Retirement Spending Rules and Forced RRIF Withdrawals

Last week's post left unexplored retirement portfolio withdrawal strategies that could serve as alternatives to our base case of a constant inflation-adjusted dollar amount. This week, we'll look at several such optional strategies, plus we'll discuss what to do about forced minimum withdrawal rates for registered retirement income funds.

The portfolio assumptions we'll use for our comparisons:

• $100,000 in assets as of retirement date
• 30-year expected duration of retirement
• asset allocation 50% fixed income (Canadian government T-Bills/cash instead of the broad bonds in our previous so that we can use historical data going further back in the Stingy Investor Asset Mixer tool), plus 50% equity (in equal parts TSX Composite Canada, S&P 500 USA and MSCI EAFE Developed countries)

1) Base case: Constant Inflation-Adjusted Dollar Amount
Method: Calculate a dollar amount based on a sustainable withdrawal rate as a percentage of the portfolio at the start of retirement. Increase annually per the past year's inflation.

Example: using the 4.0% rate that worked in the past (though 3.5% is the going-forward sustainable withdrawal we estimated in our previous post to be reasonable nowadays), in Year 1, withdraw $4000, in Year 2, after a CPI rise of 2.0%, withdraw 4000 x 1.02 = $4080.

Key Characteristics:

• Designed to maintain a steady lifestyle - while early on retirement perhaps more is spent on travel and activities, even if life slows down later on spending may rise on health care or gifts.
• Usually ends up leaving a lot more legacy at death compared to the other alternatives due to conservative withdrawal rate based on worst case assumptions designed to avoid depletion of the portfolio.
• Withdrawal amounts may look very low after a multi-year stock market bull run, making it tempting to abandon the strategy and increase withdrawals

2) Constant Percentage of Portfolio Balance
Method: Every year withdraw the same percentage amount of the current portfolio remaining balance, which may be up or down according to market swings and the effect of withdrawals

Example: Stingy Investor's tool shows us that applying a 4% withdrawal rule to historical results for our sample portfolio from 1970 to 2013 produced the following table of real (inflation-adjusted) dollar withdrawals.

(click on image to enlarge)

Key Characteristics:

• Suited to luxury or discretionary spending - amounts from year to year are highly variable - see in the table above how the amount withdrawn fell about a third from 1972 to 1974 and took till 1986 to get back to near the initial $4000 mark.
• Allows slightly higher percentage withdrawal rate than the initial percent set in the constant dollar method, but despite never incurring the risk of totally depleting, higher withdrawal rates can eat into the portfolio enough to reduce the balance to very low levels and much diminished dollar withdrawal amounts. Using Stingy Investor again, we see that a 9% withdrawal rate would have started with $8878 withdrawn in 1970 but that would have dropped to less than half that by 1980 and to only about $3000 twenty years later in 2000. The portfolio had under $11,000 left after 30 years. That's only one scenario. In his classic book Conserving Client Portfolios During Retirement, William Bengen found that a constant percentage strategy for a US investor using data going back to 1926 would on average still have incurred a 15% drop from starting amounts, even using a 4.43% withdrawal rate.

3) Higher Withdrawals in Early Years
Method: Calculate a set dollar amount higher than the constant dollars of method 1 above, adjusting it annually for inflation as before too, for the first X years of retirement, then reduce the amount in later years, perhaps by cutting part or all of the inflation adjustment.

Example: There is no set way to decide on the parameters, many combinations are possible. Bengen gives an example of a 1955 retiree who takes a 4.78% withdrawal rate for the first ten years of retirement, i.e. a $4777 real annual withdrawal, then takes an adjustment of inflation less 3% for the next ten years and at inflation for the ten years following that. It's a combination that ensures the portfolio would not have run out after 30 years. He compares that to a fixed dollar withdrawal retiree who have been able to withdraw only $4433. In exchange for $343 more for ten years (7.8% more), the higher early withdrawal retiree would have suffered an income that eventually became 19% less.

