This week, Mike Zwecher, author of Retirement Portfolios: Theory, Construction and Management (which I haven’t yet had the chance to read), wrote a brief guest post for Wade Pfau’s blog that I particularly enjoyed:
- You Only Get One Whack at the Retirement Cat from Mike Zwecher
Investing Articles
- What to Do if Your Employer Doesn’t Offer a 401(k) from Matthew Amster-Burton
- Is a Brokerage Account Signup Bonus Taxable? from The Finance Buff
- The Forecasting Quality of Professionals from Rick Ferri
- Investment Costs Hit Retirees with Double Whammy from Vanguard’s John Ameriks
- Tax Tips: How and Why to Realize Gains Early from Larry Swedroe
- For UK investors: HSBC’s World Index Portfolio from Monevator
Other Money-Related Articles
- Why Long-Term Care Insurance May Become Extinct from Allan Roth
- Why Americans Are Part of the Healthcare Problem from Steve Vernon
- Most Wealthy Individuals Earned (not Inherited) Their Money from Consumerism Commentary
- When Renting Costs More Than Buying, Should You Buy a Home? from Cash Money Life
Thanks for reading!
Hi. I'm Mike Piper, the author of this blog. I'm a CPA and the author of several personal finance books. The point of this blog is to show that investing doesn't have to be complicated. 
Thanks Mike! Mike Z. doesn’t have his own blog, so I was glad to have a chance to host his post.
One of the big ideas I got from him is that retirement plans should work by construction. It isn’t enough that they would have worked historically. This means he is not a big fan of the 4% rule.
I’m of a similar opinion. My personal plan is to use inflation adjusted lifetime annuities (including Social Security) to ensure a basic level of income before I allocate any of my retirement portfolio to riskier asset classes.
That said, I still think the 4% rule is useful in one way — as a rough sort of guideline for planning. That is, I think it’s actually more useful for people in the accumulation stage than for people in the distribution stage.