share price can swing between a 10% premium to a 10% discount over time based upon the fickle minds of the investing public. This often means that you can buy what is really a dollar worth of shares for 90 cents. Here’s a graph of the AFI share price to NTA over time. AFI can often be overvalued, since that idiot Barefoot Investor told everyone to buy it in his “book” (long winded sales pitch for his paid investing blueprint newsletter), but the other LICs mentioned more frequently trade at a discount.  I made a spreadsheet using the google finance function to track this so I know what is at the greatest discount or premium, which you can use here: NTA Calculator

AFI share price to NTA over time (below the line is a discount, above the line is a premium)

When no LICs are at a discount and I can’t buy a dollar for 90 cents I buy VAS, which doesn’t fluctuate above or below its NTA.

4. Don’t sell.

If I sell any shares I may trigger a tax event and need to pay capital gains tax. If the shares are paying a steady stream of dividends and I have a nice safety net in the Emergency Fund then there’s no reason to sell. Additionally all of the Listed Investment Companies given above have been around for at least 50 years, have a strong track record of paying ever increasing dividends and there shouldn’t be a need to sell. In the case of recession, they’re well diversified so that they’re effectively a bet on the whole Australian economy. If the whole Australian economy stops, then we all have larger things to worry about than the stock market. At that point it’s time to stop buying shares and to start buying AK47s a LandCruiser and many many cans of baked beans.

5. 100% international stocks in my Superannuation to take a little of the Australian centric risk out of my total investing life.

To make sure I still have some exposure to International stocks I swapped my Super allocation to be 100% international stocks. Many of the Australian companies within the shares above sell things overseas, so there is still some international exposure in my non-super investments, but in an attempt to even things out a little overall everything in Super will be International. The franking credit free kick is really important when I retire, but by the time I can access my Super it won’t matter so much.

Reasons I might be wrong:

A good mate of mine, John Keynes once said, “It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.”

So I try not to over optimise anything, especially something that isn’t an exact mathematical relationship. If you’re making good progress in the right direction it’s probably going to be ok in the end. Compound interest will probably look after the rest. I’ve clearly favoured regular payments of dividends over my previous approach of a mix of diversified index funds bonds and selling down as per the 4% rule, made famous by Bengen. To me it feels nicer not to sell any of my nest egg, even though selling under 4% each year shouldn’t deplete it as outlined in Bengens link above. But in taking this approach I’ve gone slightly against the conventional wisdom, and I owe it to myself and to any readers to point out where I could be wrong:

1. As pointed out by a mate of mine Shane, previously one of the political parties in Australia tried to change the treatment of franking credits. Apparently this was aimed at fixing an inequality they saw in the superannuation system. I need to explain what franking credits are here for this to make sense. When you own shares, you are an owner of that company. When you own shares in an index fund, you are an owner of many companies. As an owner of a company you also own the profits of the company. Some companies, at their owners request, pay the owners a certain percentage of the profits as a dividend. So the next question is what’s a profit? Well, that’s the roughly company revenue, minus expenses and tax is paid on the remainder at the company tax rate of 30%. So a franking credit is to take into account, that a 30% tax has already been paid on that profit and subsequent dividend. So when you pay income tax, the dividends are taxed at your marginal tax rate and you only have to make up the gap between 30% and your marginal rate on the dividend income. Or if your marginal tax rate is below 30% you’ll get a tax return. The change was to remove the ability to get a tax return if your marginal tax rate was below 30%. This to me seems a little silly, as it will mean some earnings are taxed twice, and it will be taxing people who have a marginal tax rate of below 30% (who are on low income earners) more than those with a marginal tax rate above 30%. So it’s definately a risk, but I’m happy to take it. I think it’s likely if this change does happen, that investors will favour investing in international shares over Australian shares and share prices will go down, which will in effect increase the non-franking credit dividend yield somewhat. If you’re still buying shares it may not affect you so much, but if you’ve stopped buying shares and this changes the lack of the franking credit tax refund will mean a reduction in total income.
2. According to all the investing books, this isn’t the optimal approach. You shouldn’t favour Australia so much, and you should also have a certain percentage of your asset allocation allocated to bonds and regularly rebalance betwen your Australian, Internal and bond components to take advantage of the regular change in asset prices between these asset groups. You should also sell down your portfolio over time at 4% a year or less and it should last foreverish. There’s a lot of books and a lot of research on this, and if I was giving advice (I’m not) I’d have to say go with what the books say. But for me, I really like the approach of not having to sell anything, not having to rebalance, having a regular dividend payment most months of the year that should increase over time at a faster rate than inflation.
3. I’m sure there’s plenty of other reasons I’m wrong as well.

I should of course say this is not investing advice, just what I’m doing and why, blah blah blah.

As a refresher, here’s the concluding summary of the key points from the original Money, Life, Retirement series from 2017, and a link to the page that you can read the original posts.

And that concludes this rather long winded series of ramblings. As this has been an epic multi-post ramble I’d like to summarise some of the key points for emphasis:

1. Money is a direct result of a bargain you make with your employer to hand over a very large portion of your life. In effect it’s special paper life force tokens you can exchange with other people for other things.
2. Your life, and by association money, is not a renewable resource, it is finite.
3. There is a counterparty to every transaction and they are only entering into the transaction because they think it will be beneficial to them. By inversion it will probably be net negative for you.
4. Due to hedonic adaption you shouldn’t spend large amounts of your paper life force tokens on things that make you temporarily happy that you will become used to and don’t increase your happiness in the long term. You should invert and spend your paper life force tokens taking things out of your life that make you unhappy.
5. By committing to full time employment you’ve actually limited the time you are free to be in control of your life to only 2 days a week. Two days a week is but wafer thin Monsieur. Only when you’re in the position where you don’t have to work is any choice to commit to full time employment valid, up until that point it’s a decision made under compulsion.
6. To optimise anything you need a feedback loop. Measuring and reflecting upon your expenses per category each month is a feedback loop that will allow you to optimise your spending so that you are not spending more on things that do not make you happy.
7. If your salary gives you a certain amount of dollars per month, by tracking your expenditure per month you can invert that relationship and work out the number of months per dollar. You can then work out the conversion rate between the price of things and the amount of your life you are trading for that thing.
8. The amount of money needed for indefinite retirement equals your yearly expenses divided by the safe withdrawal rate.
9. It’s been shown historically that a 4% withdrawal rate could probably last indefinitely with a 75% stock, 25% bond mix.
10. The most important thing that determines the amount of time until you can retire is your savings ratio. With a 4% withdrawal rate, no current savings and a 7% assumed return a savings ratio of 50% means you can retire in 15 years, a savings ratio of 75% means you can retire in 6.8 years.
11. People are generally bad at relating short terms actions to long term consequences. In order to get to a point where you can buy your freedom you should forecast your plan to financial freedom and track every expense to turn that forecast freedom into actual freedom.

Shared Finances: The Tragedy of the Commons?

A long time ago, in a university far far away a guy called Garrett Hardin wrote an essay called The Tragedy of the Commons, which was about a key concern of many at the time, human over-population.*

 

He argued that the resources of the world are finite and that if the human population continued to expand we would reach a point where the quality of life per person would be reduced as more people were added to the world. An example would be that the capacity of the roads in which traffic will flow freely in a city is finite, and as you add more traffic to the road each motorist experiences greater congestion and a lower quality of transit.

 

Here’s an excerpt from his essay in which he describes the concept of the tragedy of the commons using an example of farmers sharing a common paddock for their cows:

“

Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.

As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly, or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks: “What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?” This utility has one negative and one positive component.

