Opening Quotes And Cold Open

Voices [0:00]

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little mind. 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

Welcome And Foundational Episodes

Voices [0:18]

drummer.

Mostly Queen Mary [0:18]

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 [0:36]

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. And the basic foundational episodes are episodes 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9. Yes, it is still in my memory, thanks. We have also created an additional resource, a collection of additional foundational episodes and other popular episodes.

Voices [1:07]

We have top men working on it right now.

Mostly Uncle Frank [1:14]

Top men. And you can find those on the episode guide page at www.riskparty radio.com. Inconceivable! All thanks to our friend Luke, our volunteer in Quebec. We'd be helpless without him.

Voices [1:35]

I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.

Mostly Uncle Frank [1:41]

Because other than him, it's just me and Marion here. I'll give you the moon, alright?

Voices [1:46]

I'll take it.

Mostly Uncle Frank [1:48]

We have no sponsors, we have no guests, and we have no expansion plans.

Voices [1:52]

I don't think I'd like another job.

Mostly Uncle Frank [1:55]

Over the years, our podcast has become very audienced focused, and I must say we do have the finest podcast audience available.

Voices [2:05]

Really top drawer.

Mostly Uncle Frank [2:07]

Along with a host named after a hot dog.

Voices [2:10]

Lighten up Francis.

Mostly Uncle Frank [2:14]

But now onward, episode 534. Today on Risk Party Radio, we're just gonna do what we do best here, which is attend to your emails. And we're only gonna have time for two emails today. Sorry about that. They are a little bit lengthy.

Voices [2:32]

Mary, Mary! Why you bugging?

Mostly Uncle Frank [2:40]

And so without further ado.

Voices [2:42]

Here I go once again with the email. And first off.

Kelly’s Portfolio And Tracking Tools

Mostly Uncle Frank [2:48]

First off, we have an email from Kelly.

Voices [2:52]

Daddy, let me give you some advice. Um, I've been watching these television shows about rabbits. Don't put the barrel of the gun down the hole. Because what they do is they'll tie it in a knot so that it's sometimes what they'll do is they'll make it really long and curved so that it comes up from a hole behind you and you shoot yourself in the butt.

Mostly Uncle Frank [3:19]

And Kelly Wright's.

Mostly Queen Mary [3:22]

Dear Frank and Mary, first of all, thank you for all that you do. I contributed to the Father McKenna Center last summer during the top of the t-shirt campaign, and I recently contributed this summer as well. I am also a CASA volunteer in Livingston County, Michigan. I'm a new CASA who was assigned my first case not too long ago, a 15-year-old girl.

Voices [3:42]

So shine's a good deed in a weary world.

Mostly Queen Mary [3:47]

I also wanted to say that I'm so sorry about your mom, Frank. I watched the video of the memorial service, and you have such a nice family. I hope your dad is doing okay.

Voices [3:56]

Grandpa, how'd you take off your underwear without taking off your pants? I don't know.

Mostly Queen Mary [4:03]

I am 57 years old, and I recently retired from a human resources management position at a large automotive manufacturer in Michigan.

Voices [4:11]

Because I live at home in a trailer.

Mostly Queen Mary [4:16]

Mama coming home to you. My husband is turning 70 in a few short weeks, and he is an engineer for the same company. He loves his job and is still working. Hopefully, he will retire at the end of this year or early next year, though. We have four adult children who are fully flown and grown. We are blessed to be financially independent and we are working on a plan to spend more money each year, including travel and helping others. We have a firm grasp on our annual spending and have done about two years of detailed analysis. We are thankful every day for our financial stability and good health, knockwood here. My husband and I each earned and saved a similar amount of money. While all of our finances are completely joint and combined, we each have slightly different mindsets about how we will invest our money, e.g., we each have a pension and a 401k to invest. So, with each other's concurrence, we are basically each planning to manage our own retirement money. Our investing philosophies are not dramatically different, though.

