All Episodes

May 6, 2025 13 mins
Have you considered how the outdated 4% rule could impact your retirement? Jon Hicks delves into the revised 4.7% rule by William Benjamin, emphasizing the risks of relying solely on market returns averaging 9%. He scrutinizes the sequence of returns risk, explaining how early losses can drastically reduce retirement savings. Jon also discusses the need for realistic financial planning and the pitfalls of blanket advice, urging listeners to tailor their strategies to current economic conditions.   Schedule your complimentary appointment today: RetirementSolutionShow.com   Follow us on social media: YouTube | Facebook | LinkedInSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is the Retirement Solution Podcast with financial advisor John Hicks,
founder of Jayhagen Capital.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
There's been a change do do do do do? Do
this just in The four percent rule is now the
four point seven percent rule, says the man who invented it.

Speaker 3 (00:17):
Oh oh, I stand corrected.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
Let's dive in. Let's see what Let's see what all
this math is about. John Hicks. This is John Hicks,
founder of ja Hagen Capital. I've had the branch here
with John asking for his ideas on well, on this
conversation about our income because a couple of things. One,
the idea of creating income from our savings is hard

(00:41):
math for a lot of people. So good news, you
don't have to do by yourself. Jay Hagen Capital. They
are here to help retirement solutionshow dot com is our website.
We also have links posted in the show notes. But
we also are exposed to a lot of people's opinions
about how to do this math. And unfortunately a lot
of rules that we still use and apply today, John

(01:03):
are just out of date. Because and this this is
going to sting. It hurts. It stings like vinegar coming
out of my own mouth. That when I say you
know rules from the nineties. That's thirty five years ago.

Speaker 3 (01:15):
Guys, it really is.

Speaker 2 (01:16):
The nineties is not last decade. The nineties is thirty
five years ago now, so we need to update our rules.
William Benjin created the four percent rule in the nineteen nineties.
If the market averages nine percent and you take four
percent each year in retirement, you'll never run out of
money according to this idea, Am I right so far?

Speaker 3 (01:36):
That's what he says.

Speaker 2 (01:38):
Okay, In his new book, A Richer Retirement, he has
revised this rule to now be four point seven percent.
And here is what he himself said on the Decoding
Retirement podcast on Yahoo Finance.

Speaker 4 (01:54):
The four percent rule of four point seven percent rule
is designed to be a worst case scenario. If you
take out at that and you don't meet those worst
case situations, and what he's just going to pile up
during retirement and probably later in retirement you're going to
have some regrets wondering what he should have could have
spent more.

Speaker 2 (02:11):
Did you hear what he just said? Does anybody else
know that it was designed to be worst case scenario.
It's like a fallback rule. It's not supposed to be
the rule, John, Right.

Speaker 3 (02:19):
I mean, but that's how a lot of you know,
blanket advice works. Right. So that's kind of why on
this show we try real hard to not give blanket advice.
You know, most of the things we talk about, you know,
there are top of mind things that we all have
questions about. Most of them really do require a little
bit more of a planning or a skill set based
on what you actually want to accomplish, right yea. So,
so I was talking to a small business owner the
other day, and they've done a really good job building

(02:41):
a company. You know, in their mind they had created
about a twenty five million dollar company, right, And when
you look at what their cash flow was and their
assets and things like that, you could say, Okay, maybe
you're right, maybe it's about twenty five million dollars worth
of value. Here's the problem, it was unbelievably thedan on
that owner, that sixty six year old owner. No one

(03:04):
else had the same relationships as him, no one else
could probably control those new contracts as well as him.
And so if you took him out of the equation, Unfortunately,
it wasn't a twenty five million dollar business. He was
probably around a fourteen million dollar business. Now, is that
still a ton of money? Yeah, but that is a
real big difference, right so, because when you take out

(03:24):
one of the most attractive assets from that company, it's
not as attractive anymore. Right So, when it comes to
blanket advice, because someone just told me, I just to
happen to ask him, Hey, you know, if you don't
mind me asking, where did you come up with twenty
five million? I can see on paper, you know that
that could be the case. But when you look at
how dependent your company is on you, and he didn't
have any kids in the business, he didn't really have

(03:45):
a number two guy that was also you know, the
same quality level of him. He's just like, well, that's
just what I heard. That's the thing about blanket advice.
So the fact that we went through the process and
he understands Now, just because he's worth fourteen million on
paper right now, does that not mean we can get
him well over twenty five million over the next five
to six years. No, we absolutely can. As a matter

(04:06):
of fact, really smart exit planning can add three hundred
to four hundred percent more to your value at the
very tail end, three to four times. So if he's
worth fourteen million. Now, there's a good chance so he
could potentially sell for thirty six to forty million if
we do some things to maximize his value. Right, But