1) The positive component is the function of the increment of one animal. Since the herdsman receives all the proceeds from the sale of the additional animal, the positive utility is nearly +1.

2) The negative component is a function of the additional overgrazing created by one more animal. Since, however, the effects of overgrazing are shared by all the herdsmen, the negative utility for any particular decision-making herdsman is only a fraction of -1.

Adding together the component partial utilities, the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another, and another …But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit — in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.

“

So, the title of this blog post included the words shared finances. What does a paddock full of cows and greedy farmers have to do with shared finances?

I’d argue that, to a degree, if a couple share their finances, the same concept of the tragedy of the commons applies as the income that the couple bring home from their jobs each month is of course finite.

With each individual purchase decision that each member of the couple makes the percentage of benefit that the member gains from the purchase is 100%.

However, the negative component that they receive from that purchase, which is, of course, the extra time they need to work in their job to pay for the purchase decision (as described in more detail here) is shared between the couple, that is the individual share of the dis-benefit is 50%.

For example if one member of the relationship decides to buy a really cool brand new mountain bike, like say a 2019 Giant Reign SX, or a YT Capra 27 AL; he gets 100% of the benefit of the extra traction that 180mm of bump eating front suspension provides, along with the street cred that comes from taking a masterpiece of space-age fluid formed aluminium out of the back of the car at the mountain bike trail car park on the weekend in front of his mates.

However in the case of shared finances he has actually only contributed his share of income to this particular purchase, hence he’s getting 100% of the benefit of the purchase, but only contributing 50% of the income required to make that purchase.

This, of course, is not the only thing that’s considered during each purchase, but over time, faced with thousands of purchases the asymmetry in the individuals share of the benefit vs dis-benefit will influence many purchase decisions and hence affect the financial health of the couple overall. Of course there’s other affects that may have to be dealt with, possible resentment, potentially having to negotiate for non-communal purchases and the fact that financial stress tends to be the biggest contributing factor to relationship breakdown.

Sharing finances is a very personal topic, I’m sure there will be a lot of people that disagree (potentially emotionally) with my opinion that sharing finances is probably more problematic than it’s worth. That’s cool, no problem, people think I’m wrong about all kinds of things, but if you’re at the point of your relationship where you’re deciding whether you should share finances with your significant other or not, at least take into consideration the above and work out some methods that work for you to manage the problem of the tragedy of the commons and think about how to disarm any other problems that could arise from shared finances such as  resentment.

Bonus Discussion:

One solution to the problem of the tradegy of the commons is to impose more rules and regulations onto the “herdsmen” as the number of herdsmen increases. Travelling around Australia this becomes very apparent. In a city like Melbourne, there are a million rules and regulations so that the vast number of city dwelling herdsmen don’t spoil the environment for the rest of their fellow herdsmen. Contrast this with Queensland or the Northern Territory and the number of rules and regulations is dramatically less. You could argue that in general, the quality of life in a less populated city is higher, not just due to the lack of traffic, often cheaper housing etc, but also the lack of excessive rules and regulations that have been imposed to address the problem of the tragedy of the commons.

An example of the difference in the number of rules is that in Victoria, (Melbournes state) you’re not permitted to drive a car on the beach, the common reason given that driving a car on the beach will kill the birds that live on the beach. While in Queensland, everybody drives their car on the beach. If a Queenslander mentions this to a Victorian, the policeman that’s slowly been installed within the Victorians mind over time will often cause them to judge the Queenslander. I often wonder what this rule following inner policeman mindset does to the tendency of the population to take chances, risks and innovate over time.

*Reading the essay through the lens of todays cultural norms many people would label the essay racist.

Money, Retirement, Life – 3. How much do you need

“Plain dishes offer the same pleasure as a luxurious table, when the pain that comes from want is taken away.” Epicurus 

So how many of these paper life force tokens do you actually need? What sets the upper limit on your spending?

Think about when you were younger and you had less money, I assume you spent less. Then over time you slowly started to earn more, got pay rises, promotions, changed jobs etc. Chances are that your spending increased as your income increased. Did this stop at some point? Should it stop at some point? 

Are you happier now, spending more money than you were when you were younger and spent less? Say you earn a hefty income every month, are you proportionally more happier than the people you know that earn less? You may have more things, go to more fancy restaurants, but has the extra money that you’ve spent added any more happiness or convenience to your life after hedonic adaption is taken into account?

For many people the only thing that puts an upper limit upon how much they spend, is how much they earn. If this is you; you are placing something very important, the cost to maintain your lifestyle in its current state into the hands of something that you cannot control, the amount of and regularity of your income. This is a risky way to live.

I propose that as you spend more you reach a point where your happiness or convenience you receive from the purchase doesn’t increase. The law of diminishing returns kicks in and you hand over more of your paper life tokens and get less or nothing back in return. 

You should optimise your spend so that you are not pissing your finite paper life tokens up against the inevitable wall of diminishing returns.

The first step to doing this is to start to track your expenses. **

In order to know if all of your expenditure is actually making you proportionally happier, you should track how much you spend per relevant categories, and then reflect upon that spend each month. 

You should actually stop and consciously think once per month, am I happy about spending that much on said category?

To optimise anything you need a feedback loop, measuring and reflecting is a feedback loop that will allow you to optimise your spending so that you are not spending more on things that do not make you happy.

For example, here is how my spending on Recreational activities has changed over time since I started measuring and reflecting on all my expenses. This includes capital and operational expenditure on Hiking, Mountain Biking, Fishing, Camping and Surfing:
And here is how my spending on Food has changed over time, since I started measuring and reflecting on my expenses:

I know you’re probably thinking, gee Extreme Man, that seems like a lot of effort, I’m not sure if I’ve got the time. But you see, the thing is you traded a part of your life that you are never going to get back for that money, and then you decided to spend that money on things. Surely you owe it to yourself to keep a record of how much of your life you traded for those things, and time to consider if trading your life for those things was worth it? And if it’s takes too much time to record the expense, perhaps you should save even more time and not make the purchase in the first place?
Once you do this, you’ll find that over a few months your spending will go down. You’ll slowly work out the actual cost per month to maintain your life in a fashion that you can consciously justify to yourself. 
This is a very powerful moment. If money is a paper life force token that you have traded your life for, you’ve now worked out how much of those paper life force tokens you are trading back each month to sustain your life. 

If your salary gives you a certain amount of dollars per month, you’ve now inverted that relationship and worked out the number of months per dollar.
Once you know the number of months per dollar the way you think about the cost of things changes, you now know the conversion rate between the price of things, and the amount of your life.
People generally compare buying something to not buying something because they don’t know what else to do with their money; the decision is to buy and have it or not buy it and don’t have it, often this comparison inevitability results in buy it and have it as there’s no down side. Once you work out the number of months per dollar this comparison is a lot more valid. You’re comparing buying something and having it versus not buying it and keeping X months of freedom saved up.
Once you know the number of months per dollar you can immediately look at your savings and say, my savings will support me for X weeks/months/years. You now know how much of your freedom you can buy with the amount of savings that you have. You can also work out using (the cost of travel) how much freedom in certain places you can buy with your savings.
Knowing this empowers you to make informed decisions to change things about your life.
But what if looking at your savings and knowing you have X weeks/months/years of freedom saved up isn’t enough? What if you don’t want temporary freedom, you want permanent freedom? What is the cost of perpetual do anything you want, whenever you want freedom? That’s up Next.
**In the final topic in this series I’ll provide a spreadsheet that makes tracking all of your expenses easy.

