Is the 4% Rule Dead?

Mindy:
Hey, Scott. Is the 4% rule dead?

Scott:
Nope.

Mindy:
All right. That wraps up this episode of the BiggerPockets Money Podcast. He is Scott Trench and I am Eddie Jensen saying, see you later. Alligator or saying haha. Just kidding. We actually have a lot more to talk about this. Hello? Hello, hello and welcome to the BiggerPockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen and with me as always is my market conscious co-host Scott Trench.

Scott:
Thanks, Mindy. Great to be here. As always, great timing with your intro. BiggerPockets is a goal of creating 1 million millionaires. You are in the right place if you want to get your financial house in order because we truly believe a financial freedom at the 4% rule is attainable for everyone no matter when or where you’re starting, and the math still holds even here in the scary conditions at the start of 2025.

Mindy:
Scott, that intro was a little reminiscent of our show with Michael Kitsis way back in the very beginning of Covid in March of 2020 where we asked him that same question, is the 4% rule dead? And he said, no. Scott, for those who are not familiar with the 4% rule, what is the 4% rule? What are we talking about here?

Scott:
Sure. So the 4% rule is an attempt by a deep body of financial analysis to answer the question, how much money do I need in order to retire? And the idea is that a portfolio that is invested a specific way with a, for example, 60 40 stock bond allocation, although that range can vary between 70 30 and 50 50 stock bonds, a portfolio invested that way in major index fund investments for example, historically has never run out of money over a ensuing 30 year period. And that includes periods with massive economic pain like a portfolio where someone retired right before the Great Depression in 1929, or right before certain major events like the inflationary period in the sixties, seventies and eighties. In there it backtest every historical period that we have great data for in modern history in a 30 year look back. So while there’s an endless debate about whether there could be a future situation where the 4% rule does not hold up in a technical sense, it has held up in every historical period. Although it is true in some periods, a portfolio that starts out at a million dollars may decline in value in most 30 year periods. Someone who was withdrawing 4% of their portfolio who starts with a million dollars, would actually end up with more wealth at the end of the 30 year period than when they began. So it’s an answer to that question, how much money do I need to retire early?

Mindy:
I love that description, Scott. That was a really great description. Bill Bangin originally did this research in 1994 or 1996. I always get those dates mixed up in my head, but either way, it was a long time ago Michael Kitsis came in and ran the numbers where Bangin left off. So Bangin did it in the mid nineties. Michael Kitsis did it in 2018 and ran them. I’m looking at Michael Kit’s chart on starting principle over the course of 30 years. There are some wild numbers. I think the most it gets up to is 9.5 million and the lowest it gets to is not quite zero at year 30. In fact, if you continue on, this person loses their money and goes to zero at year 31. This is every scenario up until 2018 when he ran this report.

Scott:
Yeah, in the vast majority of cases, that chart shows you end up with more wealth after pulling 4% out of your portfolio every year adjusted for inflation at the end of 30 years than when you began. And in a couple of situations you end up with less wealth, but in no situation do you end up with zero wealth and truly run out of money over a 30 year period. Right? So that’s the 4% rule and the math has not changed. In fact, the guy William Bill Bangin actually came out with an update saying that you could actually withdraw as high as 5% with certain portfolios in new research this year. I believe he has a new book on that topic and we will certainly be inviting him to discuss this new research onto the BiggerPockets Money podcast in the coming months here. So that’s the update on the 4% rule in a sense that does it still work?
Does it still uphold Yes. We have no mathematical evidence that the 4% rule does not hold up. Now let’s talk about a couple of paradoxes here, Mindy, with that caveat that first we’ve interviewed a lot of folks in the fire community. We have met very few, maybe none so far still who have truly retired at a 4% rule allocation. We had a couple of folks reach out who said, I retired at the 4% rule. And then it’s like, well, they also have a rental property and they also have a paid off house and they also have a large cash position and those types of things. There’s always a defense mechanism in play well beyond the 4% rule for many of the folks that we talk to that actually spend Tuesday retired and not working on a mostly stock bond portfolio. So that’s the first paradox is we still have yet to meet a true retired at exactly the 4% rule and have nothing else going on out there.
Most people are well beyond the 4% rule or have some sort of cushion on there. The second paradox here is Bill Bangin, the father of the 4% rule who just came out with that research who we’re going to interview shortly here two years ago, announced that he was going 70% to cash and was 30% in stocks and bonds out there for fear of market conditions. Here I am the biggest proponent of the 4% rule in the math and the way I introduced this today, and I am not holding a 4% rule, 60 40, 70 30 or anything close to 50 50 stock bond portfolio. I’m heavily allocated to other things like real estate for example, and private lending will be a part of my portfolio in the next few months. So these paradoxes all exist in the context of the 4% role, even though the math is very sound and it is an excellent answer to the question of how much do I need to retire early?