Voices [5:20]

We can put that check in a money market mutual fund, then we'll reinvest the earnings into foreign currency accounts with compounding interest, and it's gone.

Mostly Queen Mary [5:30]

So, I have a couple of questions. I'd still like to be able to do an overall combined financial analysis. I feel like I don't have a firm handle on all of our various accounts and investments. What is the best software or tool to be able to see everything on one page and to be able to calculate the percentages by asset class, etc.? And it's gone. Poof. I'd like to share the plan to invest my retirement money by fund and percentage. I plan to invest this over 12 months and I am about six months in, so I still have time to make adjustments. It's likely I won't need to spend this money. And while I know I could be more aggressive with it, I do want some stability and safety in the portfolio, so I am not tempted to tinker with it. I'd like a risk parity portfolio that is tilted more to the more aggressive side. So that said, I feel like my treasury investments may be still too heavily weighted. Could you review this and see what you think about this overall plan and whether you would make any adjustments given the background I shared? 25% VUG, 20% AVUV, small value stocks, 5% KBWP, insurance stocks, 10% GLDM, gold, 12% DBMF, managed futures, 18% VGLT, long-term treasuries, 20% VGIT, intermediate treasuries. Thank you again for everything. You are my favorite podcast each week.

Voices [7:01]

The best, Jerry, the best. To be forewarned is to have four arms.

Mostly Uncle Frank [7:12]

Well, first off, thank you for being a multi-time donor to the Father McKenna Center in the second annual Top of the T-shirt campaign this year, and for also being a volunteer for your local CASA organization. As most of you know, we do not have any sponsors on this program. We do have a couple of charities we support. They are the Father McKenna Center for yours truly, and Fairfax Court-appointed special advocates for Mary. That's Queen Mary to you. So if you donate to the Top of the T-Shirt campaign or to Fairfax Casa or the Father McKenna Center generally, you get to go to the front of the email line, as Kelly has done here. And our second email has also done. Just make sure you mention it in your email so I can duly move you to the front of the line. And the links for donating will be in the show notes and on the support page at www.riskperdiary.com. And also thank you for your condolences about the passing of my mother. I was really happy that we could record the memorial service with everything that various people had to say. Because it is very rare that we were all together like that, since we live in so many different places. Dad has been holding up okay. My niece Melissa, who is his grandchild, is gonna take him out this weekend, I think. And he gets around surprisingly well for being 97 years old.

Voices [9:09]

Coma? Why I go in and out of coma is all the

Using AI To Organize Investments

Voices [9:15]

French toast, please.

Mostly Uncle Frank [9:17]

But now getting to your questions. Sounds like you guys are in pretty good shape here. But it's more a question of ironing out a few details. But your first question is whether there's a best software or tool to be able to see everything on one page in terms of a combined financial analysis. And I might be the wrong person to ask this question because I am not a big consumer of commercially prepared tools like the financial planning software that is out there. I picked the wrong weight, quit sniffing blue. A couple of things I have been using. One is a nice little tool that was prepared by Justin of Risk Parity Chronicles. And I will link to a little video in the show notes, which also has a link to the tool. It's just a simple Google Sheet, and it allows you to organize your portfolio and then have all the assets listed below. What's convenient about it is because it accesses Google Finance, it automatically updates during the day and at the end of the day in terms of what the value of your portfolio is. And so I've taken that, which is just on one sheet, created essentially five sheets or five tabs in the Google Sheet there for each account, and then had a global summary essentially that summarizes everything in every account. Until that's all in one page, and I can just open that up and look at it whenever I want to, and it tells us what we have and how it's divided up. You set the categories yourself. So I can set large cap growth, small cap value, long-term treasury bonds, and any other categories you want. It's very flexible. And I even used artificial intelligence to actually tell me how to expand the sheet and do the summary tab or page because I didn't know how to do it or what the formula should be and didn't want to try and figure it out myself. So I basically just put the sheet or what I was working on in Gemini and said, How do I make a formula that does this? And it told me what it was, and I put it in there and it worked. And it was a very seamless operation.