Key Characteristics:

• Suited to those who don't mind a big drop in spending in later years - the income penalty of the later drop is much greater the reward of the early permissible boost, according to multiple scenarios Bengen constructed. More than half of the 30 years during retirement experienced lower spending than the constant dollar amount.
• Maximum workable non-depleting withdrawal rates are not much more than the maximum sustainable rate of the constant dollar approach. Eyeballing Bengen's results show the early boost possible in his formulations to be about 0.25-0.3% more.

4) Floor and Ceiling
Method: Calculate a first-year dollar amount then each year withdraw a percentage of the current portfolio value, within a lower "floor" limit and upper "ceiling" limit compared in real dollars to the initial amount (or in a variation proposed by Vanguard, in this review of the alternatives, compared to the previous year amount).

Example: A 5.0% initial withdrawal, or $5000 in our $100k portfolio is bounded to not fall less than 5%, i.e. below $4750 in real dollars, or go above 10% ($5500, which would mean the portfolio had risen to $110k - 5% of 110,000 is 5500 - or more).

Key Characteristics:

• Provides some flexibility in spending according to market performance, with reward in good times and restriction in bad times, yet quite a bit of stability in funds available for spending. It's a solution in between fixed dollar and percent of portfolio.
• Allows an appreciably higher initial spending rate. The downside restriction in particular is key in protecting the portfolio. The upside limits make no difference! Bengen's figures show that the larger the allowable downside reduction, the greater the safe initial withdrawal amount. a 5% reduction floor allows approximately a 0.8% higher initial percentage - instead of the 3.5% we calculated, that would allow 4.3%. A 10% floor gives a 1.2% initial boost and a 15% floor permits a 1.5% boost. The big question is whether the investor can and will carry out the actual spending reduction after markets have gone sour.

RRIF or LIF withdrawal rates complicate life - The requirement imposed by the federal government to withdraw a rising minimum percentage of money ( based on outdated longevity assumptions) from RRIFs and other registered retirement accounts is completely out of sync with any of the above strategies.  For the required withdrawals, see this table from TD Canada Trust. Being obliged at age 71, when all registered retirement accounts must begin withdrawing money, to take out 7.38% far exceeds the safe rates to avoid portfolio depletion. There have been complaints in the media, like this article in the Financial Post and this one in the Globe and Mail, about the unfairness and the danger to savings depletion.

What can an investor do: avoid spending the forced withdrawal amount in excess of the sustainable minimums we have discussed, and in particular,

• Delay conversion of RRSPs to RRIFs and forced withdrawals as long as possible (age 71), keeping in mind that partial conversion is worthwhile to take advantage of the pension income tax credit (consult this page at TaxTips.ca for details). This step, and the next, allow tax-free accumulation to continue as long as possible, which is a significant benefit.
• Contribute to a TFSA as much excess as possible. The yearly contribution limit is currently $5500 and there is no age restriction, nor any forced withdrawals. Like any registered account, all income and gains in a TFSA are tax-exempt.
• Re-invest the remaining excess amount in a taxable account. There is on-going tax paid on income in such an account but the judicious use of efficient investments can defer the payment of tax, which helps.

Bottom Line: The Floor and Ceiling method offers an appealing compromise between income stability and higher sustainable withdrawal rates for those who have the discipline to reduce withdrawals after market downturn years.

Disclaimer: This post is my opinion only and should not be construed as investment advice. Readers should be aware that the above comparisons are not an investment recommendation. They rest on other sources, whose accuracy is not guaranteed and the article may not interpret such results correctly. Do your homework before making any decisions and consider consulting a professional advisor.

Refining the 4% Retirement Withdrawal Rate Rule: Pay Attention to Stock Market Valuation

How much can be withdrawn each year to spend on retirement expenses without depleting an investment portfolio can be a daunting decision considering the money has to last 25, 30 years or more. In 2009 we introduced the widely-recognized rule-of-thumb solution called the 4% rule, which entails taking out 4% of the capital in the first year of retirement and then continuing to take out the same amount year after year after increasing the amount for the previous year's inflation. (Note that the 4% rule is not withdrawing 4% of the remaining capital every year - obviously you will never run out no matter how small your balance gets.)