Money, Life, Retirement – 7. Reading List

“In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time — none, zero. You’d be amazed at how much Warren reads–and at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I’m a book with a couple of legs sticking out.” Charlie Munger

As mentioned in the first rambling of this series there is very little original thought in this entire long winded series of ramblings. I can take credit for some bad jokes, an overly long passive aggressive hashtag and I’ve put a fair bit of effort into the spreadsheets over time, but all the thoughts that have prompted this series are covered elsewhere by people who are no doubt my superiors in rationality, mathematical ability, turn of phrase and attractiveness to the opposite sex.

Anyway, if you’d like to learn more here are some of the things I have read that I recommend:

Books:

Your money or your life by Vicki Robin – https://www.amazon.com/Your-Money-Life-Transforming-Relationship/dp/0143115766

The four pillars of investing by William Bernstein – https://www.amazon.com.au/Four-Pillars-Investing-Portfolio-ebook/dp/B0041842TW

The millionaire next door – Thomas Stanley – https://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Next-Door-Surprising-Americas/dp/1589795474

A random walk down Wall st by Burton Malkiel – https://www.amazon.com/Random-Walk-Down-Wall-Street/dp/0393330338

The Simple Path to Wealth by Jim Collins – https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Path-Wealth-financial-independence/dp/1533667926

Common Sense on Mutual Funds by John Bogle – https://www.amazon.com/Common-Sense-Mutual-Funds-Anniversary/dp/0470138130

The Bogleheads guide to investing – https://www.amazon.com/Bogleheads-Guide-Investing-Taylor-Larimore/dp/0470067365

Early Retirement Extreme by Jacob Lund Fisker – https://www.amazon.com/Early-Retirement-Extreme-Philosophical-Independence/dp/145360121X

Websites:

• Mr Money Mustache – http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/
  • Getting rich, from zero to hero in one blog post – http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/02/22/getting-rich-from-zero-to-hero-in-one-blog-post/
  • The shockingly simple math behind early retirement – http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-simple-math-behind-early-retirement/
  • News Flash: Your Debt is an Emergency – http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/04/18/news-flash-your-debt-is-an-emergency/
  • What is Hedonic Adaption and how can it turn you into a Sukka – http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/22/what-is-hedonic-adaptation-and-how-can-it-turn-you-into-a-sukka/
• Jim Collins – http://jlcollinsnh.com/
  • Stock Series – http://jlcollinsnh.com/stock-series/
  • The monk and the minister – http://jlcollinsnh.com/2011/06/02/the-monk-and-the-minister/
  • Why your house is a terrible investment – http://jlcollinsnh.com/2013/05/29/why-your-house-is-a-terrible-investment/
  • Debt the unacceptable burden – http://jlcollinsnh.com/2015/03/26/stocks-part-xxviii-debt-the-unacceptable-burden/
• Mad Fientist – http://www.madfientist.com
• Early Retirement Extreme- http://earlyretirementextreme.com/
• Vanguard – http://www.vanguard.com.au/
  • Principles for Investing Success – https://static.vgcontent.info/crp/intl/auw/docs/corporate/principles-for-investing-success.pdf?20161014|163125
• FIRE calculator – http://www.firecalc.com/
• Determining withdrawal rates using historical data (William Bengen) – http://www.retailinvestor.org/pdf/Bengen1.pdf
• Aussie Firebug – http://www.aussiefirebug.com/
  • Australian Financial Independence Calculator – http://www.aussiefirebug.com/australian-financial-independence-calculator/

Apps:

• If you don’t want to track every single expense manually in a spreadsheet (you should you lazy bastard…) you can use an app like:
  • PocketBook (Aus)  – https://getpocketbook.com/
  • or Mint (US only) – https://www.mint.com/

If you’d like to suggest any others please leave a comment below.

Money, Life, Retirement – 6. If God is a DJ, life is the dance floor, love is the rhythm and you are the spreadsheet**

“A wise mans life is based around fuck you”  John Goodman in The Gambler

When I’m not being extreme or rambling about things on the internet I’m sometimes paid to get things done in a certain way for a certain cost in a certain amount of time as a project manager.

A project is basically a methodical way to get from a starting point to an end point. A lot of the formal project things that you do for a project apply equally well to other things where you are going from a starting point to an end point . One of the key things at the start of any project is the part where you spend time planning and analysing by considering things like the following:

1. Working out what the end point looks like
2. Working out the steps and order to get to the end point
3. Forecasting the amount of time to get to the end point in enough detail so that you can track progress
4. Forecasting the cashflow for the project in enough detail to know if you’re on track
5. Analyse the constraints
6. Analyse the assumptions
7. Analyse the risks

We took care of number 1 in the above list in a previous rambling. By using the 4% rule (or similar) you know where you need to get to.

We’ve somewhat taken care of number 2 in the above list in the previous rambling where I gave an example about my investment approach, which provides an example of how to get to the sum that the 4% rule requires to reach financial independence.

To take care of the rest, you need to make a plan. It’s important to do this for two reasons:

• If things aren’t written down they don’t really exist; due to the fallible nature of human memory and our psychological biases it’s likely that things that aren’t written down will change over time. For instance I think that my childhood landline phone number has 1 different digit than my brother does (he’s obviously completely wrong of course….)
• You need something visible to act as a prompt to remind you of your goal, track your progress and remind you of your plan when required. Investing can sometimes be an emotional and exciting affair, but it shouldn’t be. When emotions come into investing is when mistakes happen. You need to plan how you’re going to manage your investments in mathematical, rational, broad daylight so that when there is a time of excitement or emotion you can refer back to your boring plan and stay the course.

I can’t emphasise this enough; write it down. This is supposed to be serious and boring. Stick it up on the back of your toilet door so you need to look at it every day. Think about your future while lightening the load. Any good project manager would not try to deliver a project without first writing down the project plan. Your freedom and investment plan is a whole lot more important than a project, it deserves a written down plan.

Your investment plan should:

• State your goal
• Document your approach and the decisions that you’ve made so you can refer back to it in times of doubt, including the following:
  • Asset allocation
  • If using ETFs which ETFs
  • If using a managed fund, which managed fund
  • Rebalancing policy if applicable
• List all assumptions and constraints
  • Income
  • Expenses (before and after Financial Independence)
  • Assumed average return
  • Withdrawal Rate (4% rule or similar)
  • Current savings
• Forecast progress in a method that can be tracked at appropriate intervals
• Do a risk analysis, capture the relevant risks and what your actions will be if they eventuate so you won’t be making decisions on the fly, you’ll be executing well thought out plans.
  • What if you lose your job?
  • What if your assumptions are wrong?
  • What if the stock market crashes?
  • What if you come into some money or get a pay rise?

When I went through this exercise I put together a spreadsheet that took all constraints and assumptions and turned them into the following outputs:

• Time until financial independence
• Savings needed to retire, and
• A forecast to measure progress against.

This spreadsheet lets you analyse your constraints and assumptions and modify them to see how the outcomes change. It’s a powerful tool to crunch the numbers for hypothetical situations.

You can get download a copy here: Financial Independance Calculator 1.0

Here is an example for someone who:

• Earns $60,000 after tax
• Currently has $20,000 of savings
• Spends $2,500 per month and expects to spend $2,000 per month when they retire

You can see that they need ~$630,000 to reach financial independence, and that will take approximately 12.7 years.  You can also see that when they reach financial independence and stop working their wealth will continue to snowball. In 28 years time they will have been retired for 16 years and will be a millionaire. If you take their Superannuation into account they will have a substantial wealth of $1.8M, and this is after not having worked for 16 years!

