The Lemon Fool

xeny wrote:

MDW1954 wrote:

Moderator Message:
I personally feel a deaccumulation-centric board would provide a useful service, but I don't know what we'd call it, or quite how we'd distinguish it from HYS-S.4

deaccumulation is potentially very distinct from HYS-S.

I'm looking at deaccumulation in about 3 years. The highest yield asset I currently own is SMT, and I don't expect to change that in retirement. That's very far from anything high yield, but doesn't really fit growth strategies as clearly I need to consider things like how much cash buffer it is optimal to hold.

Why would you not consider things like a cash buffer with a growth strategy?

scrumpyjack wrote: some retirees, myself included, who have sufficient income from their investments and pensions that they do not need, or want, to spend what they have accumulated.

Living off natural yield is just a way of living off capital accumulated, unless you're saying there's no difference between investing before and and after giving up work? Maybe, but in that case why do we have the Retirement Investing board?

Gilgongo wrote:How can retirement (as defined by "giving up work") not be about spending what you have accumulated to spend? Do you mean that some retirees are also earning? I mean, I'm sure they are in some way, but this whole thread seems to be morphing into a slightly odd discussion I'd not anticipated

Well, I retired early (as defined by "giving up work") and for quite a few years my only income was from my savings & investments (what I'd accumulated, if you like), and I was what many on these boards would classify as an "income investor", including having a HYP.

But now, some years on, I've reached (and passed) the age when my pensions have kicked in, and they are more than enough for me to live on, so now as a pensioner I'm saving again and have morphed my investments to preservation/growth (yes, I've dumped the HYP).

Ok, I may not be typical (although not so unusual on these boards, I think), but it shows the issue with having fixed ideas about labels...

Gengulphus wrote:Finally, to return to this thread's subject and MDW1954's "Reach some sort of consensus" challenge, I'm not at all certain whether we have already reached some sort of consensus or not... Discussions like this one can result in people dropping out of them when they don't care about the matters that are still being discussed or only have mild preferences between them, or alternatively failing to make it clear that the preference they're still expressing is only a mild one, both of which can result in the discussion giving the impression of less consensus than there actually is. So I think some sort of poll is in order at this point to try to establish whether there is a consensus or not, and I've therefore just posted such a poll.

At present, the results of the poll are:

31 votes: The Retirement Investing board remains unchanged as it currently is
13 votes: The Retirement Investing board is split into two boards, one to discuss investing after retirement, the other to discuss investing before retirement to fund retirement
9 votes: The Retirement Investing board's subject becomes restricted to investing after retirement only; another board is created to discuss FIRE (but other discussion of investing before retirement to fund retirement should go to other existing boards)
3 votes: The Retirement Investing board's subject becomes restricted to investing after retirement only; discussion of investing before retirement to fund retirement should go to other existing boards
2 votes: The Retirement Investing board's subject becomes restricted to 'decumulation' only; another retirement investing board is created for discussion of 'accumulation'
1 vote: The Retirement Investing board's subject becomes restricted to 'decumulation' only; another board is created for discussion of FIRE (but other 'accumulation' discussion should go to other existing boards)
0 votes: The Retirement Investing board's subject becomes restricted to 'decumulation' only; discussion of 'accumulation' should go to other existing boards

I'm posting these now because the numbers of votes haven't risen all that much since yesterday morning - i.e. the results appear to have stabilised. Note by the way that I've not included some figures from what you get if you click on "View results" in the poll, namely the total votes figure of 59 and the percentages it ascribes to the various options. This is because the poll allows people to vote for more than one option being acceptable - so all it tells us about the number of people who have voted is that it's at least 31 (since nobody can vote twice for the same option) and at most 59 (since every voter must vote for at least one option), and so for instance it only tells us that the Retirement Investing board remaining unchanged is acceptable to between 31/59 = 53% and 31/31 = 100% of voters, while the straight before/after retirement split is acceptable to between 13/59 = 22% and 13/31 = 42% of voters.

