Happy Thanksgiving

Ah, my favorite holiday.

Here’s why:

• The best food of the year
• No hassles with buying or transporting presents
• The best mindset of all holidays, with a focus on gratitude instead of consumption
• It’s always on a Thursday, which makes travel planning far easier (I wish every holiday was simply on the nearest Friday instead of a particular day of the month)
• If you’re into football, lots of that
• No ridiculous amount of decorations to set out or clean up after

For all these and many other reasons, it is by far my favorite holiday.

It’s funny, Thanksgiving has always been my Dad’s favorite holiday too, but it wasn’t until I became an adult that I fully understood why. I think as a kid I was too blinded by getting presents at Xmas to properly appreciate Thanksgiving – and of course history is repeating itself with my son now.

Analysis Update

The next analysis I’m working on is a stress test of the TPM withdrawal method and the Traditional method – seeing how high expenses have to rise and/or how low investment ROI has to be to run out of money in your lifetime.

My goal is to build some nice plots of the expenses level vs how long your money lasts for both the TPM and Traditional methods – and of course I expect the TPM method to do far better, but I’m not at all sure about how much better. We’ll see!

Expanding the traditional method to handle going down to zero assets was pretty easy, but I have run into serious challenges with the TPM method.

Currently the TPM method targets a particular income, assuming it will generate enough cash for your expenses and covering any shortfall or taxes due on that income with sources that don’t generate any taxes or penalties (e.g. Roth, bank account, etc.).

However if we’re going down to zero assets, we’re going to run out of these tax and penalty free sources eventually, so I have to modify the TPM method to handle that.

And I’ll also admit the TPM method code was already getting to be a bit long and difficult to manage, so most recently I’ve been doing a major refactor of the python code for TPM. I think long term that is going to help tremendously.

Hopefully I’ll finish that up and have results by next week!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!