If you change some of the variables you can really start to get a sense of what things matter on this journey to financial independence. For example, here’s the same scenario but with spending $300 less per month while working and spending $200 less per month after retirement. You can see that it take almost 2 years off your working life!

Combining that with some of the other things you might need to consider as part of your investment plan (some things were mentioned in part 5) may look something like the following example:

Writing down your investment plan and sticking it up somewhere in your house so it’s visible shows your high level long term goal and your annual progress in tracking towards that goal. This will provide a readily available reminder of the core decisions that you’ve made and show what those decisions will compound to over your investment plan timeframe.

For a large important project such as buying your freedom; the planning and tracking should go that one step further into the detail than what we’ve covered above. High level plans are great, they show where you’re going and how to get there, but for something as important as buying your freedom back from wage slavery, you should take the detail that extra step further to allow you to monitor progress to a detailed level, at least until your trajectory is well known and stable.

To go into this level of detail you should track every expense and every income. You should already be convinced of the necessity of knowing your average spend to allow you to use the 4% rule to work out how much money you actually need to retire (as mentioned in part 3 and part 4). If you track every expense and every income you can use the power of spreadsheets to track in real time:

• your net worth,
• the amount of money needed to retire and
• the amount of time to get there.

This is a worthwhile exercise as this provides a feedback loop that reinforces the relationship between expenditure and time until you can actually buy your freedom.

I’ve made a spreadsheet template to do this which you can download here – Your life in a spreadsheet 1.0 – TEMPLATE

Here’s how it works:

Data Entry Tab:

This tab is split up into Expenses on the left and Income on the right. Here you record every transaction date, category, sub category and amount. You do similar on the income side. I’ve included sample transactions in the spreadsheet to demonstrate how it works.

The next tab is the Dashboard:

While this looks like an intimidating tab, it provides a lot of information to allow you to track your progress.

The main things you need to input are the safe withdrawal rate and your assumed rate of return, given in yellow below.

You will also need to refresh the two pivot tables to reflect new information as it’s entered into the data entry tab. The two pivot tables are the Income and Expenses tables given below.

From the transactions entered into the Data Entry tab a number of useful things will be calculated per month to allow you to track your progress. In the top left corner your performance will be calculated for 3, 6, 12 month averages as well as from the beginning of when you started tracking your data.

A task you should do at the end of each month is reconcile your recorded transactions from the data entry tab with your account balances in the Balances section . This will make sure that you haven’t missed any transactions, expenses or income.

This tab also provides information to allow you to review your expenses in the columns to the left of the expense pivot table. For each expense subcategory the following information is calculated:

• Your average spend per month
• The amount of money you need to save to be able to support that average spend indefinitely, and
• The time you need to work to be able to spend your average amount in that subcategory.

This is a powerful thing, for example, using the sample numbers given in the spreadsheet gives the following two different outcomes for hypothetical take-away food spends per month:

For an average spend of $300 dollars per month on take away food the hypothetical person would need to save $90,000 to maintain this average spend indefinitely, which would take 4.21 years.

However, if by reviewing their expenses every month, considering if that expenditure actually makes them happier or not and reducing the average take-away spend to $150 per month; the amount of savings the hypothetical person needs to sustain that average spend indefinitely drops to $45,000 and they save 2 years off their working life! And that’s just from take away food…

People are generally really bad at relating short term actions to long term consequences. Some examples are fat people eating too much and smokers smoking until they get lung cancer. The power of this spreadsheet is that it shows the direct relationship between your short term expenditure actions and the long term consequences of how long you need to work to support these short term actions.

Charts Tab:

The next tab shows your progress in 2 charts. The first chart shows your Total Income, Expenses, Net Savings and Income from Investments per Month. The second chart shows how your total savings have increased over time. Every time you update the pivot tables these charts will automatically update.

Investment Tab:

The investment tab provides a way to track your investment performance and asset allocation:

Each time you buy a share / ETF you record the transaction details in the bottom yellow section and refresh the pivot table in cells a5:c10.

This provides a way to manage your asset allocation. By entering your target allocation and market value for each share the table will calculate how much you need to buy or sell to get back on target. It’s worth noting that if you wish to include your emergency fund in your bond asset allocation you will need to modify the formula in the Current Weight column to include this.

At the end of each month you capture the Market value and gain / loss numbers from the top table in the monthly reporting columns. This will allow you to input the Portfolio Unrealised gain or loss into the data entry tab for the month from the Gain / Loss per month row. This will then count to your total net worth over time.

To calculate the number of dividends you’ve been paid by each stock refresh the second pivot table in cells n20:o25. Make sure you capture the stock-code accurately in the comments for the share dividends in the data entry tab.

It’s also worth noting that if you choose a managed fund rather than managing your own ETFs / shares you will only need to record the monthly reporting information for input into the data entry tab.

Lists Tab:

The last tab of the spreadsheet contains the lists for the categories and subcategories of income and expenses. You can configure the categories and subcategories to match your needs. Just make sure for the Expense Categories that you use Name Manager to make sure the name of the Category matches named ranges that contain the values for the subcategories. Also make sure that you put in nil cost entries in the data entry tab to reflect the new sub categories (these are hidden in the top rows of the data entry section), you may also need to re-point the total expenses column in the dashboard tab to the bottom of the expense pivot table.

And that concludes this rather long winded series of ramblings. As this has been an epic multi-post ramble I’d like to summarise some of the key points for emphasis:

1. Money is a direct result of a bargain you make with your employer to hand over a very large portion of your life. In effect it’s special paper life force tokens you can exchange with other people for other things.
2. Your life, and by association money, is not a renewable resource, it is finite.
3. There is a counterparty to every transaction and they are only entering into the transaction because they think it will be beneficial to them. By inversion it will probably be net negative for you
4. Due to hedonic adaption you shouldn’t spend large amounts of your paper life force tokens on things that make you temporarilly happy that you will become used to and don’t increase your happiness in the long term. You should invert and spend your paper life force tokens taking things out of your life that make you unhappy.
5. By committing to full time employment you’ve actually limited the time you are free to be in control of your life to only 2 days a week. Two days a week is but wafer thin Monsieur. Only when you’re in the position where you don’t have to work is any choice to commit to full time employment valid, up until that point it’s a decision made under compulsion.
6. To optimise anything you need a feedback loop. Measuring and reflecting upon your expenses per category each month is a feedback loop that will allow you to optimise your spending so that you are not spending more on things that do not make you happy.
7. If your salary gives you a certain amount of dollars per month, by tracking your expenditure per month you can invert that relationship and work out the number of months per dollar. You can then work out the conversion rate between the price of things and the amount of your life you are trading for that thing.
8. The amount of money needed for indefinite retirement equals your yearly expenses divided by the safe withdrawal rate.
9. It’s been shown historically that a 4% withdrawal rate could probably last indefinitely with a 75% stock, 25% bond mix.
10. The most important thing that determines the amount of time until you can retire is your savings ratio. With a 4% withdrawal rate, no current savings and a 7% assumed return a savings ratio of 50% means you can retire in 15 years, a savings ratio of 75% means you can retire in 6.8 years.
11. People are generally bad at relating short terms actions to long term consequences. In order to get to a point where you can buy your freedom you should forecast your plan to financial freedom and track every expense to turn that forecast freedom into actual freedom.

I hope that this has provoked some thought. No matter what the end outcome of that thought is, critically analysing your life choices or lack there-of is a good thing and should be encouraged by everyone.

I also hope that the spreadsheets and methods involved in this series provide some insight for some.