I have however noticed wordings of a subsequent comment or two that suggest to me that some might have treated it as a "vote for the best option" poll rather than a "vote for all the options you find acceptable" poll. Nothing remotely conclusive and I'm not pointing any fingers, but I did set the poll up to allow people to change their votes. So if anyone has misunderstood the nature of the poll and wants to correct their vote in the light of that misunderstanding, it's easy to do so.

And just in case this post results in a lot of vote changes, I'll be treating the above results as preliminary and leave the poll running for another day or two before posting some more definitive results.

Gengulphus

mc2fool wrote:The poll is about the Retirement Investing (inc FIRE) board, and I'm a little surprised that what would seem an obvious choice isn't in the poll, namely that Retirement Investing should be for all retirement investing matters, both pre and post retirement, and FIRE is split off to another board, as FIRE isn't, per se, about investing but rather a lifestyle movement characterised by great frugality and extraordinary saving, i.e. the vast majority of one's income.

hiriskpaul wrote:ps, Mc2fool's suggestion about separating out the lifestyle aspects of FIRE might be a good one as this has nothing much to do with investing.

It seems a reasonable point to me as well. But it hadn't been mentioned earlier in the thread (other possibly than by oblique references - if so, I'm afraid I missed them when putting the poll together), and the OP was pretty clear about being about restricting (or possibly splitting) the board along decumulation/accumulation lines (which might or might not have been intended to be the same as after/before retirement lines). So when compiling the poll, I was focussing on the question of whether the board was to be restricted/split along those lines and if so, what the consequences should be for where posts should go, and missed the possible issue of splitting out the FIRE lifestyle aspects.

FIRE does of course also have investment aspects, but issues about those are 'before retirement' and 'accumulation' matters that would fit on an appropriate retirement investing board more-or-less independently of the investor's lifestyle, and indeed not necessarily be all that distinguishable from similar questions from non-FIRE investors (a middling-income investor saving the vast majority of their income and a high-income investor saving a modest amount of their income will be saving similar amounts...). So now that you've pointed the lifestyle aspects of FIRE out, it seems to me that a FIRE-specific board would be a 'lifestyle' board, not a 'finances' board, and to be a separate board, would need to be distinguished in some way from Living Below Your Means. But I don't think I know enough to have an informed opinion on what that distinction should be, so I'll refrain from making suggestions about it!

Gengulphus

Just to throw a curve ball into the discussion, but we can create a sub board within a board!
Just for examples sake we have created a temporary one to demonstrate.
If this work for everyone, please let us know and we can rename adapt accordingly.
Of course you can choose not to use it at all and we can remove it again.

TLF.

stooz wrote:If this work for everyone, please let us know and we can rename adapt accordingly.

I'm thinking...

Retirement - General
Subgroups:

• FIRE
• Investing During Retirement
• Decumulation

Anyone fancy that?

Chris

csearle wrote:

stooz wrote:If this work for everyone, please let us know and we can rename adapt accordingly.

I'm thinking...

Retirement - General
Subgroups:

• FIRE
• Investing During Retirement
• Decumulation

Anyone fancy that?

Chris

Personally I'm still confused as to the distinction between decumulation and investing during retirement. Since people who have retired and are living off their investments generally want to make sure that their savings out last them they still need to be looking at their investments and maybe selling some and buying others according to whatever strategy they are following (or if their dividend income exceeds the amount they need to spend investing some of their dividend income in new investments). Unless you mean to restrict "investing during retirement" to just those who who never remove anything from their investments ie they are just intent on leaving it to their benefiaries then both they and those posting to the "decumulation" board would be looking at general issues such as safe withdrawal rates, modelling the future using historical or monte-carlo tools etc.

ursaminortaur wrote:Personally I'm still confused as to the distinction between decumulation and investing during retirement.

In my mind, investment, pre or post retirement, is still investment, i.e spending "spare" cash (wherever it comes from) to buy shares or other investments. As such, I don't really see the need for a separate board for investors, just because they've stopped working.