Actuary Fred Vettese wrote about the 4% rule in the Financial Post in July, saying that it might be too low, since at least a couple of recent historical scenarios applying an 8% withdrawal rate did not run out after 25 years. However, he does advocate caution and recommends sticking with the lower 4% rate. He cites as the key reason that rates of return on investments are likely to be much lower in future - in the order of 3% real (after-inflation) return in a diversified portfolio. That's compared to the Credit Suisse Global Investment Returns Yearbook 2014 reported historical average for Canada of 5.7% for equities and 2.1% for bonds from 1900 to 2013, or 3.9% in a portfolio containing half of each.

A world of 1% lower returns - Our own recent look at prospective future returns for Canada and for the USA (especially!) and other foreign countries found much the same probable return as Vettese proposes. Using the ranges of future return estimates in our posts, which end up straddling Vettese's 3% real return, we figure a portfolio of 50% equity (1/3 each of Canada, USA and other Developed plus Emerging Markets together) and 50% Canadian bonds, will likely produce 2.8 to 3.1% annual compound real return.

Effects of 1% less on the Maximum Safe Withdrawal Rate - Vettese does not demonstrate in the newspaper article the exact impact on the maximum sustainable withdrawal rate retirees can adopt. But other researchers in the USA have done so and included a longer 30 year retirement period (is even that enough for people retiring early and living longer?). The results suggest some caution is in order for the 4% rate.

In a newly-published paper Retirement Risk, Rising Equity Glidepaths, and Valuation-Based Asset Allocation, Michael Kitces and Wade Pfau find that in the past when stock markets were over-valued, such as is the case right now, the maximum safe / sustainable withdrawal rate for a US stocks and (10 year government) bonds portfolio fell short of the 4% rate, no matter which of various asset allocation investment strategies they tested.

A table of their key results is shown below. Note the majority of values under 4.0% for SAFEMAX (the maximum withdrawal rate that doesn't run out of money) in the right hand "Overvalued" column, which we have highlighted by a blue rectangle. Such results based on index values do not take account of fund MERs that further reduce returns by 0.1 or 0.2% even for the lowest fee funds.

(click on image to enlarge)

As a result, we believe a safer withdrawal rate for a 30-year retirement is closer to 3.5% nowadays for a traditional portfolio made up of stocks and bonds.

This and other research points out several other useful ideas for investors contemplating their retirement investment strategy:

• Fixed 60% stocks, 40% bonds or T-Bills (aka cash or short-term bonds up to a couple of years maturity) does quite acceptably - Kitces and Pfau: "... an annually rebalanced static 60% equity exposure is still remarkably effective as a retirement asset allocation". For the investor wishing to keep retirement investing simple, this is a comforting thought. Another conclusion from other research (like William Bengen's seminal book Conserving Client Portfolios During Retirement, is that equity allocations in a range of 45 to 65% do about equally well, especially as retirement duration lasts 20 years and longer. Conversely, very low equity allocations, like 10% stand more chance of running out at withdrawal rates of 4%, or to put it another way, they can sustain only much lower withdrawal rates. The reason is that bonds provide a much lower return than equities.
• Successful retirement income portfolios include at least 30%, up to 70% equity. A fairly even mix of equities, which produce higher returns, and bonds (or T-Bills/cash) which reduce volatility, gives the best chance of success through all types of market environments.
• A rising equity glidepath, where the equity allocation starts low (30% in their testing) and is increased 2% per year over the first 15 years of retirement to reach an eventual 60%, or a strategy that switches amongst 30-45-60% equity allocation according to market valuation, are best suited to the present high-valuation market environment. 
• "... declining equity glidepaths [from 60% equity at retirement steadily down to 30% after 30 years] provide the worst outcomes"! The idea that you should progressively reduce the equity allocation during retirement is unhelpful in an over-valued market environment. Nevertheless, such a strategy is not disastrous as there is always a substantial allocation to equity.
• Cash / T-Bills / Short term bonds (< 2 year) work better in providing safety than bonds (10 year government) as can be seen in the table above. Sacrificing lower return from cash is more than compensated by the much lower volatility. This is particularly so in today's environment where bond returns are already low.