If you have any comments, suggestions or if you agree or disagree with anything that I’ve written and would like to let me know why I’d love to hear it. Please comment below.

In the next post I’ll provide a recommended reading list.

**You know when I first came up with the name for this rambling I thought it was some half remembered chorus from some techno dance song from my alcohol fuelled irresponsible youth. Later I realised it’s from a Pink song. The same Pink that teenage girls, “I used to be cool” mothers and effeminate men like. Wow.

Money, Life, Retirement – 5. How to get to where you want?

“If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time.” Zig Ziglar

So now that you know how much of the paper life tokens you need to be able to buy your freedom permanently, how do you manage to roll up a sufficiently fat wad of them to get there?

You spend a lot less than you earn, and you invest the rest. Put your money to work, let compound interest do the heavy lifting for you.

There are a lot of ways to invest; some people invest in shares, some invest in real estate, some invest in bonds or term deposits, some invest in magic beans or bit coins. You should probably speak to a professional before investing (or at least read a lot of really good books). I’ve spent a lot of time reading investing books and I’m going to give an example of my approach and a description of why I made the decisions I did. I set myself a goal of reading a certain number of books on investing and to decide and write down my strategy only when I had finished.

I doesn’t matter how you manage to build enough wealth to satisfy the 4% rule; only that you earn an appropriate average return above 4% that will account for the compounding affect of inflation, and that you don’t lose your principal. What follows is only an example of the method that I am using, there are many others. This is not advice, only a description of the choices I have made and why.

I first of all set myself some principles to guide my decision making:

• I wanted it to be simple. I already have a full time job and didn’t want another
• I did not want to use any leverage. Leverage won’t make a bad investment good, but is more than capable of making a good investment bad. Furthermore if there’s a counterparty to every transaction and if that counterparty is a bank who is more sophisticated than and understands mathematics and risk better than you do, it’s more than likely that they are getting the better end of the deal.
• I wanted diversification. Humans are fallible (even me), and I didn’t want any one mistake costing me my freedom.

Asset classes and allocations: Growth vs Income

I then decided what asset classes I wanted to invest in.

Here is a chart showing the performance of some different asset classes over the last 20 years with $10,000 initially invested and all dividends reinvested:

Source: http://insights.vanguard.com.au/VolatilityIndexChart/ui/advisor.html?utm_source=IndexChart&utm_medium=LandingPage&utm_campaign=Ret2016&utm_content=Ret

Over a long time period stocks perform better than all other asset classes, however the price can be quite volatile. Hence I decided I also needed bonds to smooth out the fluctuations in my total portfolio. Appropriately rated bonds are safer than stocks, pay regular coupon payments (interest) and the price should be reasonably stable.

Stocks and Bonds are both reasonably liquid assets, but I didn’t want to have to sell any if anything unexpected happened and I needed cash. If you need to sell you’ll either have to pay capital gains tax if the market is up, or realise a loss if the market is down. So I also decided I needed an emergency fund which would sit in a high interest savings account and would pay for my living expenses if I lost my job or some other emergency occurred. I decided a year of living expenses (known from part 3) would be more than enough.

I then needed to decide my asset allocation. As stock prices can move quite substantially based upon fear, greed or the greater economy, your tolerance for watching the variation and potentially the total value of your portfolio plummet should feed into what percentage of stocks you hold. If you are likely to panic and sell if your portfolio plunges in price you will lock in the loss and demolish your returns. If you can set the asset allocation so that you can remain comfortable to stay the course through any kind of future crisis your returns will be good in the long run.

Here is a graph showing the best, worst and average yearly returns based upon the percentage of stocks and bonds that make up a portfolio over a long period of time. Stocks are seen as a growth asset with higher risk, bonds are seen as a defensive asset with lower risk.

Source: https://static.vgcontent.info/crp/intl/auw/docs/corporate/principles-for-investing-success.pdf?20170426|161125

I thought that for me the 70% stocks 30% bonds seemed like a good compromise between a good average return and lower magnitude negative returns in the negative years.

I also did an asset allocation questionnaire which you can do here which suggested that for me an allocation of 70% stocks and 30% bonds was appropriate.

Asset classes and allocations: International Exposure

Having decided upon the asset allocation to growth and defensive asset classes the next thing to decide was the weighting to Australian assets vs International assets.

A common split seems to be 50% Australian assets, 50% International assets. The theory goes that if your Australian assets go bad due to problems with the Australian economy your wealth will be somewhat protected.

I intend to spend a large part of my retirement in Australia or New Zealand and all things being equal, if the Australian economy goes bad Australian asset prices will head south, but prices of things you need to buy to live in Australia or New Zealand should get cheaper as well.

Furthermore when you invest in Australian publicly listed companies you have the benefit of being able to receive franking credits. Franking credits are a tax bonus when you get paid dividends. As Australian companies have generally already paid 30% tax on their earnings franking credits are a way to compensate you so that you aren’t taxed twice on the same earned income. For instance, if a company pays you a $100 dividend that is fully franked you receive $30 in franking credits which is used to offset the income tax you pay on the income from the dividend. For example if your marginal tax rate is 30% you don’t need to pay any tax on the $100 dividend. Taking this to the extremes, if you intend to live on an income low enough to pay no tax, your fully franked dividend payments will increase by 30%. For exampe a 5% dividend yield will turn into 6.5% gross. This is free money.

As I will live on a lot lower income that I do now in retirement (I save a large percentage of my income currently) I will drop down several tax brackets and franking credits turn out to be a pretty powerful bonus.

After considering all of the above I settled upon 70% weighting to Australia and 30% International.

Combining these gave the following Asset Allocation:

Australian Shares: 50%

International Shares: 20%

Australian Bonds: 20%

International Bonds: 10%

I included the emergency fund high interest savings account cash holding in calculating the bond allocation as well as they are similar asset classes.

If you’d like to model your own ideas about what your portfolio should look like, the returns, yields and exposures you should check out this site.

Investing approach

Having determined my asset allocation I needed to work out what type of investing to fill the respective allocation buckets with.

There are a few different types of investing; there is the active type where you are actively choosing which stocks to buy and sell based upon some kind of calculated or perceived value (value investing) or where you trade based upon trends in price movements (technical analysis), or there is passive investing where you buy small chunks of the entire market via a low cost fund that contains parts of the whole index or part thereof (index fund) not attempting to find better companies than the average, simply owning everything.

I have throughout my life tended to settle on the value investing side of the argument. This is the type of investing Warren Buffet, Charlie Munger, Ben Graham and the like are proponents of. I have believed that the market is often irrational and through being  rational and patient you can take advantage of Mr Markets irrationality and make greater returns than average. More recently I’ve come around to a more passive investing approach. The men listed above are actually my heroes in a nerdy kind of way, and it’s been very hard to take a good hard look at one of my core beliefs and actually change my mind, but here are the reasons I have:

• If you’re actively investing you’re competing against highly paid investing professionals who have significantly more time and training than you do to put into their trades. They often have access to CEOs etc to obtain greater insights than you. When I say competing against I mean they can be directly on the other side of the trade from you with their greater time, knowledge and access to management.
• Research for active investing takes a lot of time, time that I don’t have. I used to enjoy reading financial statements and building discounted cashflow models, but now I’d rather go fishing or surfing.
• By picking individual stocks there’s always the chance that the financial reports are fraudulent and the company’s stock price can go to zero. If you buy the whole index there is no chance the entire index will go to zero.
• Once you work out how much money and the time it will take to reach financial freedom the variable that affects it the most is your expenses. Performing sensitivity analysis upon your rate of return will show that an increase in the return above what can be expected by an index fund perhaps won’t provide the benefit in time to reach financial freedom it should once the additional time, effort and risk is taken into account.
• The majority of professional active investors aren’t able to beat the average market return once transactions costs and fees are taken into account, my ego can be large at times, but not so large to think that I, as an amateur can do what many professionals cannot.

