Mostly Voices [0:00]

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. A different drummer.

Mostly Mary [0:19]

And now, coming to you from dead center on your dial, welcome to Risk Parity Radio, where we explore alternatives and asset allocations for the do-it-yourself investor. Broadcasting to you now from the comfort of his easy chair, here is your host, Frank Vasquez.

Mostly Uncle Frank [0:37]

Thank you, Mary, and welcome to Risk Parity Radio. If you are new here and wonder what we are talking about, you may wish to go back and listen to some of the foundational episodes for this program. Yeah, baby, yeah! And the basic foundational episodes are episodes 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9. Some of our listeners, including Karen and Chris, have identified additional episodes that you may consider foundational. And those are episodes 12, 14, 16, 19, 21, 56, 82, and 184. And you probably should check those out too because we have the finest podcast audience available.

Mostly Voices [1:28]

Top drawer, really top drawer, along with a host named

Mostly Uncle Frank [1:32]

after a hot dog. Lighten up, Francis. But now onward, episode 326. We're back.

Mostly Voices [1:45]

No way, way, yeah.

Mostly Uncle Frank [1:48]

And we are ready once again to answer your emails. But before we get to that, I just wanted to reflect on our recent trip to the Economy Conference in Cincinnati, Ohio, which is run by my friend Diana Miriam. I'm living on the air in Cincinnati.

Mostly Voices [2:06]

Mary and I went there last Thursday, got back on Monday,

Mostly Uncle Frank [2:09]

and had a very nice time. Met lots of people, lots of listeners. We had a breakout session where we played a little bingo and I gave away a mug. I also did a main stage presentation, or was part of a main stage presentation where we did a case study of a willing applicant, which was very well received, and I got to sing some Bon Jovi on stage to boot. Economy is the one and only personal finance conference that Mary and I attend in a year because that is enough of personal finance conferences for us, honestly. You can't handle the dogs and cats living together. But we always enjoy it immensely and enjoy the crowd there, which is skewed much younger than we are. And so it's nice to hang out with the younger set, largely in their 30s and 40s, but also some 20s. And then as older folks in 50-plus territory. Get off my lawn. But I know after these things I always get a few new listeners who are either amazed or appalled at what they hear.

Mostly Voices [3:31]

You are talking about the nonsensical ravings of a lunatic mind.

Mostly Uncle Frank [3:35]

So I thought I'd just remind you all of what this podcast is and what it is not. this podcast is a retirement hobby project for me, and its initial purpose was to lay down some information that I thought would be useful to our adult children as they begin to earn money and need to invest it.

Mostly Voices [3:57]

Why, what have children ever done for me?

Mostly Uncle Frank [4:00]

And so I play lots of clips from their childhood so that they are encouraged to listen.

Mostly Voices [4:10]

I love karate! I love money! I hate all of you.

Mostly Uncle Frank [4:17]

I've been gratified to know that not only do they listen in their 20s, but also some of their 20-something friends also listen to this. So it's also a creative outlet now and an opportunity for me to make a few new friends here and there. Talk him out of it.

Mostly Voices [4:32]

Do not ask him for mercy. Let's face it, you can't talk him out of anything.

Mostly Uncle Frank [4:40]

But this is also why it's much different than many of the personal finance podcasts that you're used to. I have no illusions or desires to make this a career or even a job. I don't think I'd like another job. So we don't have any sponsors, we don't have any email lists, we don't have a very complicated website or lots of other information other than what you'll find in the show notes to these podcasts. I also do not have any guests or need to attract any guests, even though I get lots of offers, and I do not have any need to appeal to others to be guests on their podcasts, even though I do appear on some of them from time to time as requested. So I tend to speak my mind on areas of personal finance as I see them. and for the reasons I give for them.

Mostly Voices [5:30]

I want you to be nice until it's time to not be nice.

Mostly Uncle Frank [5:38]

And I don't have any qualms about critiquing or commending any particular person.

Mostly Voices [5:42]

Do you think anybody wants a roundhouse kick to the face while I'm wearing these bad boys? Forget about it. But I don't belong to any groups.

Mostly Uncle Frank [5:50]

I don't desire to belong to any Groups of media producers. Please accept my resignation. I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member. I do get concerned that personal financial media has become more about the media recently and people trying to promote themselves and other things and less about the finance. That kills people. So I try to keep things as real as possible.

Mostly Voices [6:21]

Battle speed Hortator. Absolute speed!

