Consuming your net worth means spending from your savings over the years. In this article, I want to discuss how spending rates affect your net worth and whether you ever need to spend from your net worth.
Net Worth Trajectory Over Time
If you keep an investment log or a financial net worth chart, you’ll know if your net worth is rising, falling, or holding steady.
Like a stock chart, your net worth will fluctuate, and we are looking more for trends over a broad time horizon rather than momentary ups and downs.
Maintaining a positive net worth trajectory can solve a lot of financial uncertainties and retirement woes. You must ensure that your net worth keeps heading in the right direction until your assets reach a critical mass.
Market Crashes Affect The Net Worth Minimally
But what about a market crash? This surely will demolish your net worth trajectory and will do a solid job of consuming your net worth.
So it would seem. But my investments have always recovered after crashes and have done better than ever before.
In fact, most market downtrends, crashes, or corrections are temporary market events. Expect the market to recover for no reason other than investors rushing into such low-priced funds.
This has been the history of the securities market, and few stock market events have deviated from this paradigm.
Investing in a Down-Market
It’s painful continuing to invest in a market that appears to be crashing, but it’s a necessity. The example I am using in this post is the stock market – the securities market. However, you may be invested in your own particular investment which undoubtedly will have its own ups and down.
If you continue to invest while the market is down, then you will come out ahead in the long run. You will have maintained the upward trajectory of your net worth by putting more money in than your portfolio gave up in losses.
Going Against the Grain When Investing
If you invest long-term, I think it’s best to go against the grain and trust the securities market model. Invest even when the market seems to be doing poorly.
Avoiding popular trends will ensure a high net worth and a high net worth is resistant to consuming your net worth in later years.
This is akin to continuing to pay the mortgage on your rental income properties even if the value of these properties bottoms out or the rental market dries up. You know such events are temporary, so why bail on your investments?
The advantage of investing in a poor-performing economy is that you are still purchasing dividend-producing assets. On top of dividends, these investments will also increase in value – at least, that’s the point of investing in securities.
I buy an index fund ETF for 2 reasons:
- dividend income
- appreciation
$130 of VTI will produce a 2% annual income of dividends, and it will hopefully be worth $138 in another year.
The Efficiency of Earning – Income vs. Investments
What is more efficient, earning an income as a physician or earning passive income from your portfolio?
Earning an income as a physician doing the kind of work you’d love – the kind of work you’d perhaps do for free, is far more efficient than passive income from a portfolio. Here, I am referring to some consulting or perhaps the occasional telemedicine shift.
However, once your portfolio reaches critical mass, then the returns from that portfolio will likely far outpace your income-earning abilities.
Consuming Your Net Worth
Consuming your net worth refers to spending from your wealth to the point of depleting it. Theoretically, there is nothing wrong with this. In fact, it’s the main way that we spend in retirement – in traditional retirement.
I am proposing to that healthcare professionals avoid consuming their net worth too early because it’s one of the most powerful tools you will have in your financial independence arsenal.
Building a Critical Mass in the Net Worth
Your investment portfolio will reach a level eventually when it doesn’t matter how much you withdraw from it within reason. This is the critical mass stage of your portfolio.
Your spending level, whether $30k/year, $60k, or $120k a year, won’t affect your underlying net worth by much because your assets have reached a critical mass that is powerful enough to maintain your level of spending.
If you have $1M invested in the securities market and you are spending $30k a year, then it’s quite feasible to spend $50k or even $60k from time to time without consuming your net worth.
Critical mass is affected by the size of your portfolio, the underlying returns on investment, and how well-diversified the portfolio is.
Depleting Your Net Worth By Consuming it for Income
Once you hit the age when you can no longer work due to old age or perhaps a medical condition, you are okay to deplete or consume your net worth.
This means you can spend well beyond what your portfolio can passively earn because your goal isn’t to maintain your net worth forever.
If you are 90 years old and have an investment portfolio of $2.5M, then sticking to the 4% rule is shallow thinking.
Portfolio Critical Mass
When will your portfolio reach critical mass? There is no good equation to help answer this question, and I haven’t heard it discussed by any of my previous financial advisers.
However, a good financial adviser will have a ‘feel’ for this and tell you at what point you can probably do whatever you want, spend wildly, and you will not be consuming your net worth.
For the layperson, it will be obvious because your net worth keeps growing even when you’re spending from it at will in a poor-performing economy. It takes just 1-2 years for you to realize this. The upward trajectory is maintained despite you cashing out some of your investments.
Long Retirement Horizon
There is a concern among early retirees that because their time spent in retirement is protracted, they have a higher risk of running out of money. The concern is that a passive income model from a securities portfolio may not sustain a 4-5 decade-long retirement.
This is one of the reasons that a 4%-rule becomes 3.5%, 3%, 2%, and eventually 1%. It’s time to graduate beyond financial rules and use the common sense you’ve honed over years of investing.
In fact, when we look at securities historically, the longer the timeline, the better the chance of succeeding.
Plasticity, Adapting, Moving with the Changes
If your lifestyle is most comfortable to the tune of $60k/year, but you can still enjoy it at $40k a year then you have something most other consumers don’t – plasticity.
This plasticity will play out really nicely when your stock portfolio declines in a given year, ensuring you’ll never run out of passive income.
Markets Spend More Time Going up than Going Down
The other advantage you will have with a longer time spent in retirement is that historically the markets spend more time returning profits than losses.
If I take a 10-year snapshot of the market, you’ll see that most years the market is doing well. This means that most years the underlying asset is gaining value, returning dividends, and increasing the price of the stock.
Ironically, this phenomenon also makes long-term investing a less profitable endeavor. In that same 10-year window, you buy the same assets at a discounted price only a fraction of the time. The rest of the time, you are buying that asset at a slightly inflated price.
This serves as another argument to invest in maintaining the upward trajectory of your net worth.
More Time = More Opportunity
When you retire, you have more time. More time for the savvy physician means more opportunities. My local housing market might suffer a crash because of a wave of bankruptcies or layoffs. I can use this opportunity to buy real estate.
As a retired healthcare professional, you also may be offered an opportunity to generate income doing something you enjoy. Particularly opportune if you have been consuming your net worth due to unforeseen circumstances.
Replenish Your Net Worth
A financial adviser cannot predict every single financial scenario, which is why they come up with the most conservative financial plans for their clients. The kind of plan that is fairly bulletproof.
Your spending behavior (your plasticity) isn’t the only variable that can make for a solid retirement plan. If you can replenish your net worth during poor-performing years you will have added one more level of support to your retirement foundation.
The upward trajectory of your net worth is what I want to get back to. It’s quite possible for the market to chew off 5-10% a year from your invested assets when the economy is tanking. But it’s also possible for you to replenish your net worth with money from earned income.
If you are adding $100k a year to your net worth while your stock portfolio is declining by $50k, you still enjoy a $50k rise in your portfolio. You still enjoyed an upward trajectory of your net worth, and you avoided consuming your net worth.
The X-Factor – Your Individual Factor
Personal finances and investing is certainly not a science. Much like the practice of medicine, there is more art than science.
The x-factor that you can bring to the equation will make a world of a difference.
This post would get out of control if I talked about:
- reverse mortgages
- seller-financing a property
- fixed annuities
- living overseas for a year during a weak economy
- timing the sale of your primary residence or business
A Personal Finance Plan
Can you build these things into a personal finance plan? Impossible. Can you have such skills and tools at your disposal? Absolutely.
I am convinced that if I got wiped out financially tomorrow, with a net worth down to $0, I could build my portfolio back up even better than before in a shorter period of time.