Decumulation is a different game entirely. At one end, a HYP investor may be taking income from dividends, so just want to talk about cash buffers and safety margins, whereas a TR investor might want to talk about how / when / what to sell so as to realise cash as efficiently as possible, whilst also talking about reserves etc. Yet others may want to discuss over-spending in early retirement, and what others have done, or how to change and restructure portfolios as a defence against the oncoming loss of marbles. Such topics as how to plan for the surviving partner's financial security (assuming, like mine, they have no interest in investing) might be more relevant on a decumulation board than elsewhere, even though the issue is not limited to retirees!

Some investors may want to simplify their strategies (e.g. migrate a HYP to IT holdings) or make other changes in retirement. Some might want to discuss strategies around inheritance, or downsizing, or retiring abroad, etc. etc.

To me, "decumulation" represents the topic of unwinding a working lifetime of investing, either with a timeframe that ends with the poster's demise, or includes the desired transfer of assets at said demise. It's not about "investing" but about how to manage the investments achieved, with the new requirement of actually living off of them.

VRD
(Decumulating since 2014, but not very successfully )

<Pedant>The word is actually decumulation</pedant>

But we are not overwhelmed with posts yet. Feel free to bin this.

genou wrote:<Pedant>The word is actually decumulation</pedant>

But we are not overwhelmed with posts yet. Feel free to bin this.

Or decrementation.

Or does that sound too much like having a cremation reversed? Feel free to bin this also.

genou wrote:But we are not overwhelmed with posts yet. Feel free to bin this.

I guess people are bored with it?

Good to be here. The board name threw me a bit. I agree on the change of spelling (not that it matters too much).

I’m currently getting very close to the end of accumulation. Will be moving into decumulation next year. Navigating a soft landing to hit my definition of ‘enough’. Read many of the books, blogs, articles, research. Know lots of the theory. 20 years of unconsciously accumulating followed by 15 years of consciously accumulating. Moving into decumulation still feels like a very big step. Education takes you to a certain point then behavioural finance factors starts to play a much bigger part. I have the advantage of investing through a couple of market crashes over the past 15 years so I have some real world experience of my risk tolerance and behaviours.

Looking forwards to sharing part of the ride with others here over the coming months and years (or at least up to the point that the boards are reorganised again and this sub-board disappears ).

Degsy

What a terrible name for the board IMO. I've never heard anyone use this word.

I’d go for “How to spend it”

I would just call it "Post retirement finances".

Or even "Post retirement finances Practical (See Group Guidelines)".

Though I prefer the former.

Is this a serious name? Any one of us could have produced a better name than that. I can assure you that in retirement it is very unlikely that investors will be deaccumulating anything. Just call it 'Investing in retirement' or as MrFoolish suggested, Post Retirement Finances, but deaccumulation is silly.

It sounds as though deaccumultion is an aim or a natural consequence of retirement whilst it is neither.

Dod

MrFoolish wrote:I would just call it "Post retirement finances".

Or even "Post retirement finances Practical (See Group Guidelines)".

Though I prefer the former.

Either suggestion seems sensible.

I think we could do with two boards -

Decumulation - practical
and
Decumulation - philosophy

I have spent my whole life making prudent decisions 'for the future'. About ten years ago I decided 'the future' was arriving and this deeply affected my financial philosophy. Basically I decided it was time to start hosing it up the wall and drawing down on all those decisions I made back in the day, to do the things now that I like and am interested in. Things like living under a thatched roof, driving a nice vehicle and having far more workshop tools, vintage diesels and canal boats than is is practical or sensible.

And of course doing my favourite thing, waking up in the middle of the night, drinking some good wine and posting rubbish on the internet....

Do you really want to split this board? We will just end up with the same nonsense as with the HYP boards where there is endless tedious fuss about posts being on the wrong board and posts getting moved.

Regardless, please don't call any sub-board "decumulation" (however you spell it).