Via Kiplinger
By Jason Lambert
It’s been more than seven years since Wade Pfau, one of the top experts in retirement research, wrote a column for MarketWatch urging readers to “Say Goodbye to the 4% Rule.”
In it, Pfau suggests that the “rule” — which is more of a theory, really — made too many assumptions based on old numbers that didn’t necessarily translate to modern markets — or modern investors. A few months later, in 2013, Pfau and fellow retirement specialists Michael Finke and David Blanchett published their study, “The 4 Percent Rule is Not Safe in a Low-Yield World,” further demonstrating why advisers who base their clients’ withdrawal plans on historical data could be doing them a disservice.