Mindy:
Alright, so Scott, one thing that I have noticed, I don’t know if you have noticed, but since about 2012 the market has been fairly up and to the right.

Scott:
Oh my gosh, this has been an incredible bull run for the last 12, 15 years essentially, and people have made an incredible amount of money in the stock market in particular, and they’ve done nothing. They just sit there and dollar cost average into it and they’ve been rewarded to degrees unprecedented in history with those investments.

Mindy:
So I actually looked it up on macro trends.net. They have a 100 year historical chart of the Dow Jones and December, 2008 is when it hit the bottom and started climbing. There have been dips since then, but that is the last time it has been the last big low. So 2008 to 2025. Scott, do that math really quick. How long is that?

Scott:
That is 2 5 17, 17 years,

Mindy:
17 years of up into the right. So if I was in the stock market for the last 17 years, which I was, and I kept seeing it go up into the right with some small dips, I would not be tempted to go into bonds in any significant capacity because bonds have traditionally, or in those same last 17 years, what have bond yields been? They’ve been fairly low, right? I’m getting
12, sometimes 15% returns in the stock market and bonds are giving you like three or 4%. I like 15 a whole lot more than I like four. So my current bond portfolio is I believe $0 and I’m okay with that. I’m okay with the risk because I am with great risk comes great reward, potential reward, and my portfolio has gone up significantly. But the 4% rule is what I based my early retirement number on and I am not in a 60 40 portfolio. And that is what the 4% rule is based on. How many people do you think are in a 60 40 portfolio who are fire? Fire in the next year, plans to fire in the next year or have fired recently?

Scott:
I think less than 10% of the people who listen to BiggerPockets money are in a 60 40 stock bond portfolio and it may be less than 5%. Let’s review the data here. So here’s Mindy smiling face in infant mirror and now here’s, I do a poll all the time on BiggerPockets money. It’s one of my favorite things. Thank you so much to everyone who watches the YouTube channel and responds to these polls. There’s a wealth of really good information here that I just love endlessly collecting and then discussing on this. So let’s look at this one right here. Okay, do you actually invest with the classic 60 40 stock bonds portfolio? 680 people responded 90%, 89% said no. I own essentially no bonds with less than 10% of my portfolio. 4% said yes, excluding real estate or cash. My investments are 60 40 stock bonds.
So what we have here, more infinite mirror is dynamic of at least in the fire community of people who are heavily concentrated in stocks. And that is both a function I believe, of the extraordinary bull run we’ve had for the last 17 years, maybe more on there. Well, I guess 17 years exactly with 2008 being the bottom, we’ve had extraordinary bull run for that period of time and the very low yield that bonds are delivering right now, like VBT lx, Vanguard’s Bond Index Fund for example, has a yield to maturity of 4.3% and an income yield of something in the threes. So that’s just not very attractive to many investors out there, especially folks who are personal finance nerds. And that I think has resulted in heavily concentrated portfolios. And the risk I see for the fire community in many, maybe tens or maybe hundreds of millions of American households is that because of this dynamic of huge returns in the stock market and all incremental dollars going into stocks with very little bond exposure, this is a community that is not ready for a market pullback and does not have portfolios that are allocated in the way that the 4% rule has been historically discussed.
Right? The 4% rule, you are not fire. If you need two and a half million dollars to generate a hundred thousand dollars a year in spending and you are a hundred percent in stocks, you are not fire. You can fall out of fire with that. Now if you have that two and a half million dollar portfolio, 60 40 allocated to stocks and bonds, then you are meeting the 4% rule and you have at least in history, never run out of money in a historical simulation calculator. It could be that this time is different, but I would be willing to personally bet that on a 60 40 stock bond portfolio that there will not be a reduction to zero over a 30 year period going forward. We have to take a quick ad break, but want to know what you can do while we’re away? Subscribe to our brand new BiggerPockets money newsletter. Go to biggerpockets.com/money newsletter to subscribe on your very first rendition of this newsletter, you’ll be greeted with a very friendly hello, hello, hello from the one and only Mindy Jensen.