Mostly Uncle Frank [6:34]

And you do need to put up with my personality here, and my personality is that I enjoy humor, I enjoy laughing a lot. I probably laugh more in a day than most people laugh in a week or a month. Well, Ladi Frickin' Dah! and I realize some people just do not like that and/or do not like it combined with hoary numerical topics like personal finance and investing. But that's okay, because this podcast frankly is not for everyone. I have somewhere around between 1200 and 1500 regular listeners, and that's far more enough than I would ever need or want, honestly. But I have made some good connections and good friendships out of this, which is one of my goals later in life. And so I'm very happy this podcast can serve that purpose. Yes! So anyway, if you're new here and wondered what the heck was going on, that is a decent summary of why things sound the way they do here and do not sound like A commercial preparation, trying to earn awards or grow an audience or sell ads or anything like that.

Mostly Voices [7:55]

Attack speed. Attack speed. Ramming speed.

Mostly Uncle Frank [8:04]

Ramming speed. But enough about me, let's talk about you. At least the ones that have sent me some emails recently that we're going to address today. And so without further ado...

Mostly Voices [8:35]

Here I go once again with the email.

Mostly Uncle Frank [8:40]

And first off, First off, we have an email from Abby Normal, aka Paulo. I'm almost sure that was the name.

Mostly Mary [9:02]

And Abby Normal Paulo writes, hi, Uncle Frank, in the grand tradition of risk parity radio listeners who get on a roll and bug you semi-regularly for a spell. Hi, Alexi. The dude abides. I've got more questions. And thanks for your helpful answer about base rates and possibility fallacies from my earlier question on end-planned expenses later in life. I've been experimenting toward a super simple drawdown portfolio somewhere between Golden Ratio and Golden Butterfly. I like the simplicity of the Golden Butterfly but want to reduce its overabundance of gold and cash equivalents. I've got two similar variations and would love your notes on them if you'd indulge me. Assumption is approximately 4.5% withdrawal rate with yearly rebalancing. Withdrawable rate flexible per your 3% basics, 4% extras, 5% luxuries idea. Portfolio number one, 25% VTI, 25% VIoV, 25% long-term Treasuries, 15% gold, 10% cash equivalents. Portfolio two, 25% VTI, 25% VIoV, 25% long-term treasuries, 15% gold, 5% REIT, 5% cash equivalents. I suspect you'd lean towards option two on the principle of not relying on cash to deal with rough patches, but relying on the strongest possible portfolio instead. And I suspect you'll tell me why this is not right thinking, But I wondered about having that 10% cash in the event that all the other components went down at the same time. For a while, I could just spend down the cash until at least one of the other ingredients went in the right direction. Last off, for the 3% basics, 4% extras, 5% luxuries idea mentioned above, are the percentages meant to remain forever based on the portfolio at the start date, or does the meaning of 4% change as the size of the portfolio changes? I.E. If I start with $1 million, will 4% always be $40,000 no matter what the portfolio does? Thank you, Abby Normal, AKA Paulo in Tampa.

Mostly Uncle Frank [11:13]