Voices [11:46]

Will the freaking guy!

Mostly Uncle Frank [11:50]

So I've been very happy with that little thing because before that I just had things spread out on a bunch of different spreadsheets and stuff, and it was fairly cumbersome actually. But this will line up all the percentages for you and then also tell you whether you are high or low on the target percentage for any particular asset class that you're dealing with. And maybe that's all you need. But I've also had another experience with Google or now Gemini Notebook LM, which was very positive, which was somebody asked me to look at a whole bunch of account statements and sort of do this exercise for their eight or ten accounts. And so what we did is we took all of their account statements, these are like from Vanguard and Schwab and stuff like that, Fidelity, and just put them into Google Notebook LM and asked it to do the work for us. And so it literally just created this spreadsheet with all the accounts arranged and all the assets arranged and the other things like unrealized capital gains. We asked it to include that. And it just created a nice spreadsheet with everything there that we can then use for other things. And once it's in there, you can also ask it to analyze spreadsheets like that and say, well, give me a pie chart or give me a slideshow or do all sorts of stuff with it. Inconceivable. So I've also been very happy with that and the fact that it can basically just customize the thing to exactly what I want, because when you use somebody else's tool, you get what they give you, and sometimes it's not what you want, or a lot of times it's more than you want, or things you don't care about. And honestly, I think in the next couple of years, a lot of these commercial softwares are going to be made obsolete by artificial intelligence because it seems to be getting better every few months here. I don't think I could have had it do the spreadsheet just out of the account statements six months ago, and certainly not a year ago, it would have failed at that task. So if you're game, first I will put Justin's link in the show notes so you can get that sheet to play with. But if you've never experimented with artificial intelligence and things like Gemini Notebook, now is probably the time, because this is the perfect kind of task for it, to take a bunch of stuff in a bunch of documents and organize it for you, and then analyze it based on what you ask it specifically to do with it, and create additional reports, charts, graphs, etc. and so forth.

Risk Parity Tilt And Bond Weight

Mostly Uncle Frank [14:21]

Alright, now looking at your plans here, since you say you don't necessarily plan on spending the money, this more comes down to personal preferences as to how aggressive or conservative you want to be. And if you want a rough guideline for these kinds of portfolios, I would say that things with between 40 and 50 percent in stocks are on the conservative side. Portfolios with between 50 and 60% are on the moderately aggressive side, and then portfolios with over 60% or between 60 and 70% would be on the aggressive side of these sorts of portfolios. And remember from Paul Pant's blueprint that that's kind of the range of portfolios that tend to have higher safe withdrawal rates. So your targets look like 50% equities, and I would call that a moderately conservative portfolio. You could be more aggressive, but you don't need to be more aggressive if you don't want to be. You asked about the treasury bond weightings you have. It looks like you have 28% in intermediate and long-term treasury bonds as your targets. Yeah, that is on the high side for these sorts of portfolios in terms of treasury bonds. We're looking at allocations of between 15% and 30%. And 28% is closer to 30% than it is to 15%. So you could move five or ten percent of those over to either more stocks or the other alternatives. I'd probably keep the alternatives still to under 25%, though, of the total, or close to that. The main thing here at this point is that you're comfortable with your choices here and that you plan on sticking with them. That would really be my only overall comment or admonition because that's really what undermines most amateur investors is jumping from one thing to another on a year-on-year basis when you should only be making changes in your portfolio kind of very incrementally and over the long term. So I'm glad you're enjoying the podcast and have come back for more. Thank you for being a donor to the Father McKenna Center. And to Fairfax Casa. And thank you for your email.

Voices [16:33]

It's worked so far, but we're not out yet. I want to know what you're thinking. Tell me what's on your mind. Second off. Last off.

Joe’s Transition And Tax Decisions

Mostly Uncle Frank [16:48]

Second off and last off, we have an email from Joe.

Mostly Queen Mary [16:52]

No way.

Mostly Uncle Frank [16:54]

And Joe writes.