Mindy:
Yes, you will. Welcome back to the show. So Bill Benin’s original study was based on traditional retirement. He didn’t take into account the concept of retiring early because that wasn’t a thing back when he did this in the early nineties. It was like, well, it’s still weird, but it was even more weird back then. We didn’t have podcasts and internet to talk about it. I think that it’s a lot easier to get yourself to a 60 40 portfolio when you are older and you’re retiring at 65. Once you hit 60, you start to think, oh, maybe I don’t want to risk all this money, but you have really compressed your investment timeline into to fit into your fire goals. So I see both sides. Yes, bill Benin said 60 40 and the Trinity Group reran the numbers and they said, yep, he’s right. And Michael Kitsis reran them and he said he’s right. And West Moss ran them and said, yep, Benin’s, right? So all these very, very smart people are looking at all of this historical data and past performance is not indicative of future gains, but they’re looking at all this historical data. They didn’t just make this up, they said with this stock portfolio and I mean, have you read the original report or the original article that Bill bein published in the Journal of Financial Planning way back when? It’s so fascinating he ran this at, Mindy sends

Scott:
This to all of her friends. So yes, I have read this.

Mindy:
I do, I do. It’s a really long article. If you want to read it, email [email protected] and I will send you a copy. It can be a little bit difficult to find online. It was not an online publication when it first came out, but he ran all these different scenarios. He didn’t just come up with this and say, you know what, this sounds good. Somebody sent me a note to say that he was not a rocket scientist. He worked for NASA or he did something with rockets and he’s very, very, very smart. And then he decided to be a financial planner after he was done with that career. And he really looked at this from all angles and ran the numbers in all sorts of different ways. So I do believe that it is still valid. I am still basing my retirement ideas on it, but I am not following it correctly. So if I run out of money first, I will be very shocked. But if I run out of money, it’s my own fault. I’m not following the rules in the first place. And that seems rather harsh. I’m saying that about me. I hope that nobody runs out of money,

Scott:
But yours is true of everyone I have met in the fire community, right? There is a tiny fraction, less than 5% of people who will tell you that they retired on the 4% rule with nothing else. And then when you actually talk to them, oh, there’s my rental, there’s my large cash position, there’s this other thing that I’m doing here. I do this kind of thing to defray costs on this part. They all have something going on. Nobody does this with the 4% rule. Even though again, you’re asking me, is a 4% rule still sound? Does the math still work? Yes. Is it dead? Nope. Do ordinary people, the people we are trying to serve here on BiggerPockets money actually retire on the 4% rule and nothing else? No. And that’s where we need to address it head on in order to help the folks in this community actually see Tuesday afternoon in their thirties or forties the way that they wanted to do it. And I think that’s the fun challenge about this that makes this job so interesting. If it was just a 4% rule, every path would be the same for it, but it doesn’t work that way in practice. It doesn’t work that way in people’s actual psyche. And we have to address that in order to actually achieve our mission of helping people build enough wealth and then stop and enjoy their lives.