So you're back for more, eh? And you won't be angry? I will not be angry. Well, just looking at your planned portfolios here, yeah, I think those look fine. They are variations on the Golden Butterfly or the Golden Ratio Portfolio. They look like they would have a 5% withdrawal rate, safe withdrawal rate, using the Bengen assumptions over the past 100 years or so. But if you want to test that, you can go to the Early Retirement Now toolbox and download that. It's a spreadsheet and you would be able to enter these except you would not be able to model the REITs in there, but everything else is modelable in there. Although it can be a little tricky. Whether it's 5% or 10% in cash is not that significant. We're still talking about a relatively low allocation to cash and it's only when it gets above 10% is that it can start having a drag effect on the portfolio. If you do have 10%, you might consider whether you should lower actually the allocation to long-term treasuries, since both cash and long-term treasuries are going to perform well in a recessionary or depressionary environment. You may not want 35% total of that, and then you could take that extra 5% and say, put it back in the stocks. or a REIT, whatever you like there. Because just in terms of managing a drawdown portfolio, the easiest management technique is to have enough cash to sustain you at least through a year and just spend that for the year and then refill it when it's time for rebalancing. Because you'll have some dividends and other things flowing into that as well. You should turn off all dividend reinvestment because you don't want all those transactions, particularly in a taxable account. But of course, the other way of doing it is to look at it whenever you're taking a distribution, whether that's monthly or quarterly, and then just selling whatever is high at that point in time with the idea that you would have rebalanced out of that into something else anyway. So selling it when it's high is more efficient. Those management techniques don't end up being that critical if you are in fact rebalancing periodically because the rebalancing effectively resets everything in the portfolio anyway. I suppose the other observation on that is that the more cash you have in a portfolio, the more you want some of that, at least in a short-term bond fund, like VGSH or SHY, which is a one to three year treasury bond fund. Because then at least you'll get a little bit of duration, two to three years, as opposed to straight cash, which you would deem savings accounts and T-bills and things like that, which are a year or less in duration. Right now it doesn't really matter because the yield curve is very flat at that point. But in theory, it should go up in slope most of the time. And the times we're living in now with an inverted yield curve are unusual to say the least. Now your last off question I find the most interesting where the basic plan that we use is 3% for basics, Another 1% for comfort, if you will, and another 1% getting us up to 5% for luxuries. What that really is, is kind of a ballpark way of managing this and to get yourself comfortable with the spending. So we do really want to be spending 5% of our portfolios or be able to spend about 5% of them annually. But as a practical matter, when you're looking at your spending, some of it you can easily categorize as required and some of it is discretionary. Those are the kind of the two big categories. So you know that even if you're spending 5%, you're probably not spending that all on required expenses because if you are, you may have a problem or you're just not going out to eat ever. We're not worthy! I suppose you could do that if you were living a very lean fi lifestyle, but that is not what we've ever aspired to. Not gonna do it. Wouldn't be prudent at this juncture. And so in order to promote spending and be able to spend, it is useful to look at your expenses and Divide them up into these categories. And some people just have the two categories, required and discretionary. And some people put strange names on them like minimum dignity adult diapers or floors or something like that. You're insane, gold member.

Mostly Voices [16:04]

And that's the way, -huh, -huh, I like it.

Mostly Uncle Frank [16:08]

By the way, with the bingo we played at Economy was a bingo card full of jargon and Labels commonly used by popular financial advisors.

Mostly Voices [16:21]

Because only one thing counts in this life. Get them to sign on the line which is dotted.

Mostly Uncle Frank [16:28]

And just looking at your last questions, does the meaning of 4% change as the size of the portfolio changes, i.e. if I start with 1 million, will 4% always be 40k no matter what the portfolio does? The reality of it is you're going to need to increase your baseline expenses by your personal rate of inflation, which is not the CPI rate of inflation. It's whatever your personal rate of inflation is. It's probably less than CPI. For us, it's been negative as we remove children from our payroll. I don't care about the children. I just care about their parents' money. And we can see that certain other expenses that we have are going to also go away in the future. For example, I would expect our housing expenses to eventually drop because we're not going to be living in the old family homestead forever. And we'll downsize at an appropriate age, which should probably be in about a decade.

Mostly Voices [17:26]

If you don't start making more sense, we're gonna have to put you in a home. You already put me in a home. Then we'll put you in the crooked homies on 60 minutes. I'll be good.

Mostly Uncle Frank [17:37]

So yes, I do believe that taking a variable approach is the correct one and is the only sensible one when you're talking about a lengthy retirement. Because chances are, even with a 5% withdrawal rate, you are still going to end up with more money than you started with, even if you're not using a particularly good portfolio for drawing down on because all of these figures were based on worst case scenarios, not average case scenarios. In an average case scenario with an average portfolio, you could withdraw 6% per year. So I would expect that you would be able to take some more over time and whether that some more is going to end up going to your baseline expenses or some of your discretionary expenses. Your comfort or extravagances, as the way I would put it, will vary from person to person. But if you find your overall net worth continues to increase at a High rate that is telling you you're probably not spending enough money. You know, at my age, the mind starts playing tricks. So, ahhhh, death! That's only the cat. Oh. And not spending money or not being able to spend money is still the number one plague, if you will, of personal finance, personalities, writers, etc. Which gives me a chance to plug a new podcast from a new friend, Mark Troutman, whom I sat on the case study panel with, and I goaded into leading that panel.

Mostly Voices [19:12]

You see what I did there? I'd say in a given week, I probably only do about 15 minutes of real, actual work.

Mostly Uncle Frank [19:20]

He is a CFP, an early retiree who lives in Colorado. But anyway, he's had a blog for quite some time called Mark's Money Mind and now he's expanded into a podcast.

Mostly Voices [19:31]

Top drawer, really top drawer.