Mostly Queen Mary [16:56]

Hello again, Uncle Frank and Queen Mary. This will be our fourth email to you, and we remain very grateful for the information you provide to us and the rest of your listeners.

Voices [17:06]

Joey, do you ever hang around a gymnasium?

Mostly Queen Mary [17:11]

We continue to support the Father McKenna Center via Patreon and have made a small donation to your top of the t-shirt campaign. Sorry, Mary, in advance for the long email.

Voices [17:21]

Mary, Mary, I need you again.

Mostly Queen Mary [17:29]

To catch you up, after your advice in episode 504, April 25, 2026, we completed all our bond purchases and our portfolio now includes 9% VGLT and 7% VGIT all in our IRA accounts. We plan on gradually increasing our GLDM to 10% from the 5% we reported in our last email. Correction, closer to 4% GLDM since we purchased it before it started its downward trend. Q, and it's gone from South Park. And it's gone. Uh what?

Voices [18:05]

It's gone. It's all gone.

Mostly Queen Mary [18:07]

As that email indicated, the new shares of GLDM will be purchased from additional money deposited in our brokerage account because there isn't room in the IRAs. The greater activity has been in the brokerage account. To refresh your memory, our Vanguard portfolio at the time of our last email was comprised of approximately 50% stocks, 40% bonds, 5% GLDM, and 5% DBMF. We've already detailed the changes to our IRAs above, so let's discuss our brokerage account. Oh boy, is this great! At the time of our last email, our brokerage account was VXUS 18.98%, VOO 9.5%, VTI 15.55%, VTCLX 5.28%, VMLUX 3.72%, VWLUX 5.92%, VMIUX 8.09%, and VMFXX 2.92%. We were concerned with the overlap between VOO, VTI, and VTCLX, and after discussing it with our CPA, we decided we could deal with the capital gains bill. Therefore, we sold our complete stakes in VOO and VTCLX and sold half of our VXUS investment. An additional reason for selling was that all three of the ETFs were at all-time highs at that time, so it seemed like we were getting a nice return and could use the money to improve our portfolio by purchasing some small cap value. We kept VTI because it has about 25% in value stock, mostly large value stocks. By the way, I know you don't like VXUS, but selling all of that would have given us some tax issues. So where are we now, you ask? Well, we are glad you asked.

Voices [20:00]

I guess you could say things are getting pretty serious.

Mostly Queen Mary [20:03]

Presently we're here. Stocks, Growth Blend, VTI 13.97%, VXUS 10.02%, AAPL 2.67%, MSFT 1.62%. Please note that we believe we had left off the AAPL and MSFT from prior emails for simplicity. We purchased both long ago and have just held on to them. Value VOE 0.38%, VXF 2.15%, bonds, VGLT 9.38%, VGIT 7.65%, VMLUX 5.43%, VWLUX 5.63%, VWIUX 7.55%, alternatives GLDM 3.94%, DBMF 5.1%, Cash, VMFXX 25.8%. The plan is to use the 25% in cash to purchase the value funds, specifically AVUV and AVDV. First question, do VTI and VXUX accomplish the growth part of the stock portfolio? Or should we look at adding some VUG in the future? If VTI and VXUS suffice, then the plan would be to have 28% in growth and 27% in value. Second question, when do we make those purchases? I know this is going to sound like a level two investor question, and Sonia and her crystal balls will make an appearance. But AVUV and AVDV are both near their 52 week highs. Do we dollar cost average and hope for the best? More on this in our last question. Third question, is there a particular split between AVUV and AVDV you believe would be better for us given our portfolio? This brings us to our last question. Please cue the I'm not a smart man from Forrest Gump.

Voices [22:15]

I'm not a smart man.

Mostly Queen Mary [22:18]

Here's the question: Should the current price of an investment be considered when moving your portfolio from an accumulation portfolio to a risk parity portfolio as we near retirement?

Voices [22:29]

Shirley, you can't be serious. I am serious. And don't call me Shirley.

