[go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/pra/mprapa/32973.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Capital market expectations, asset allocation, and safe withdrawal rates

Author

Listed:
  • Pfau, Wade Donald
Abstract
Most retirement withdrawal rate studies are either based on historical data or use a particular assumption about portfolio returns unique to the study in question. But planners may have their own capital market expectations for future returns from stocks, bonds, and other assets they deem suitable for their clients’ portfolios. These uniquely personal expectations may or may not bear resemblance to those used for making retirement withdrawal rate guidelines. The objective here is to provide a general framework for thinking about how to estimate sustainable withdrawal rates and appropriate asset allocations for clients based on one’s capital market expectations, as well as other inputs about the client including the planning horizon, tolerance for exhausting wealth, and personal concerns about holding riskier assets. The study also tests the sensitivity of various assumptions for the recommended withdrawal rates and asset allocations, and finds that these assumptions are very important. Another common feature of existing studies is to focus on an optimal asset allocation, which is expected either to minimize the probability of failure for a given withdrawal rate, or to maximize the withdrawal rate for a given probability of failure. Retirement withdrawal rate studies are known in this regard for lending support to stock allocations in excess of 50 percent. This study shows that usually there are a wide range of asset allocations which can be expected to perform nearly as well as the optimal allocation, and that lower stock allocations are indeed justifiable in many cases.

Suggested Citation

  • Pfau, Wade Donald, 2011. "Capital market expectations, asset allocation, and safe withdrawal rates," MPRA Paper 32973, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:32973
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/32973/1/MPRA_paper_32973.pdf
    File Function: original version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    retirement planning; safe withdrawal rates; asset allocation; capital market expectations;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G11 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions
    • N22 - Economic History - - Financial Markets and Institutions - - - U.S.; Canada: 1913-
    • C15 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods and Methodology: General - - - Statistical Simulation Methods: General
    • D14 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Household Saving; Personal Finance

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:32973. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Joachim Winter (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/vfmunde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.