Anticipation: my recalculation date is less than 3 weeks away
Posted on November 13, 2017

I peaked. The R in the CORE is coming up for me: Recalculation. Oh, boy. Wow. Unless the world falls apart over the next three weeks Patti and I have dodged the bullet of “bad variability” of returns for three years now. It’s waaay better than dodged! (It’s obviously been that way for you, too.)

I can use the Morningstar site to obtain the returns from any past recalculation date to the present for any mutual fund.* (You can see on last year’s calculation sheet that I picked December 15 as my annual recalculation date, and that’s an awkward date; it’s a pain using mid-month as the date to obtain 12-month returns. I want to switch my calculation date to November 30 for this year and all years in the future. So my return data for this year will be from December 15, 2016 through November 30, 2017 – 50 weeks this year.)

Anyway, I can see that through the period from last December 15 to last Friday my stocks (in total with my mix of US and International) are about +18% and my bonds are about +2.5%. With my mix of stocks and bonds, that’s going to translate to maybe +16% overall for my 50-week year.

I took out 4.6% (our applicable Safe Spending Rate) last year to get to our Safe Spending Amount for 2017. We paid ourselves that, and we’ll spend or gift all that over the next few weeks. The +16% gets that 4.6% that back and more. It’s clear: we will have more than enough for our current spending. That means one of two things: Patti and I can increase our Safe Spending Amount for 2018 (that’s our stated plan) or we keep spending the same and gift the More-Than-Enough. (Or, a combination of the two. That’s what Alice did after her recalculation date of October 31.)

I’ll keep you posted – literally. I’m guessing I’ll be able to post my calculation based on actual returns as of November 30 easily by Friday, December 8.

* You use the “Growth of 10k” graph and enter start and end dates to get the total change of a $10k investment over the period. From that you can get the percentage change.