Market timing and rebalancing

While I had changed my ideas about Value investing, by implication this also meant that I needed to acknowledge that I probably shouldn’t be attempting to time the market. To reinforce this I needed to examine a key decision I made way back in 2008. During this time I was looking at buying a house in Melbourne. At the time houses were selling at a gross rental yield of approximately 2-3.5% depending upon the house, which was of course a lot worse from a net yield perspective. The more I looked into the market, the more convinced I became that this did not represent any kind of investment value and that any purchase of a house wasn’t investment grade due to the extremely low yield. I was convinced that anyone buying a house as an investment was in fact speculating with leverage for capital gains, and I thought that at any time there could be a market correction or mean reversion back towards the long term averages for several housing value metrics leading to a permanent loss of capital. Fast forward to 2015 and Melbourne house prices continued to increase as follows:

Solving for the amount that house prices in Melbourne could drop in 2015 and not be below 2008 prices gives a total of 35% before you would start to be behind where you were in 2008. This is of course ignoring inflation, interest on mortgage repayments, stamp duty, council fees etc. The humbling lesson I was forced to acknowledge here is that even though I may be convinced that the market is completely irrational it doesn’t mean at all that the market will become rational at any time in the future. In the words of John Keynes, “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent”.

Instead of trying to time the market I decided that as the different asset classes I had chosen to invest in weren’t 100% correlated I would periodically rebalance my holdings. This would by comparison of the different asset class prices force unemotional purely mathematical buying low and selling high from a relative comparison point of view. I decided that during the time that I was pumping cash into my portfolio I would rebalance with input funds, and after retirement I would periodically rebalance once a year.

Investing vehicle

Having decided upon my asset allocation and that I would be investing in index funds the next question was how? There are two main methods for index investing, I could either purchase Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) through a stock broker, or use a managed fund that matched the asset allocation I was looking for. The way I made this decision was based upon the fees that I would be charged. I compared the fees that I would incur by using a fund such as the Vanguard LifeStrategy Growth Fund or using ETFs. Here is how the fees as a percentage of funds invested compared:

The ETFs would allow me to vary the asset allocation simply if I needed to, however the managed fund rebalances automatically and requires no effort, set and forget. In the end I decided to go with the ETF approach as it would let me change my asset allocation in retirement if I wanted to and it was slightly cheaper, however based upon the work by William Bengen there’s probably no need to change the allocation from 70:30 and the simplicity of the Vanguard LifeStrategy fund is appealing.

The next and final step is to write all of this down in an investment plan where forecast progress can be tracked and turned into actual progress over time. I’ll ramble about that and provide some useful spreadsheets that tie all of these ramblings together in the next post.

Money, Life, Retirement – 4. How much do you need to retire and how long will that take?

“You really don’t need to begin saving for retirement before you reach 60. At that point, simply save 250 percent of your income each year and you’ll be able to retire comfortably at 70.” Jonathan Pond

If you were to guess how much you needed to retire indefinitely how much do you think that would be?

• One million dollars?
• Two million dollars?
• It depends upon how long your retirement is going to be for?

Well it depends upon two simple things:

• The amount of money you need to spend each year to sustain your life,
• A withdrawal rate that will not diminish your savings over time (safe withdrawal rate).

This can be expressed by a relatively simple equation:

When you save the amount above you have enough money to buy your freedom. You have reached financial indepenence.

If the safe withdrawal rate is going to make your savings last forever it needs to be less than the average long term return of the asset classes you invest in to account for the variability in their return from year to year.

Some historical returns of different asset classes is given below:

Asset Class	20 year historical return
Australian Shares	8.7%
Global Shares (hedged)	7.6%
Australian Bonds	6.8%
Global Bonds (hedged)	7.7%
Cash	3.4%

Source: http://www.asx.com.au/documents/research/russell-asx-long-term-investing-report-2016.pdf

To work out an appropriate safe withdrawal rate, it’s useful to refer to a study done by a guy called William Bengen, which you can read about here (it’s actually really good). He showed that for a historical period of 50 years that included the great depression and periods of rampant inflation that a 4% withdrawal rate would in almost all cases see your initial savings last for at least 50 years. There are some caveats of course;

• If you are unlucky enough to retire just before a major stock market crash you should probably reduce your expenditure and increase your asset allocation to stocks
• You need to get your asset allocation right (his data showed a 75% stock and 25% bond mix worked well)
• You should rebalance your asset allocation about once a year
• It’s worth noting that if you are an Australian reader you’ll have access to your Superannuation at approximately 65, in which case you could potentially use a higher number than 4% depending upon your age. (your super and non-super total withdrawal rate should still be 4% or below though)

Here’s some examples of how much money you would need to satisfy the 4% rule for different yearly expenditures:

Expenditure per year (before tax)	Amount of money needed to retire
$15,000	$375,000
$20,000	$500,000
$25,000	$625,000
$30,000	$750,000
$50,000	$1,250,000
$70,000	$1,750,000
$100,000	$2,500,000

Additionally there’s a great calculator here which will calculate the percentage chance of your initial savings lasting for a certain number of years based upon historical analysis of years of previous changes in asset prices with the withdrawal amount taken out each year.

Modelled for a starting portfolio of $500,000 and $20,000 expenditure per year (4% rule) where the yearly expenditure increases with CPI every year over a period of 60 years gives the following:

There is an 82.6% chance of having money remaining at the end of the 60 year period (historically). In most cases the modelling tool predicts a substantial amount of money left over at the end of the 60 years (an average of $2,700,000). For Australian readers, this also doesn’t include Super windfall which you can access at approximately 65.

However a guy by the name of Ty Bernicke did a lot of research upon spending habits as we age and found that over the age of about 56 yearly inflation adjusted spending actually decreases by approximately 2% per year. Modelling for this, assuming a retirement age of 35 and the same starting portfolio and expenditure above (4% rule) gives the following:

A 96.5% chance of success and an average portfolio size at the end of the 60 years of $3,700,000. Again this is ignoring Superannuation.

So having established that the method to determine how much money you need to retire is a function of your yearly expenditure and the withdrawal rate, which should be close to the 4% rule, it’s now time to work out how long it will take to save that amount of money and buy your freedom.

The main thing that determines this is your savings ratio, which is given by:

Coupling this with the previous equation for the amount of money needed for indefinite retirement you can see that the effect of expenses on the time you have to retire is non-linear.

Using the NPER function in a spreadsheet you can calculate the time to save enough money to satisfy the 4% rule. Here is the time to retirement for some different savings ratios, assuming the following:

• 4% safe withdrawal rate
• No current savings
• Average return on your investments per year of 7%

You can see at the Savings Ratio boundaries if you save 0% you will never be able to retire, while at the other end if you are saving 100% of your income that means that your expenses are zero and you can retire right now. Also of interest for the Australian reader is the 12% employer Super guarantee gives a time until retirement of 38.8 years, which seems close to general retirement age.

Referring back to the previous rambling, tracking your expenses and minimising them has a very powerful effect on the amount of time until you can retire.

I’m sure some are reading the table above and thinking there’s no way they can save any more than 10% of their after tax income. It’s all about priorities, do those expensive take away coffees, fancy restaurant dinners and designer clothes really mean more to you than being able to do whatever you want whenever you want? Is not having to bite your tongue with your terrible boss at your place of employment worth less to you than a new handbag?