Flexible withdrawal rate rules - 4% growing by inflation is used as the base case to test portfolio resilience but there is no obligation to take and spend 4% or any fixed amount out of the portfolio every year. Next week we'll review various retirement withdrawal alternatives and discuss how the forced withdrawals from registered retirement accounts fit into the picture.

Bottom line - Meantime, investors need to keep in mind that returns are likely to be lower than past historical averages and that spending from retirement portfolios needs to be reduced in consequence.

Disclaimer: This post is my opinion only and should not be construed as investment advice. Readers should be aware that the above comparisons are not an investment recommendation. They rest on other sources, whose accuracy is not guaranteed and the article may not interpret such results correctly. Do your homework before making any decisions and consider consulting a professional advisor.

Fixed Income - best rates in Canada for 1 to 20+ year maturities

A year ago we compared the best available rates for safe fixed income investments with a variety of maturities from on-demand savings accounts to terms expiring in 20+ years. Rates keep changing and it's time to do an update.

As before we have restricted our search to investment grade bonds (BBB or higher) and preferred shares (Pfd2-low or higher), those securities having "substantial protection of interest / dividend payment and principal", either from individual issuers, ETFs or closed-end funds. We've primarily selected investments with hard maturity dates when money will definitely be paid back to the investor. We've thus excluded the many preferred shares with either no fixed maturity date or a date at the discretion of the issuer. Some of these excluded preferreds currently offer much higher rates than anything in our comparisons below - see for example the weekly list of top-yielding preferreds at the Libra Investment Management Quick Pick Prefs page - but such investments bear that crucial difference. Despite focusing on hard maturities, for comparison we have included some of the main Canadian bond ETFs, which of course do not have a definite maturity date as they incessantly keep buying new bonds to replace maturing bonds.

The Investment Options:

• High interest savings account - BMO's version (symbol: AAT770)
  
• Guaranteed Investment Certificates (GIC) - our biggest constraint here is to select only from GICs available from online brokers, ignoring some (see Cannex's complete listing of rates and providers) that might have higher rates but which require going direct to the provider; different brokers have different sets of GIC offerings, especially at the higher-yielding end
• Corporate, federal and provincial government bonds as individual bonds and in target maturity ETFs, or traditional ever-renewing ETFs - see this previous post comparing the ins and outs of fixed income alternatives)
• Preferred shares of individual companies (previous post here)
• Preferred shares of split share corporations (see posts here and here), with under-lying holdings of either a single company or multiple companies

Pre- or No-Tax Accounts: TFSA, RRSP - Green text shows the best rate trade-off between credit risk rating and return. Red text shows rates that fall below the most recent July 2014 CPI inflation rate for Canada of 2.1%. There are quite a few choices that fall short of compensating for inflation even in tax-sheltered accounts so picking the best ones really matters.

(click on image to enlarge)

Comparing this table to the one for September 2013, we notice that interest and dividend rates on offer are lower. Many people, including this blogger(!), have for years expected rates to rise but it has not been happening yet.

The chart below takes the best choices for each maturity range. All investments except the 1-year GIC beats inflation in a tax-protected account.

(click to enlarge)

Taxable Account - There is a lot more red in the table below, indicating investments that do not beat inflation. The higher tax rate on interest income from bonds makes many of the bonds unattractive. The split share preferreds from CGI and Partners Value look especially attractive in contrast.

(click to enlarge)

Disclaimer: This post is my opinion only and should not be construed as investment advice. Readers should be aware that the above comparisons are not an investment recommendation. They rest on other sources, whose accuracy is not guaranteed and the article may not interpret such results correctly. Do your homework before making any decisions and consider consulting a professional advisor.