Mindy:
How do you approach market downturns if you’re getting ready to retire, if you’re retiring in your thirties or forties instead of when you’ve got a 40 year horizon to save your money? A market downturn isn’t as affecting as when you’ve got a 10 year window.

Scott:
Well, look, I think there’s a couple of ways to go about it, right? The first one, and I think that the right answer is to say there is a approach that makes sense when you’re starting out for all out aggression, right? When I got started all out aggression, highly leveraged house hack, everything was going into stocks. I’ll do that again today. The issue is if you continue that infinitely, then you’ll end up at 65 with an enormous pile of wealth in most historical situations that is far more than you ever needed and you’ll miss that thirties, forties, fifties fire retirement that you said to yourself was the original goal, right? So that’s the problem. So what one answer to the question is just keep going for many, many more years than you really need to and amass so much money that it’s so far beyond what you actually need to retire, that you don’t have to make decisions based on driving cashflow. And Mindy, I’d argue that you’re kind of maybe in that situation to a little bit of a degree, you guys went so far beyond, you have so much more wealth than what was required for the 4% rule that it allows you to not really have to worry about the technical best practices in optimizing the portfolio component. Is that fair?

Mindy:
As you were saying that, I’m like, oh, that’s me Scott. Yes, and not only that, I still work. I have this job. I am a real estate agent and I want to say I made $200,000 last year as a real estate agent working very little. I had a couple of really whopper of a deal properties, but I generate a lot of income and I don’t spend $200,000 a year except this year when we’re building the house. I generate a lot of income in a way that I’m really not reliant my portfolio right now. I have the confidence that my portfolio will eventually recover because I’m not pulling anything out of it right now.

Scott:
And Mindy, guess what? I’m in the same boat here on that front, right? I find myself having started out attempting to achieve fire so I could play video games on Tuesday and now I run an enormous or fairly large company here, do this podcast and work harder than ever on that front. So that’s one answer to the question and that is frankly the answer that you and I both chose and it’s not a terrible one for many folks on there, but there is a cost to that. You’re not retiring at the optimal point if that’s your specific goal there. So that’s one answer to the question. The second way I think to really maximize that early retirement here is to say, I’m going to be in this all out aggressive accumulation mode and then I’m going to stop and I’m going to flip the switch to something much more conservative in the years building up to true early retirement.
And it’s very hard, I think for folks to do that for seven to 10 years, grind away, increase their income, begin amassing a slow but surely compounding pile of assets and then stop and move it all into a conservative portfolio that has 60 40 stocks, bonds, and then begin enjoying it. That’s the right answer. I think that that’s technically the right way to do this is to go all aggressive and then shift it either gradually as we approach 3, 4, 5 years, seven years out from retirement or do it all at once toward the end. But I think very few people will do that in practice even though that’s the right theory, I think. What’s your reaction to those two answers to the question here?

Mindy:
I don’t think that going all out and then retiring and moving it into the conservative portfolio, the recommended is what I would recommend. It seems like you are running just as much risk as if you didn’t do that at all. I would suggest if you are retiring in the next, I dunno, three to five years or the next five years, I guess start instead of allocating your money to the stock market, keep what you’ve got there and then start allocating bonds. Start buying bonds, start buying bond funds. I know so little about bonds because I’m not in them at all. I’ve never really studied them because for 17 years or 16 years we have had such a growth market that bonds didn’t really make a lot of sense. I mean they still make sense. They always make sense because you’re hedging against other things. I wonder, Scott, do another poll.
How many people are not in a 60 40 stock bond portfolio but are 60 ish stocks and 40% something else? You just recently brought that real estate property that is acting as a bond for you. It’s not going to be generating all of these giant returns that a stock market would, a good stock market, not the current stock market, but it’s also fairly safe. It’s the kind of property that is always going to have tenants in it. It’s a fourplex. So it’s not like your tenants leave and then all of a sudden you’re like, oh shucks. Now what? You’ve got three other tenants to help you pay that mortgage until you get that fourth tenant in place. So the vacancy is not a big hit, but I wonder what other kinds of investments are acting like a bond? Like is gold, gold is an inflation hedge?