(04:27):
there's that whole concept of a blanket statement may or
may not be the truth. So coming back to your
point about the guy that says you can pull up
now four point seven percent a year from your investments. Now,
he made two assumptions here that I have to kind
of critique. Number one, he said that if we can
earn nine percent, All right, guys, let's just be real

(04:48):
serious about that. A lot of people think, well, the
market averages ten, not always, and it doesn't always average ten.
In the last fifteen years, has the market averaged better
than ten? Yes? What about the previous ten years, did
it average more than ten? No, it only averaged around seven.
Now what does that mean. It means that if you
had been pulling out four point seven percent, even though

(05:11):
the market averaged seven, you could still run out of money.
Why because the second thing he didn't mention. He didn't
mention sequence of returns. So I'm going to break this
down real quickly. So if you use what they call
a linear assumption, which is what he's using. Assuming you
just get nine percent every single year, and you pull
up four point seven, he says, well, this is a
worst case scenario. Well, well, let's go back. If you

(05:33):
had had all this money and you started pulling money
out four point seven percent back in two thousand, because
that was the year that you were going to retire.
Why Because you made all that money during the beginning
part of the dot com and you made all that
money towards the end of the Clinton administration nineteen ninety nine.
You were sitting on top of a gold mine of
of equities, and that's when you decided to retire. So

(05:54):
in two thousand, if you started pulling out four point
seven percent, even if you averaged that night, which it
didn't average nine over that period, but even if you did,
there's a good chance that you ran out of money
in only eleven years. Whoa who wha wha who whah
whoa whoa whoa who whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa John,
whoa buddy? Who wa woo. If you are only pulling

(06:15):
out four point seven but you earn more than that,
you can't ever run out. It depends on what years
you get bad returns, just like the Fidelity study we've
been talking about a lot recently, where if you have
a loss in the first couple years of retirement, you
are six times more likely to run out of money.
Now why does that happen. Well, if you had a

(06:36):
million dollars and you lose thirty percent, you don't have
a million bucks anymore. You'd only get seven hundred grand.
And if you wanted to pull out four point seve
I'm gonna round it up to five just for easier math.
If you wanted to pull out fifty grand to live
off that year, you're not at seven hundred anymore either,
You're at six hundred and fifty. So if you wanted
to get back to even so you can pull out
that fifty thousand dollars each year. Guys, it's what they

(06:58):
call dormy game over. We potentially can't do it before
we run out of money, depending on how long we last.
So the two major issues that I have is using
a linear assumption, which means that you're expecting to get
nine percent every year. Well, the market doesn't work that way.
As a matter of fact. You know, last year the
market was gangbusters, but this year it kind of stinks
so far. We don't know how it's going to end up.

(07:20):
But if someone ends up having a double digit loss
in twenty twenty five, my guess is it's going to
be a little uncomfortable depending on what these tariffs and
what China, what Russia, what Ukraine end up doing down
the road. So I would be very careful about four
point seven. Now, if you have a diversified portfolio that
is built to create income for one of your buckets

(07:43):
of money, you can potentially take more than four point seven.
As a matter of fact, you can pull potentially six
seven and hold on maybe even up to eight percent
a year of an income stream from that bucket. But
you have to understand you will probably see depletion, which
means that big old bucket that you're starting off with,

(08:05):
whatever the amount of money in there, you're probably going
to be chiseling away at that, picking away at a
little bit at a time. Are you prepared for that? Mentally?
Some people aren't and some people aren't. It's one of
those paradigms we have to shift. But four point seven,
I think, if you're in all market based investments, is
number one a little high and number two linear assumptions

(08:25):
are unfortunately what get a lot of people really messed
up when you start to pull money out. Distribution economics
are not very friendly when we have negative market environments.
We have to put those things into.

Speaker 2 (08:38):
Perspective understanding how to utilize your assets to create income
streams for your retirement. This is the foundation of the
plans they created jahigen Capital. They can create with and
for you as well. Retirement solutionsshow dot com is where
to start that conversation. We also have links posted in
the show notes. John, I think that when it comes

(08:59):
to blank advice, there's a lot of quote unquote good
blanket advice in a way of an idea starter.

Speaker 3 (09:05):
Sure, but you.

Speaker 2 (09:06):
Then as a consumer need to take the responsibility upon
yourself to say, I heard this idea, It sounds pretty good.
How does it apply to me? Because is it precentage
poll plan ever applicable in any case scenario? Or is
that not a good idea because of what you were saying,
what can happen to the markets and the sequence of
returns risk?