Mostly Queen Mary [22:33]

What impact does purchasing a substantial portion of your portfolio at all-time highs, close to retirement, have on the safe rate of withdrawal? Has that ever been studied?

Voices [22:44]

Yes!

Mostly Queen Mary [22:45]

We know that in his new book, Bill Bangin discusses the perils of retiring when the Schiller-Cape ratio is high. But then again, we also know what you think about the Cape ratio. What do you think, Uncle Frank? Is it as simple as we cannot foresee the future, so we should invest the money now? That's not how it works. That's not how any of this works. By the way, we recently heard an episode of the Rational Reminder podcast where a listener asked, I sold 50% of my portfolio. What now? They had a lot of statistics about why lump sum investments beat dollar cost averaging.

Voices [23:19]

That is the straight stuff, oh funkmaster.

Mostly Queen Mary [23:22]

Sorry again for the long email, and thanks again for what you do. Best, Jose and Mary Lou.

Voices [23:29]

Rex Quando, we use the buddy system. No more flying solo. You need somebody watching your back at all times.

Mostly Uncle Frank [23:37]

Well, Joe, it seems like you're in the thick of your transitioning, and I'm glad it's all going well so far. For most people with a bunch of investments and a bunch of accounts, this can take a few stages to get through, mostly dealing with tax issues and location of asset issues. I'm glad you consulted with your CPA about the tax issues, because that is actually the number one job of handling a large retirement portfolio is making sure you're not making bad tax decisions, because that generally matters more than the investment choices, actually, in most cases these days.

Voices [24:19]

No! It's a tax collector! Hi there, Spongebob.

Mostly Uncle Frank [24:24]

But getting to your specific questions. First one was whether VTI and VXUS accomplish the growth part of the stock portfolio. And I would say they're serviceable, yes, certainly VTI. VXUS does kind of have a value tilt toward it naturally, just because the international large caps don't include a lot of the kind of large cap tech growth that the US has. So if you were looking to augment that, I would probably add something that is on the international side but more growth y, something like IDMO, which we've talked about, which is labeled as an international momentum fund, but does play in the growth space, if you will, the large cap growth space.

Voices [25:14]

Joey, have you ever been in a in a Turkish prison?

Mostly Uncle Frank [25:19]

So I would probably add a little bit of that instead of the VXUS, as opposed to adding some BUG in the future. This is not a big decision, though. This is more of a preference since the overall allocation seems to be set up and is reasonable. Because honestly, it's not wrong to have a value tilt in one of these kind of portfolios. And if you look at something like the weird portfolio that the value stock geek holds, it's very much value tilted, or what say Larry Suedro does. That's very much value tilted as well. So if you've got a little more value than growth, that's not really a problem in one of these kind of portfolios. Alright, moving to your second question.

Buying Small Value Near Highs

Mostly Uncle Frank [26:08]

Well, as soon as possible, really. You say they're both near their 52-week highs. Well, everything's near its 52-week high, at least on the equity side of things. And because stock markets tend to go up most of the time, they are frequently at 52-week highs, regardless of what year you're looking at. But if you just can't stomach putting in all the money at once, it's not wrong to put this on some kind of reasonable schedule over the next six months or a year, saying that I'm going to put in this amount on these calendar days and then just do it that way. Because in the grand scheme of things, whether you invested it all now or invested it all next year is probably not going to matter a whole lot in 10 or 15 years. So it's really not the big decision that people think it is often, unless you were planning on not investing it for years, then you'd have a problem. Because then you'd just be out of the market. So if you don't want to put it all in at once right away, come up with a plan, write it down, and then just follow your plan until it's all executed and it's all invested, and that'll work just fine. All right, your third question is whether there's a particular split between AVUV and AVDV. I would believe is better for you given your portfolio. And no, I don't have a particular recommendation there, at least given the rest of your portfolio. I would say if you're looking at AVUV and AVDV together, I would at least want 10% of that allocation to be AVDV to be having much of an effect at all. And you could go up to one-third of your small cap value allocation into AVDV if you prefer that. I think over time, those two funds are likely to perform very similarly over long periods of time, but over short periods of time, the difference of which performs better than the other one is almost all tied up in the value of the US dollar relative to the value of other currencies. So like last year in 2025, the US dollar was weak, ABDV was up over 40%, this year the dollar is stronger, so ABDV is not up that much, but AVUV is up over 25%. And I believe that is mostly related to the value of the US dollar. So again, I would just pick an allocation or division between those two assets that you feel comfortable with and are willing to stick with because that is the most important thing. So if you want to do two-thirds AVUV and one-third AVDV, that's fine, or you can do three-quarters AVUV and 25% AVDV, that would be fine too. Or even 90-10, but then you are really not getting much out of holding AVDV at all at that point. Alright, your last question.