The #1 Canadian Dividend ETF according to the Shareholder Yield Test

In the past month we have written several posts on using Shareholder Yield as a broader measure of dividend performance, first introducing the concept, then looking at which individual Canadian stocks rate best according to this measure. Today we'll compare the main Canadian dividend ETFs against the measure (see our January post comparing these ETFs on a range of other factors). For a benchmark, we'll also look at the stats for the ETF formed of the 60 largest and most liquid Canadian companies, the iShares S&P/TSX 60 Index ETF (TSX symbol: XIU). After all, if the dividend ETFs don't look any better than the benchmark, why bother with them?

The Comparison Method
First, we had to calculate the Shareholder Yield for all the stocks held by all the dividend ETFs. There are 161 different stocks held by at least one ETF. Then we counted how many of the stocks in each ETF had a positive or a negative Shareholder Yield. As a supplement, we have included the stats for Total Payout Yield, formed as the sum of straight dividend yield and net share purchase/buybacks yield, which is used as the basis for several ETFs in the USA (see our first post for details) though none yet in Canada. Payout Yield gives a better representation of dividend performance than only dividends (to understand this, see the various articles and research papers linked to by Mebane Faber). We did this to see whether there was any consistency in results. Fortunately, we would say yes, both Shareholder Yield and Payout Yield paint the same picture of the ETFs.

The Results
Our comparison table below shows Shareholder Yield in the light blue cells and Payout Yield in the yellow cells, with the total ETF stats at the bottom. Green text is positive and/or good numbers while red text is negative / bad. Within the table, the detailed stats are shown for all the 30 individual stocks held by the ETF that has impressed us the most, the iShares Canadian Select Dividend Index ETF (XDV).

XDV looks significantly better than any other ETF

• It is the only ETF holding a much greater proportion (67%) of companies with positive Shareholder Yield vs the benchmark XIU (57%), or the gamut of all the 161 companies across all the dividend ETFs (also 57%). Even the stocks with negative numbers held by XDV are not extreme - the worst is -7.7% while the bottom stocks of the overall table (not shown) are in the high negative 90 percents and worse.
• XDV's 90% proportion of holdings with positive Payout Yield is also well above both XIU's 82% and the "gamut" range's 78%
• XDV holds all but one (missing only Potash Corp) of the Shareholder Yield superstars (see post on the individual stocks) shown in green text

In sharp contrast, none of the other dividend ETFs looks any better on Shareholder Yield than either XIU or the overall dividend stock average. Only one - CDZ - manages to exceed XIU's Payout Yield.

Somehow, XDV's vaguely defined "rules-based methodology including an analysis of dividend growth, yield and average payout ratio" seems to achieve the closest alignment with Shareholder Yield. XDV's cumulative five-year total return to the end of August 2014 of 79.05% far outstrips XIU's 57.11%. The big question - will it continue? We believe there is a good chance, though perhaps not to the same degree, based on the research, but there are no guarantees.

Cherry-pick high Shareholder Yield stocks - Investors willing and able (i.e. with sufficient funds to properly diversify by buying 20 or so companies) to invest in individual stocks may wish to select stocks with attractive Shareholder Yields and ally that to other stock evaluation methods such as ratio analysis to make a final choice. To that end, below is more of our working table sorted by Shareholder Yield. Stocks not previously shown above, i.e. not held by XDV, have paler blue cells.

Update 30 September: We had no inkling this was coming but S&P Dow Jones Indices and TMX Group have teamed up to create a Canadian stock shareholder yield index, whose constituents are listed here on the TMX website. Horizons ETFs is apparently planning to launch an ETF based on the index according to this Financial Post article.

Disclaimer: This post is my opinion only and should not be construed as investment advice. Readers should be aware that the above comparisons are not an investment recommendation. They rest on other sources, whose accuracy is not guaranteed and the article may not interpret such results correctly. Do your homework before making any decisions and consider consulting a professional advisor.