Scott:
Yes. I think that the headline is every asset class has exploded over the last six years from January, 2019, which is my favorite lookback period in the current climate to January, 2025 except commercial real estate. And then residential real estate has basically paced in price with the increase in the money supply. So I think that there’s plenty of risk in residential real estate, but that other asset classes are at extreme risk. Obviously I think bitcoin’s going to zero. I’ve made that point very clear and multiple things there. You can go beat me up in the comment section as the 900th to a thousandth comment. Disagreeing with me in my video, the Rational Investors case against Bitcoin here on the BiggerPockets money YouTube channel. Gold, by the way, is another one on there. Gold has been pacing the s and p 500 for the last six years. Really it’s gone up 2.3 ish X over the last couple of years. I think it might have pulled back recently a little bit, but gold is, gold is whatever gold was as this store of value, it has gone up in value way faster than the money supply.

Mindy:
So I am looking at the historic gold prices again on macro trends.net. They’ve got some really great charts here and I want to show you this. This is inflation adjusted. So look at this inflation adjusted in 1980, it was $2,700, now it’s $2,800 inflation

Scott:
Adjusted. So the return for gold from 2000 has been what? Five x? It’s unbelievable, right? Inflation is not. This is real. This is inflation adjusted,

Mindy:
This is inflation adjusted, this is, but it’s

Scott:
Incredible how expensive gold is in terms of its historical value. I mean investors are fearing the market right now and we’ll talk about that a little bit in a few minutes here as well. Or maybe that’s a good transition point here to talk about what is going on in the stock market right now.

Mindy:
Alright, my dear listeners, we want to hit a hundred thousand subscribers on YouTube and we need your help. While we take a quick ad break, please hop on over to youtube.com/biggerpockets money and make sure you are subscribed to this channel. Stay tuned after the break for more.

Scott:
Thanks for sticking with us.

Mindy:
Okay, Scott, what’s going on in the stock market right now? A whole lot of down, we are recording this on March 11th. Yesterday there was a 900 point drop based on a commentary from the administration. Today there is an additional drop. I haven’t even seen how much yet because I’ve been working, but it is based on double tariffs on Canadian steel.

Scott:
Look, I think the problem that I saw that I see and saw is just historically high price to earnings ratios on a reel or inflation adjusted basis. So we discussed that at length in a previous episode here. That was the risk factor in here. And I think what is causing this problem is very simple. There’s a large body of activity coming from the new Trump administration and that activity is causing uncertainty. And some could use the word chaos that is confusing markets and individuals and I think several hundred million Americans are asking themselves the question, am I comfortable having most or all of my financial portfolio and investment portfolio in stock market funds that are disproportionately allocated to the United States in the context of the current environment? And increasingly more and more of those people are saying, no, I’m not comfortable with that. And Mindy, that scares the heck out of me. We can talk about the 4% rule all day long on this and how it works. I’m just not comfortable allocating huge percentages of my net worth to stock market index funds given that risk. I think that’s a real risk and that we could have a lot more pain to come. It can go every way. Who knows what the market’s going to do with all this stuff. I just can’t handle the heat. And so I got out of the kitchen

Mindy:
And where did you go?

Scott:
I put it into real estate. I rebalanced my 401k and HSA accounts to 60 40 stock bond portfolios that my bond fund of choice is V-B-T-L-X. I also have a large pile of cash which I’ll put into. I’ll go back to private lending and that one in the hard money space and I’ll likely buy another rental property later on in this year and I’ll likely make several syndication investments in the most distressed markets around the country, probably mostly here in Denver in multifamily and or a sprinkling of office.