All-Time Highs And Withdrawal Rates

Mostly Uncle Frank [29:00]

Should the current price of the investment be considered when moving your portfolio from an accumulation portfolio to a risk parity portfolio as we near retirement? What impact does purchasing a substantial portion of your portfolio at all-time highs close to retirement have on the safe rate of withdrawal? Has that ever been studied?

Voices [29:17]

Unlike any schooling you've ever been through before.

Mostly Uncle Frank [29:21]

Well, a couple of questions here. First, I think you have things in reverse because if you are going from an accumulation portfolio and things are at an all-time high, you were actually selling stuff that's at an all-time high. So you are going from a more risky portfolio to a less risky portfolio. And if you're taking U.S. stocks that are at an all-time high and then just going off and buying international stocks that are also at an all-time high, there isn't much of a change there. What's the real change is going from stock holdings that are an all-time high to bonds or other assets. Because remember, these valuation metrics are only talking about the value of the equity holdings in the portfolio. They have nothing to do with the rest of the portfolio. And so that's the funny thing. If you're really concerned about assets being at an all-time high, then you would have done this transition a long time ago because they've been at an all-time high for a little while. And you don't know how long that's going to go on, because I think the stock market is frequently at or near an all-time high, like at least a third of the time, if not more. And the other thing is if you're going from US growth or US total market, which is what is considered to be very overvalued now, and you're buying basically anything else, whether it's US value, small cap value, international, international value, you are basically going from something that is considered to be overvalued to something that is considered to be undervalued or fairly valued. So again, you're reducing your risk by making these changes, not increasing it. And that's especially true when you're buying the value stocks.

Voices [31:04]

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

Mostly Uncle Frank [31:08]

This is why people like Jeremy Grantham of GMO, who has always been big on these valuation metrics, is basically saying don't invest in US large cap growth or U.S. large cap blend now and focus on other things, mostly value things and international value things. I'll link to that. Interview of him in the show notes, it's on Morningstar. And then if you look at projections like from Morningstar itself, it's projecting that small cap value is going to outperform large caps by 4% annually for the next 30 years. I have my doubts as to whether that will come true.

Voices [31:47]

Crystal ball can help you, it can guide you.

Mostly Uncle Frank [31:51]

But that is what is going on for people that are really looking at valuation metrics and really looking at them across different aspects of the market and considering what that really means. This is not just one number. You can't just say the market's overvalued. Well, what is the market? Parts of the market are always going to be overvalued, and parts of the market are always going to be undervalued. Did you see the memo about this? And when you're moving to one of these kinds of portfolios, you are moving away from things that are considered to be overvalued to other things that are considered to be undervalued or fairly valued. So you're actually solving the problem you think you have by doing this.

Voices [32:32]

Yeah. Didn't you get that memo?