Mostly Uncle Frank [19:35]

And he has a lot of good nuts and bolts kind of information about financial independence topics. And I know he's also been teaching classes to high schoolers for a number of years now. But anyway, in his most I've got a recent podcast, which came out on March 20th, and I will link to in the show notes. He does talk about this issue and his struggles with actually spending the money he's accumulated, and that if left to his druthers, he tends to spend 2% or less of his portfolio. And I think what you should appreciate is that in my experience, that is actually the norm of personal finance personalities. who have written books or have podcasts or other media. And some of them states explicitly that they're never going to retire and essentially live off their books or media sales. And so this was one of the reasons I actually started this podcast because when I looked at what these folks were actually doing and the portfolios they were actually holding, they were all over the map with their portfolios because honestly, their portfolios really don't matter. Unless you're just ridiculously speculating. You can hold any kind of one fund, two fund, three fund portfolio somebody came up with in 2005 and spend 3% or less and never have any problem because your actual strategy is not the portfolio or how it's managed. Your actual strategy is don't spend much money. My view is that is not a good life goal to have. Because you're going to run out of life before you run out of money and somebody else is gonna spend it anyway.

Mostly Voices [21:22]

That's the fact, Jack! That's the fact, Jack!

Mostly Uncle Frank [21:25]

So it's actually irrational unless you have found a way to live forever.

Mostly Voices [21:32]

It works. I want money and power and money and power and money. in power.

Mostly Uncle Frank [21:44]

So I start from the premise that you actually do want to spend your money in retirement and you want to spend it in as large amounts as possible, which means that 4% is the minimum I would want to be thinking about spending. And if your goal becomes how do you spend the most money, then you stop adhering to outdated strategies. and start looking at what the professionals do, people that run hedge funds or institutions or endowments. And so that 3%, 4%, 5% plan that I like to use, in my mind that's actually an extremely conservative plan and that I would like to find ways to spend even more money and make it a 4%, 5%, 6% spending plan in the future sometime. I don't know if we can do that, but I think we should be trying to do that. At least that would be one of my goals.

Mostly Voices [22:41]

No one can stop me.

Mostly Uncle Frank [22:45]

Because it would be really nice to be able to tell my children that they can stop working a lot earlier if they want to, and do other things with their lives, because they have accumulated enough money that if it's properly managed in a good portfolio that is designed for decumulation, then they can spend more of it. and don't have to be worried or concerned about it. Anyway, Food for Thought. You should all check out Mark's Money Mind podcast. He's got some YouTube videos of himself up on mountains in Colorado, which are also quite nice. And I commend that you check out. And thank you for your email. Second off. Second off, we have an email from Paul. Paul G. Hey, what's up, man? Not too much.

Mostly Voices [23:47]

You know you won G.

Mostly Mary [23:51]

Won what? And Paul G. Writes, Dear Frank, thanks so much for answering my questions about portfolio visualizer in episode 314. Your insights were enlightening. I have continued to play with Portfolio Visualizer and Portfolio Charts and wanted to ask some new questions. I have noticed that I get similar results when I substitute the short and long-term treasuries of a portfolio such as the Golden Butterfly with intermediate or 10-year treasuries. See the attached PDF file of a Portfolio Visualizer backtest. This has raised some questions in my mind. Are intermediate or 10-year Treasuries adequate to protect against the market conditions for which we add short and long-term bonds to a risk parity portfolio? Or, is there a compelling reason to keep the short and long-term bonds in the portfolio rather than simplify to a single intermediate or 10-year Treasury fund instead? Is there an argument for why intermediate or 10-year Treasuries would be the better choice for one bond fund to rule them all? As always, thanks for all you do. Sincerely, Paul G.

Mostly Uncle Frank [25:06]