Speaker 3 (09:24):
Yeah, I think there's you know, when people latch onto
an idea, are they here something for the first time?
There is some kind of a catalyst, there's an intrigue like,
hold on, hold on, John, how'd they saving money? You
mentioned this story the other day about this guy that
was saved over four hundred thousand dollars over the course
of retirement. You know, how did you do that? Oh yeah,
let's talk about that. So he had most of his
money in a tax deferred IRA, and we showed him

(09:44):
by doing bracket bumping and asset shifting that over the
course of his retirement, we could literally save him four
hundred thousand dollars. Now, would that situation work the exact
same way if someone already had all of their money
in taxable or roth accounts, No, they've probably already done
a really good job. That person may not be able
to save four hundred thousand, They may not be able
to save more than thirty or forty grand perfect case scenario,

(10:07):
even if they had the same amount of assets. So
when you're thinking about those things that that catalyst of intrigue,
WHOA what did they just say? The question is is
that something that you want to explore more about? And
of course, you know you can get on the Google machine,
you can call our staff as well. Chat GPT is
getting better at some of this stuff. Groc is getting
better at this stuff, Perplexity is getting better at this stuff.

(10:28):
But I find that it is very wrong when you
get when you try to get precise, when you try
to get precise, if you say I have a million
dollars to Grock and say I have a million dollars
and I have it in these accounts, what should I do?
It'll get so close to getting a right answer, but
it's not right because it doesn't either understand the taxable
structure in your state or when you're going to define

(10:49):
those incomes. It doesn't understand that longevity factor. We tried
all the time. I'm always trying to find out have
they kind of fixed some of the bugs. They haven't yet.
So when you want specific advice, make sure you're asking
a suitable advisor, right. You know, you probably don't want
to ask a whole bunch of tax advice to your
Edward Jones guy. There's no offense to Edward Jones guys.
Most of these guys just don't practice tax. As a
matter of fact, they have a little disclaimer at the

(11:09):
bottom of things says, hey, we do not practice tax
or legal advice. See when you deal with a fiduciary
firm that does handle actual tax concerns because they have
CPAs like us, or they have tax attorneys, or they
actually have estate planning attorneys they work with exclusively. It's different.
We can make sure that you put all those silos together. So,
whether it's our firm or anyone else's, you just want
to make sure are you getting the type of advice

(11:31):
you're looking for. If you're a small business owner, you
want to make sure that who you're talking to understand
small business owners. I understand it because that's exactly what
I am. We brought in our CPAs and our tax
attorneys into our firm because I needed the information. I
needed it for myself to make sure that I'm doing
the right thing, setting things up correctly, creating a company
that has value and in scalable right, and so many

(11:54):
of us have done the same thing. We want to
get proper advice. So the blanket advice and especially this
four point seven, I'm afraid that if people use that,
they could actually run out. So just make sure if
you have your plan with your guy, make sure you
understand what it's based on. If they say it's based
on a nine ten eleven twelve percent rate of return
on the market. I would be very cautious and maybe

(12:17):
have them recast that with more realistic numbers of the five, six, seven,
eight range. Even nine seems a little pricey given what's
happening right now in the economies.

Speaker 2 (12:29):
And if you are having a conversation with a financial
advisor that is saying those higher percentage numbers and that
has you worried, now is a great time to get
a second opinion then, And this is what John and
his team can offer you at Jahigen Capital. Retirement solutionshow
dot com is where to start the conversation about the
questions you have when it comes to your future. If
you're a small business owner and you're wondering about exit strategies,
if you are a DIY investor, or you have a

(12:50):
financial advisor and you're wondering about some sort of blanket
advice term that you heard and how it can apply
to you. Let's get to work. How can you understand
how it does does apply to you, how it would
apply to you, what effects it might have on your
money in your future. Again, it's retirement solutionshow dot com Orce.
Just click on the links we've got posted in the
show note.

Speaker 1 (13:10):
Thanks for listening to The Retirement Solution Podcast with John Hicks.
Begin the conversation about your savings plan with John and
the team at Jayhagen Capital by visiting Retirement Solution Radio
dot com. Be sure to listen to John's radio show,
The Retirement Solution Saturdays at eight am and Sundays at
nine am on NewsRadio eight forty Whas.

Speaker 5 (13:31):
Jhagen Capital Incorporated is not licensed in all fifty states.
To find out if the Jayhagan Capital Incorporated is licensed
in your state, please call five zero two six nine
fifty six thirty five. If Jahagan Capital Incorporated is not
affiliated with, nor endorsed by the Social Security Administration or
any other government agency, and does not provide legal or
tax advice, by contacting us, you may be provided with
information about insurance and annuity products offered through jjigin Capital

(13:52):
LLCNPN number one eight eight two seven zero nine four
Advertise With Us

Popular Podcasts

24/7 News: The Latest
Therapy Gecko

Therapy Gecko

An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.

The Joe Rogan Experience

The Joe Rogan Experience

The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.

Music, radio and podcasts, all free. Listen online or download the iHeart App.

Connect

© 2025 iHeartMedia, Inc.