Mindy:
If you don’t want to rely on the 4% rule anymore or you don’t want to rely on the 60 44% rule, what options do you have, Scott?

Scott:
Well look, let’s go back to the, let’s pretend we’re retiring with a million or two and a half dollars portfolio in the 4% rule, and let’s begin to alleviate our fears, right? Even if there’s a crash as bad as the Great Depression or an inflationary environment as bad as the seventies and eighties, this rule is held up second and it’s all adjusted for inflation on the 4%. Rule math second, that 4% rule assumes that you will never decrease your spending in the event of a market catastrophe. It assumes, assumes that you’ll never earn another dollar of any type with any work whatsoever in the event of a downturn. You could get a part-time job, for example, to defray some of those expenses or offset components of it. It assumes you’ll never get social security or other forms of benefits in there. It assumes that you’ll never start a business.
It assumes that you’ll never swap certain spending for other things in an inflationary adjusted inflation environment. When eggs get expensive to eat oats for breakfast instead for a while, it makes none of those assumptions. So all of those are ways to defray the risks. The 4% rule before we even get into alternatives, once we get into alternatives, there are plenty of options. Obviously one of the ones I’m most comfortable with is real estate. I’ve been doing BiggerPockets for the last 11 years on this. This is a clear area that I’m comfortable with and feel like I have some skill in. Private lending is another one that you can get into on this. Building a bigger cash position is another one. Starting some kind of side business, even one that’s seasonal. For example, we had that Christmas lights guy, a kid come on the show kid, he was 25, but we had this Christmas lights man that was doing that and making almost six figures in a couple of months at the end of the year.
There’s so many different ways to begin doing that, but I think that having one or two of those alternatives layered into your portfolio, keep your formula. If you’re like the 4% ruling, you like the passiveness of stocks and bonds, keep your formula and go hit it and then layer on. You have likely many years between now and TrueFire every year or two, maybe every six months, if you’re like me, every 90 days, layer in some side bets that can begin to compound because you just need one or two, I believe for most people to really defray the risks, the discomfort and the pit of your stomach with the 4% rule as your only backstop in your portfolio. Just have build a couple of those over time and that should put you more than over the edge when a decision comes to actually pull the trigger and retire early,

Mindy:
The end result, there’s still, I want to say it’s 12 times that you would’ve ended up with less than a million dollars at the end, and that’s all past information. But I think that a $1 million portfolio is going to be enough for people who have a paid off house or a very low mortgage. My mortgage is $1,300 a month, I’m not going to pay it off very fast at all. I can just build that into my numbers to make that an expense. I think that I’m not in a low cost of living area, but my cost of living is low because I bought a house in 2019 for very little money compared to what I could get if I sold it. And now these prices aren’t available. It’s been five years we’ve had that market run up. If you are a renter, your rents are probably going to go up over the next 30 years.

Scott:
Yeah, that’s a key bet too. That informs parts of my portfolio. I mean, there’s a lot of math that suggests that renting is better than buying right now with historical averages. But I believe that while 2025 will not see significant rent growth, I believe we’ll see rents rise dramatically in 2026 and 2027 across this country because a large amount of the supply that’s going on, like multifamily construction will start to abate. And if interest rates stay high, that should continue to push up demand for rentals because the alternative to renting, buying a home is up there. So I think that buying is a great way to defray risk of a 4% rural portfolio because you lock in your housing expense adjusted for inflation, whether you use a mortgage or not on there. So there is something to be said for buying a home. Especially one of my favorite tactics that’s coming up is I’m talking to people from high cost living areas and they’ve got a million dollars in equity in their homes in certain parts of California or the east coast.
And those markets are also great because if you have a house like that and you’re dead set on staying there, but you want to travel, many of those markets offer things like you can rent out your house 25% of the time on short-term rentals only if you’re an owner occupant. That’s an awesome way to defray early retirement expenses, by the way. So I think that there’s, there’s options that come with home homeownership that are not available to renters where you just know your portfolio has to cover the renter’s expense in some of those. So it’s not black and white in that. Guess the math leans if you don’t have any of these side bets in place towards renting over buying right now. But it is nice to just have it locked in. No, I can stay here for 20 years and not have to worry about material inflation adjusted costs to my living outside of my taxes and insurance and maintenance, I guess.