Alright, let me first describe what we're looking at for the audience here. Paul did send me an attachment with a printout from Portfolio Visualizer. And in this analysis he's done, he's comparing kind of a standard golden butterfly portfolio comprised of 20% US stock market, 20% US small cap value, 20% short-term treasuries, 20% long-term treasuries, and 20% gold. And then in the two alternatives, he's got a golden butterfly with intermediate term treasuries substituted for the short and long. So it's 40% allocation. and then another one with 10-year Treasuries for that allocation. I will link to that analysis in the show notes and you do see that you do get similar results over time for all three of these portfolio variations. This does have a time limit of January 1978 in the Portfolio Visualizer dataset. I'm always a little bit suspicious of starting in a date like 1978 because it's just at the end of a very bad period and so everything looks better when you start at January 1978. 1978 than it would if you started at, say, 1970 or 1968. But I don't think that matters for the purpose of this. Now it doesn't surprise me that you get similar outcomes over time for these three portfolios, because if you did some kind of an average between long and short term treasuries, you would end up with something that looks like either a set of intermediate term treasuries or the 10 year. Intermediate term Treasuries and the 10-year are pretty much interchangeable in most analyses. And if we look at the performance summary for these three portfolios, we see that their compounded annual growth rates are within 0.1 of each other, their Sharpe ratios are within 0.01 of each other, and their Sortino ratios are similarly within 0.01 of each other. And what that tells you is it's probably noise that is making the difference between these portfolios. But that leads to the question of, well, why would you want to have the two funds, a short and a long, as opposed to just one medium fund? A question. And the answer goes to rebalancing, really. in this article that we've talked about at Portfolio Charts called Shannon's Demon that we've referred to recently, but is just modeling out the benefits of rebalancing. So what is the main difference here? Well, if you look at a short-term bond fund, you are essentially holding that for stability. You expect it to have low returns and low volatility, just low, low, low across the board. When you're looking at long-term treasury bonds, you're expecting potentially high returns, but high volatility, in fact, volatility that is similar to the stock market. But the reason you want higher volatility, and honestly, Cliff Asness of AQR is the profit of this, you want assets with higher volatility in an overall portfolio so that you can rebalance them when they move up and down. And by that mechanism, and the theory described in that article about Shannon's Demon, you do get extra performance out of that essentially, because you're buying low and selling high as these things fluctuate. Now, if you have all your bonds in one intermediate bond fund, you don't have that opportunity to rebalance, at least amongst the bond funds, like you would with a short and a long. Obviously, you would still rebalance it against the stocks and other things in your portfolio, but you're going to be missing that potential rebalancing component. And this is also why it's advisable to split up your stocks into at least two funds that are diversified from each other. Thus the basic recommendation being this kind of merriman one of a large cap total market S&P 500 or large cap growth fund paired with a small cap value fund is kind of the quickest and easiest way to do that, because then you're also getting rebalancing opportunities out of that. This is also why when you look at the three principles we follow here, the simplicity principle, the macro allocation principle, and the holy grail principle, it's that holy grail principle that needs to be the preeminent one.

Mostly Voices [29:47]

Yes, cat, now I shall be ruler of the world.

Mostly Uncle Frank [29:55]

Because that deals with actual diversification amongst the components in your portfolio, not only on a macro basis, say stocks, bonds, gold, or other alternatives, but also between stock funds or bond funds. I think too many people, and it's very common these days, to elevate that simplicity principle above all others. and to think that having one stock fund is better than having a couple of stock funds, two or three stock funds, or that having only one bond fund is better. In fact, that does not play out when you're managing a portfolio and rebalancing it over time. So it is actually better to be working with something like between four and ten funds than it is to try and be simplifying your portfolio down to as few a number of funds as possible. Now, whenever I press people on that, they don't seem to have an answer other than, well, psychologically, it's easier if we just do it this way and have fewer funds because obviously these are incompetent, incapable people and they can't possibly rebalance two or three stock funds. They need to have it all in one, otherwise they'll explode.

Mostly Voices [31:11]

Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, Mass hysteria.

Mostly Uncle Frank [31:18]

Okay, that kind of reasoning is nice for people who act like their finances are a scary thing that they can't handle, but it's not an adult approach to this. I think we are capable of managing a few more funds in a portfolio if it's going to help us by increasing our safe withdrawal rates more significantly.

Mostly Voices [31:44]

Can we fix it? Yes, we can.

Mostly Uncle Frank [31:52]

So don't let the simplicity principle tail wag the holy grail principle dog. And if you want to learn more about those principles, go back and listen to episodes 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9.

Mostly Voices [32:03]

That is the straight stuff, O Funk Master. Hopefully all of that makes some sense and is helpful in some way.

Mostly Uncle Frank [32:11]

And thank you for your email. Last off, an email from Carlos. Please give me a million dollars and the fridge with a padlock and hell yeah, huge pectoral muscles. And Carlos writes.

Mostly Mary [32:47]

Hi Frank, I live in an emerging market country and I came across this 2011 article that calculated the safe withdrawal rate for most of emerging market countries. I know you guys pretty much only cover the United States retirement scenario, but we outside the United States also need to live and retire, and we don't have free resources you guys do like your awesome podcast. We could really use your insight, but in a way that someone not living or investing in the US could relate. Are those safe withdrawal rates too optimistic? I know you advocate to never invest in weak currency government bonds But it's something 99% of the people living in those countries do, either for lack of knowledge on how to invest in the U.S. market, or mainly for the hefty tax rates imposed on foreign investors by your government, especially for those living in countries without a tax treaty with Uncle Sam, which is my case. Thanks for anything you could say on the matter, Carlos Alberto.