Even with an Australian wage of $50,000 before tax, if you optimise your spending it’s possible to save above 60% of your after tax income per year and be in a position to retire in approximately 11 years.

Now that you have an understanding of the basic maths, it’s time to come up with a plan, which we’ll do in the next rambling.

Money, Life, Retirement – 2. What to do with Money

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.” Henry Thoreau

In the previous rambling I argued that the most important definition of money is special paper tokens that you exchange large portions of your life for via employment.

It got a little extreme, it was perhaps a little confronting relating every trivial transaction that you make with your own mortality, I even used hashtags.

But if you shouldn’t fritter away your precious non-renewable life force on expensive skinny soy cappuccinos and designer handbags, what should you spend these special paper tokens on?

To start with I’d like to talk a little about hedonic adaption.

From a genetics point of view, by the very fact that you are here reading this blog at the end of countless generations of sexual reproduction means that you, out of all the possible permutations of your ancestors are likely the best at adapting to your current environment. People are good at adapting to environments and as part of that we are good at adapting to things. You are an adaption machine.

Say for example you have an old 2000 model Toyota Corolla. Probably a pretty reliable car, it doesn’t cause you any discomfort by breaking down, meets all of your transport needs but doesn’t particularly make you feel good when you drive it. A 2000 Toyota Corolla doesn’t make anyone feel sexy or good about themselves. Say one day you decide to part with $25,000 of your hard earned paper life force tokens to buy a brand new Toyota Corolla. Oh what a feeling.  In the first week you’re offering to drive your friends anywhere they want to go, doing unnecessary errands and trips, because you enjoy the feeling of driving this new car. It makes you feel happy.

But the problem is that the happiness you gain from a new thing is temporary. In 2 months’ time all happiness resultant from the new car feeling is gone. Your brand new Toyota Corolla has become just a functional means of transport. Compared to your previous corolla there is no long term net change in how the car makes you feel when you drive it. You’ve become used to it. What has changed though is your bank balance. $25,000 of your paper life tokens gone. Perhaps you manage to save $12,500 per year. What you have done is exchanged two years of forced labour for a brand new car that is perfectly functional but does not increase your happiness one bit in the long term when compared to your last one.

Hedonic adaption is the ability of your brain to become used to anything that once bought you happiness.

Studies have been done on this topic by surveying recent lottery winners and recent paraplegics. What was found that the lottery winners were above their usual happiness level for a time, but over time they adapt and their happiness levels return to normal. Similarly the paraplegics were found to be unhappy after their accident, but then over time their happiness levels basically returned to normal.

What I propose is that rather than spending large amounts of your paper life force tokens on things that you will become used to and won’t increase your happiness any in the long term, that you’re probably better off if you invert and spend your paper life tokens taking things out of your life that make you temporarily unhappy.

For example, say you really dislike doing the dishes. Is the feeling of last nights mashed potato being squeezed between your fingers under the dirty dish water enough to make you spew a little in your mouth? Spend some of your paper life tokens on a dishwasher. Never have to touch underwater mystery food again.

Similarly, if you wake up every weekday morning, labouring through the same morning commute, the same office politics, deadlines and tasks like a real life perverted Groundhog day, only to reach the end of the day to then eat, sleep and prepare to do it all over again. If you think that your precious finite life would be better spent going surfing , bushwalking, or any other activity of your own choosing each morning, perhaps to increase your happiness you should remove this source of displeasure from your life.

I’m sure that a lot of people don’t directly relate full time employment as a source of displeasure. What I think is that people don’t understand the freedom that they have given up by this commitment. By committing to full time employment you’ve limited the time that you are free to be in control of your own life to only 2 days a week. 2 days a week tis but wafer thin monsieur.

Put in a stronger sense, I think anyone that defends their choice to commit to full time employment is suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. You are a captive. Any free will you have is perceived, a shallow attempt to rationalise the dire situation you’ve found yourself in as you think there is no way to escape. You should know that your captor only has their own self-interest at heart.

Only when you’re in the position where you don’t have to work indefinitely is the choice to commit to full time employment valid, up until that point it is not a choice, it is a decision made under compulsion.

So to take this back to the original question, what should you spend these paper life force tokens on? You exchanged large portions of your precious finite life being a captive in exchange for these tokens, hence in my view you should spend them on buying your freedom.

How do you do that?

1. You work out how many of these paper life force tokens it takes to maintain your life
2. You work out how many of these paper life force tokens it will take to maintain your life indefinitely
3. You work out a way to accumulate that many paper life force tokens
4. You work out how long that will take and track your progress at regular intervals.

To some the dot points above may seem unachievable, but I can assure you, by harnessing the super power of compound interest this is achievable by anyone. Compound interest is a super power.

Keep reading for ramblings, details and tools to assist with the above.

Link to the next post

Money, Life, Retirement – 1. Introduction

“And finally, monsieur, a wafer thin mint”, Maitre D

 

Introduction to the introduction:

So I’ve been thinking about this series of posts for a while now. I often feel like everywhere I go, every conversation or interaction I have, that this topic is the elephant in the room. Often the elephant is standing on peoples necks, shitting elephant shit on peoples shoulders or trunk punching people in the testicles/uterus, but for some reason I seem to be the only person aware of this cheeky grey menace.

I think money, how you use it, and spending the largest part of your life working by default without making a conscious well informed decision to do so is the most important topic in your life, but nobody talks about it. Not making a conscious decision is in fact making a decision, a decision to be someone who makes bad decisions. In terms of extreme ramblings, this will definitely be one…**

 

Actual introduction:

So, what do you think of when you think of money?

Do you think of fast cars, fast women/men and champagne?

Or do you perhaps think of a faith based medium of exchange that has no intrinsic value of its own?

Or do you think of it as special paper tokens that you exchange large portions of your life for?

All of the above are kind of true. Money can be exchanged for all kinds of hedonic pleasures or short term thrills. Fiat currency is perhaps the largest example of species wide group think, a cultural construct that only has meaning because everyone else believes it does. Money is in fact the result of expending large portions of the finite time that you have here on this earth in what we call employment.

Out of the three examples above, it’s the third one that has weighed on me the most over the last few years.

I’ve had a reasonably unique experience compared to my peer group. At the age of 34 I’ve had a total of 3 years off work  in two big juicy lumps. During this time off I did whatever it was that I wanted to do. Such as travel, fishing, surfing, camping, growing a ginger beard, designing things, building things, demolishing things, reading things, learning things etc. When you have that amount of time off work your time is quickly filled up with things you want to do and enjoy doing. After about 3 months you start to wonder about how you ever had the time for full time employment in the first place.

Contrast this with how you feel when you get back to work. Going from having 7 days a week, 365 days a year to fill with any number of activities that you choose, to being an employee for 5 days a week, commuting to your place of employment at the beginning and end of each day, having an hour of sunlight if you are lucky to do non employment related things before having to cook, eat, clean, go to sleep and do it all again the next day. Only having a wafer thin 2 days a week to do things that you choose uninterrupted by commuting and employment.

To put this in context, here are some examples of how much time I spend in employment related activities vs time I spend in activities of my own choosing:

Time at work: 8:30 am until generally 5:30 pm – 9 hours per work day

Time commuting to work (by bicycle): 45 minutes each way – 1.5 hours per work day

Total hours per week: 52.5

Time spent mountain biking per week: 3 hours per week

5.7% of the time I spend at work I spend mountain biking on the weekend

Time spent surfing per fortnight: 3 hours per fortnight

2.8% of the time I spend at work I spend surfing

Time spent fishing per fortnight: 5 hours per fortnight

4.7% of the time I spend at work I spend fishing

Time spent having sex per week: 10 minutes per week

0.03% of the time I spend at work I spend having the sex!!!