Mindy:
Ooh, and taxes and insurance. That’s a great conversation that we’ll have another time. But yeah, I’m hearing that insurance, homeowners insurance is going up.

Scott:
I got a 90% quote for a 90% increase in my home insurance, then I shopped it around and my premium will decrease by 50%. So shop around guys, because some of these carriers are different

Mindy:
Things. Absolutely. Shop it around and if your property taxes go up exponentially, even if your property taxes go up just a little bit, protest them. Figure out how your city will have a detailed way for you to protest your tax increase and protest protested every single time. I have never protested and not gotten a

Scott:
Reduction. Yeah, I plan to shop all of my rental property insurance policies and my assessed values, my rental properties this year. I got a feeling that I’ve been neglecting that and I got a good 10,000 to $15,000 in cost savings annually in that exercise for me. So

Mindy:
They reassess on the odd year. So they’re going to reassess this year and you will probably see an increase next year.

Scott:
Yeah, well guess. Well, look, I think there’s a case that my properties are down in value. We got a buyer’s market in the commercial side on some of these, so we’ll see. Yeah.

Mindy:
Yeah, you have to do some research in order to do the protest, but I have always had it be well worth it for me to protest my tax increases.

Scott:
Yeah. Going back to the 4% rule piece there though, this is a key concept because how little you spend, the less you spend, the easier all of this gets. So if you can control adjusted for inflation, the costs to commute, the costs to live in your house, your food costs, those types of things, you can go from anywhere from reasonable, like paying off a mortgage and having your housing costs fixed outside of your taxes, insurance and maintenance to extreme installing solar panels, for example, to mitigate your electricity bill for the foreseeable future to planting a garden to grow much of your own. You can get really extreme with this stuff, but that framework as you apply it puts less and less pressure on your overall portfolio and makes that margin of safety in the 4% rule, safer and safer and safer and safer. And that’s a luxury I think that a lot of folks who do actually pull the trigger will have is not only is there these opportunities to earn more money, not only will you probably not do with nothing for 30 years that generates an income, but you’ll also be able to tackle the projects that control expenses in your portfolio, do your own taxes, those types of things to defray costs, which can make your portfolio stretch longer.
And again, that’s not accounted for in the 4% rule if you put in conservative expense estimates upfront. So those are all things you can do. And then again, there’s always the world of alternatives out there.

Mindy:
That sounds like a show for another day. Scott, I want to hear from our listeners, what do you think of the 4% rule? Are you still excited about it? Are you in at a hundred percent stocks? Have you adjusted your fire plans in response to the recent market conditions? Please leave a comment below, leave a comment on your, if you’re watching this on YouTube, leave a comment below. We will also post this in our Facebook group, so we would love to hear from you, what are your fire plans and what are your impressions of the 4% rule today? You can also email [email protected] [email protected] to give us your opinion as well. Alright, Scott. I think this is a very lively discussion. I can’t wait till the comments are coming in.

Scott:
Yeah, this was fun. Mindy, thanks so much for joining me today and I’m glad we didn’t have a 15 second episode. After all,

Mindy:
Anybody who has ever met me knows that I cannot talk for only 15 seconds. Alright, that wraps up this episode of the BiggerPockets Money podcast. He is Scott Trench. I am Mindy Jensen now saying, see you later, alligator. And yes, Jason, that’s for you.