Mostly Uncle Frank [33:48]

Well, I looked at the paper you cited, and I will link to it in the show notes, but There's something wrong with that site and it's not including the tables that are embedded in the paper, so it's very difficult to actually read it. Ultimately though, I don't think it's that useful or that interesting because what they were analyzing there is a portfolio of a particular country's stocks and then whatever you could get in savings accounts in the particular country at the same time. And they explicitly say they are not modeling bonds in these countries. Not that that may make it any better because you're dealing with bonds in perhaps unstable or undesirable currencies in many cases. So unless you are investing in that kind of portfolio, I would not put a whole lot of credence in this paper. Unfortunately, not knowing exactly where you live and not knowing the laws on investing in every jurisdiction, or at least not many jurisdictions outside of my own. I don't have specific answers to give you about investing, but obviously you do want to be investing substantial amounts of money in US funds. Now, in Europe, that's relatively easy to do through the funds in the UCITS system. And I don't know whether you have access to those or not. But there are more and more of these kinds of funds becoming available even if you can't use the US system. I know Interactive Brokers works worldwide and if I were outside the US I would probably look to be opening an account there because it does allow you to trade on worldwide exchanges and has a nice website in many different languages. The best Jerry, the best.

Mostly Voices [35:39]

Along with lots of good information for investors,

Mostly Uncle Frank [35:43]

regardless of what country you're in. So I would go and look there into opening an account and seeing what other sorts of information they have there if that is available to you. And I think it is. After that, I would limit your investments in your own country, particularly if it's not using a reserve currency. Because for investors who are outside the US, you do need to put a substantial amount of your money into the US markets because they treat capital better here than they do in most other countries. And so that is where the capital flows and that's why we have all of these gigantic internet companies. It's not an accident those companies originated in the United States, not because they could not have originated somewhere else, China has plenty of kind of clone companies, if you will, but nobody would want to use them outside of China. And as for companies on other exchanges, I really would look at the sector makeup of whatever specific country you're thinking about investing in. Both the sector makeup and the factor makeup. Is it growth? Is it value? Is it quality? Etc. Because it's really those two factors that determine how things perform. And the one big difference these days of the US market compared to the rest of the world is we have these huge large cap growth companies in the tech sector that other countries just don't have. As far as debt instruments are concerned, I would confine those to the reserve currencies, particularly the dollar and the euro. Maybe those will get displaced someday, but that someday is not now or anytime soon. Forget about it.

Mostly Voices [37:33]

And again, a lot of those types of investments are now

Mostly Uncle Frank [37:37]

available in funds that are traded in different jurisdictions. I know in the UCITS system, you can get US debt, US equity, and a lot of other things that are just the same sort of thing that you can buy in the US and may carry a higher expense ratio, but it has the same general composition. I'm sorry, I can't be any more helpful than that. As for your tax rates, I do not know tax law outside the US and barely know the tax law inside the US. Well, I know it better than most people, but I still hire a CPA. So I suppose, in summary, I don't think I'd rely on that article for anything meaningful. Unless you are going to invest in exactly what the article is modeling. And if you're not, then it's of academic interest and no other real interest. Forget about it. And I'm sorry I can't give you any more specific information about your situation from either an investment or taxation point of view. But hopefully that helps at least a little.

Mostly Voices [38:45]

You're gonna end up eating a steady diet of government cheese and living in a van down And thank you for

Mostly Uncle Frank [38:53]

your email. But now I see our signal is beginning to fade. If you have comments or questions for me, please send them to frank@riskparityradio.com that email is frank@riskparityradio.com or you can go to the website www.riskparityradio.com and put your message into the contact form and I'll get it that way. If you have any other chance to do it, please go to your favorite podcast provider, And like, subscribe, give me some stars or a view, a follow. That would be great. Mmmkay? Thank you once again for tuning in. This is Frank Vasquez with Risk Parity Radio, signing off.

Mostly Mary [39:59]

The Risk Parity Radio Show is hosted by Frank Vasquez. The content provided is for entertainment and informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, tax, or legal advice. Please consult with your own advisors before taking any actions based on any information you have heard here, making sure to take into account your own personal circumstances.