Mostly Uncle Frank [32:35]

I think you may be mistaken about what Bengen actually says about these cape ratios and things like that. If you look in his book, this is around page 219. He addresses this question specifically, and he says he hasn't found that valuations by themselves really matter that much. What matters more is things like inflation. But please do pick up his book and read it. And uh I'll go ahead and make sure you get another copy of that memo. And have there been studies done? Well, yes, there have been studies done, and you can actually do them yourself by just doing simulations when all-time highs are present. There is a convenient place to find this information in one place, which is the toolbox at early retirement now. If you download that as part of that calculator, it calculates safe withdrawal rates at the peaks of valuations in the stock market. So you don't even have to figure it out yourself which ones to do. So I did present some of this as part of my presentation at the Economy Conference in 2025 as to what this tool said about a risk parity style portfolio analyzed over a hundred years in these periods. I'll link to the presentation in the show notes, and you can check out the slides. So this is on slide six of this presentation. And what we did here is we constructed a relatively simple risk parity style portfolio consisting of 27.5% in the SP 500, 27.5% in small cap value, so a total of 55% in equities, 25% in long-term treasury bonds, 5% in cash, and 15% in gold. And then ran it through this calculator over the past 100 years to get out the safe withdrawal rates for various periods. And so the overall safe withdrawal rate that came out of this calculator for this portfolio was 4.86%, and that was starting on a year in the 1930s, right around 1931, in fact. For all other decades, the safe withdrawal rate was well over 5%, generally between 5.3% and 7.3%. But then this also gives you the safe withdrawal rates for what happened around five prominent market peaks. So for somebody retiring in 1929, the safe withdrawal rate for that would have been 6.19%. For somebody retiring with this portfolio between 1964 and 1969, the safe withdrawal rate would have been 5.4%. For somebody retiring in 1972 or 1973, the safe withdrawal rate for this portfolio is 6.66%. And for the 1999 to 2000 period, the safe withdrawal rate is 6.87%. And then for 2008-2009, the safe withdrawal rate is 5.87%. So you can see from this early retirement now calculator that if you retire with this kind of portfolio at these market peaks, it really doesn't have that big of an effect. And the reason is kind of obvious because if you've only got 27.5% that's in the SP 500, and that is what is driving overall high market valuations, the rest of your portfolio really isn't subject to that. And so it doesn't have that big of an impact. So the short answer is you are solving this problem to the extent it's a problem by moving to a risk parity style portfolio, and that's what the analysis says. But you can certainly do a lot of that yourself on test folio just by starting portfolio dates either in the late 1960s or early 1970s, and then also running tests starting in 1999 or 2000. And so that's the good news to the extent you thought you might have a problem there. You do not have a problem, and it will be even less of a problem when you finish allocating to all of the things that are not the SP 500 in this portfolio that you're constructing. And incidentally, you can also see from this presentation that you would have a big problem if you were just holding a portfolio that was solely the SP 500 or concentrated in that, and that's on page five of this slide presentation. That's when you get the lowest safe withdrawal rates for these kind of standard two-fund portfolios, and that's really the problem with them. Am I right or am I right? Or am I right?

Voices [37:14]

Am I right?

Mostly Uncle Frank [37:15]

But I will let you check out that little slide presentation at your leisure. So, you had a lot of questions, and hopefully I answered them sufficiently for your purposes. Thank you for being a loyal listener and a donor to the Father McKenna Center. Hopefully, we've been able to help you, and thank you for your email.

Hiatus Note And How To Reach Us

Mostly Uncle Frank [37:36]

But now I see our signal is beginning to fade. Just a little programming note. We are going on hiatus for about a week. So you probably won't hear from us for about a week and a half. But you will hear from us. We're actually going to go visit Optimus Bill, as well as one of our children. I am Optimus Bill. Well, actually, we're going to visit Karen Optimus Bill's wife, but he'll be there. And in the meantime, if you have comments or questions for me, please send them to Frank at RiskPardyRader.com. That email is Frank at RiskPardyRader.com. Or you can go to the website www.riskpartyrador.com. Put your message into the contact form and I'll get it that way. If you haven't had a chance to do it, please go to your favorite podcast provider and like, subscribe, give me some stars, a follow, a review. That would be great. Okay. Thank you once again for tuning in. This is Frank Vasquez with Risk Party Radio. Signing off.

Mostly Queen Mary [39:48]

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