(Ok, perhaps the last example was exaggerated for the sake of my rambling. It’s probably closer to 15 or maybe even 16 minutes.)

Thought of in this context, it is clear that money is a direct result of a bargain you strike with your employer to hand over a very large portion of your life in exchange for special paper tokens you can exchange with people for other things.

So what do people generally do with these paper tokens that they’ve exchanged very large parts of their finite life for? Is it treated like the precious non-renewable resource that it is? (your life is of course not renewable) or is It treated like a renewable resource that will be around forever and can be fritted away on the next thing that takes your fancy?

Referring to the graph above, mostly it’s the second one. Most people live in a world of expensive take away coffees, brand new cars, shoes, handbags, designer clothes and mega mortgages.

We’re continuously told via advertising and our peers that you should spoil yourself, you’ve worked hard, and you deserve it.

But what is so obvious and yet hides in plain sight is that there is of course a counter party to every single transaction. Every overpriced take away coffee has a counter party on the other side that is entering into the transaction only because they think this transaction will be beneficial to them, and by inversion, probably negative for you. Across the counter at the car dealership, hand bag store or mortgage broker is a suit wearing vampire that wants to suck your finite life force straight from your veins via a proxy we call money, while all you’re interested in is getting the right photo of you smoothing out that sold sign on the real estate for-sale sign and smiling just right for your Instagram followers. #sold #nesting #Ididntevendosimpleyear8mathematicsbeforedecidingtoenterintothismountainoflifecripplingdebt #yolo

So what should you do with these paper tokens that you’ve exchanged large parts of your life for?

I’ll ramble about that in the next post.

Link to the next post

** I’ve been thinking about my motivations for writing all of this and what they may be. Is it perhaps my need to convince people of my argument to satisfy my need for social proof? Is it some kind narcissistic virtue signalling? Is it some way to publicly back myself into an inconsistency-avoidance tendency based corner? Or is it that I’m just worried about that a few years from now I’ll be retiring really early and eventually I’ll get bored of fishing every day while all my mates are still stuck working full time hating their lives compared to my relative freedom? It’s probably a little of all of them.

Besides an original hashtag and a pretty serious spreadsheet or two there’s not much original thought in this series of ramblings, everything here has been mentioned by some pretty smart, rational people before, I’ll give a reading list in the last post of the series.

Superannuation or Suckerannuation?

What if I asked you how much Superannuation you had, would you know?

What if I asked you if you knew what fees and insurance premiums were coming out of your Superannuation every month, would you know that?

What if I asked you how you knew that your Superannuation Fund had your best interests at heart and wasn’t just trying to line it’s filthy unproductive finance industry pockets at your expense?

Would you tell me something like it’s the super fund for <insert profession>’s and they really understand the challenges  and  circumstances of <insert profession>, and they also have inclusive ads on TV, the radio and at bus stops shaming other “fund industry suits” but saying that their suits are different all the while they’re claiming great investment performance, whatever the hell great investment performance means???

 

Yes? No?

 

I’ve recently taken a serious interest in Superannuation and retirement. For example I spent approximately 8 hours on a weekend a few weeks ago trawling the Australian Tax Office website learning all about how Super is taxed, how it can be accessed early, concessional limits, lifetime annuities and self-managed super funds. All very exciting stuff to an Extreme Man.

Anyway, without getting too far into my crazy ideas about early retirement I thought I should look at my super and work out how much I have and how it has been performing.

I have a Super Fund with VicSuper, and like many Australians I use it only because an employer years ago used it as their default option.

I logged in to their members website and found after my 18 years of working, I’ve managed to accumulate about $46,000, not too bad I suppose for an Extreme Man that tends to take extended holidays all the time, but after a little bit more investigation on their clunky website I managed to find that I was being charged about $60 a month in various fees! To put that in perspective, that’s about enough for 15 beers every week at Public Bar on a Monday!!! Or, assuming this extra 60 dollars a month was allowed to embrace the super power of compound interest, at an interest rate of 6% this $60 a month would turn into approximately $120,000 over a 40 year time-frame!!!

The next obvious step was to investigate these fees further by trying to export every single transaction from my super account since it was started way back in 2001.

I found that the transaction records on the website only went back about a year… Helpful.

I then called their contact number and said that I’d like every single transaction for my super account all the way back to the beginning of space and time. The response I got was something along the lines of they only provide what they need to provide under the regulations, which is about 10 years of history, and I couldn’t get this in an easy to use format I would need to go through 10 years of statements to work this out…. Imagine an industry that is only controlled/motivated by compliance to regulation, not competition and innovation to attract or retain customers…. Wow.

So go through 10 years of statements I did and here are some of the nuggets of super fund greed I found. I need to add to this that I had never changed anything in my Super account apart from changing my asset allocation to 100% cash in 2012. Everything that has happened below is somehow the default option…

• My fees had steadily increased from $70 per year to $700 per year…
• Included in this was insurance costs (which I never requested) which had risen from $57 per year to approximately $500 per year…
• In 2011 they swapped from a yearly statement to a 6 monthly statement, no doubt this made the fee numbers look less as they were only over a 6 month period. This worked for a short amount of time until they happened to increase past what they had been for the 12 month cycle…
• I started off having a life insurance policy for $90,000, by the end of the 10 years I had a life insurance policy for $412,000 and income protection insurance of $3,000 per month, all without asking for any insurance at any time, apparently the default option must include ever increasing insurance cover…
• Approximately $51,000 of contributions had been made, but after fees and taxes on returns the balance is $46,466… Over 10 years I have actually lost a good wad of money, mostly through ever increasing fees… (Approximate as roughly $1500 was contributed before 2006, but it’s hard to be precise as there are no records of this..)
• My 100% cash asset allocation has returned the dismal rate of 1.89% over the last year (this is probably less right now as interest rates have gone down) compared to a rate of 2.87% currently easily available on a plain old Ubank Usaver Ultra account…

And here it is in graphs:

So what’s the explanation for this rampant gorging of fees by VicSuper?

Does VicSuper (probably all other Super Funds as well) think that their members will treat their Super money as money that isn’t theirs,  if they get some (any) at retirement they treat it as a windfall, rather than money they actually worked for and invested over a long term? Is the apathy of most people towards their Superannuation really that great? I know in my case it has been..

Or do they think that over a long term gradually increasing fees will go unnoticed, similar to the anecdote about boiling a frog to death?

Surely they have complied with all regulations, but how can it possibly be in my best interests to buy ever increasing amounts of insurance with my hard earned Super money? How is this allowed to be the default position?

I’ve now stopped all insurance payments from my Super fund. In general insurance is a tax on people who are bad at math, and why on earth would I need a payout if I die? I’d much rather a theoretically $120,000 greater sum in my Super at retirement as mentioned above.

 

The next step on my path to not being a Sucker is to look into some kind of Self-Managed Super Fund, with low compliance fees.

 

And how about you? If you can answer all the questions at the start of this rant correctly, bravo, well done good Sir, you are smarter, more sophisticated and probably a better lover than I.

If not, then it’s time to face facts that you are actually a Sucker. Take control of your money Sucker, strike back at the full moist leach that is the Australian finance industry, sucking on the blood and sweat of workers like you in other more productive Australian industries.