You should be taking money out at your chosen rate, not depending on how those companies choose to allocate money between dividends vs. buybacks vs. cash piles vs. reinvestment. So treating dividends as reinvested by default makes sense to me.
If you plan to withdraw 4% per year, so you preserve your wealth indefinitely, you're more than 2 percentage points short when the dividend yield is 1.71% [1]
If you want to live solely from dividends, you'll need more than double the capital.
If you want to die with zero [2], it's impossible.
I'd much rather invest in a dividend-accumulating index fund and sell as I please.
It may be hard to imagine, but dividend yields were not always this low [1]. Investopedia has it usually something healthy over 4% up until 1990s it seems. Over that 1926- time frame, dividends are said to have contributed 32% of the total return of S&P 500 [2].
I think parent is saying that you can't die with zero if you plan to live off dividends. (Because you need to keep owning the stock throwing off the dividends.)
In most other developed countries a) healthcare is funded by the government (to a first approximation).
b) end-of-life healthcare expenditure is considerably lower outside the US.
OK sure; same's true of bonds or CDs or any other asset type though no? The point is that "invest in equities with dividend reinvestment until retirement and then buy a life annuity" is a totally viable strategy. That's basically the way pension saving in the UK works historically, for example.
Right. Life annuities may or may not be a good deal. But that's certainly the main way to not be essentially forced to pass on assets. (Modulo real estate you own and are living in.) And, as you say, defined benefit pensions basically work the same way--although, in the US, current ones are fairly uncommon outside public sector--although a lot of people still have them from years past.
Just to add. Bonds and CDs do have durations though so you can essentially do your own actuarial calculations to a certain degree.
In the UK this is actually the typical pattern for defined-contribution schemes; I haven't looked recently but it used to be the case that you were legally required to buy an annuity with 75% of your tax-deferred retirement savings.
Interesting. I'm not sure how common annuities outside of defined benefit pensions are in the US. My impression is not very.
I've noticed them mostly in the form of charitable trusts (which can offer the benefit of basically shielding large asset gains from taxation). But it doesn't seem to be a widely-used investment strategy in general. Maybe it's more common if someone doesn't have an interest in passing down any money.
Once you start selling off your assets, the """returns""" are worse, but equally so no matter what you invested in. It's better to leave that math out of the situation and look at the returns of the actual assets by themselves. Which includes reinvesting.
If you really want to factor in the sell-off, then every dollar of dividend means one less dollar of sold stock. If dividends go higher than withdrawals for a year, then you need to buy more stock to compensate. So the math comes out the same. What you don't do is ignore dividends, or let excess dividends pile up in cash form. Which the original paper apparently did.
Why would you exclude part of the total return on an investment? It'd be like ignoring the principal value of a bond because you expect to live on the coupon. Cashflows are cashflows.
There are enough “cash cow” securities that maintain a same / similar share price by distributing heavily for this to make sense. The price wouldn’t show the whole story and the cash could go much further over 100 years than just sitting in a bank account.
I don’t know many people that spend 100 years in retirement.
An extremely interesting paper that puts into perspective a lot of investment "knowledge" shared at nauseom almost everywhere.
> Investors have seen countless charts of US stock market performance which start in 1926 and end near the present. But US trading long predates 1926, and the foreshortened perspective that results from a focus on post-1926 data can be misleading.
> The goal is to challenge shibboleths about the expected outcomes of buy-and-hold stock market investing, and to raise questions about the expected performance of stocks versus bonds over long periods.
> Put another way, since 1928 dividends plus inflation accounted for 99.7% of the nominal wealth produced, as of 2008, by investing in stocks.
> Total return measured on the century scale presumes an investor who never needs to spend the dividends or interest received. No real investor, individual or institution, has that luxury. And there is one class of individual investor, now of growing importance within the financial planning literature as the Baby Boom generation ages, for whom the total return metric is particularly malaprop: retirees. Once portfolio accumulation ceases with retirement, portfolio income must be spent to live. Under those circumstances real price return, over short periods lasting two or three decades, becomes an important metric. By that measure, an investment in stocks has been dicey indeed.
---
Just to whet your appetite some more:
> Figure 4 [1] illuminates how much of the long-term return on stocks since 1926 has been due to sustained high inflation on the one hand, and to the favorable enhancement from re-investing dividends on the other. Under the one depiction, the portfolio returned about 9% compounded, from near the high in the Twenties to near the low in the Oughts; under the other, only about 1.5%.
> Few contemporary investors expect a multi-decade return on their stock portfolios of 1 2% per year. They have no reason to expect such poor results, because most investors have never seen a post-1926 chart of inflation-adjusted, price-only returns, and have rarely seen any charts extending back past 1896.
> Put another way, since 1928 dividends plus inflation accounted for 99.7% of the nominal wealth produced, as of 2008, by investing in stocks.
I feel like I must be missing something. Why are dividends treated differently from price increases?
As I'm saving for retirement, "stock goes up" and "stock pays dividends" are basically the same thing in my mind. I assume a dividend is effectively a price increase that gets automatically liquidated. I could choose not to re-invest them, but I could also choose to sell some of my non-dividend stock.
It is true that, as a future retiree, I need to be looking at grown on a decade-scale, not century scale. That part makes sense. I'm just confused by this separation of dividends.
> I feel like I must be missing something. Why are dividends treated differently from price increases?
you're thinking about it the right way, and they aren't treated differently the way you're thinking. They way they are treated differently is,
if you just look at historical stock prices you will miss the dividends being siphoned off, so you have to track the dividends and put those amounts back into your charts, and it's mentioned over and over so you don't look at the data and wonder if they did the naive thing or the complex thing.
and dividends are taxed in that calendar year as income at the corporate level, and again at the personal level, and not with lower capital gains tax rates, so the amount left over that is available to the investor to spend or reinvest is smaller than the nominal amount, and taxes change over time, and different income brackets pay different taxes (which is ignored, i think, they just use worst case marginal tax rates) Because dividends are income-taxed, it makes sense to earmark that money to spend on yourself if you're going to be spending any of the money on yourself.
and large "institutions" frequently don't pay income tax (I'm not an expert, but churches, foundations, and perhaps pension funds and corporations which have large losses/expenses/depreciation to write off) but they do play a large role in the investment markets, driving market prices etc.
You know what it all reminds me of? climate science. You can measure a ton of metrics and track them over time and try to predict the future, but the data is only a very rough estimate of what's going on, and the underlying dynamics change a lot over time.
The tax situation also obviously depends on the investors' tax residence. For example in Switzerland, private investors don't have to pay taxes on capital gains. And many countries have a flat tax for dividends and don't consider them income. But then dividends are often additionally taxed at the source, even though you can reclaim it in some cases.
a dividend is a payout of the companies earnings. rather, the portion the company has chosen not to spend on itself. That amount is divide up by how much % you own in the company. If you owned 50% of all the stock, you would directly receive 50% of their profits less re-investing come dividend time
the stock price is how much people are willing to pay for purchase said stock.(consider market share when looking at price, because 2 stocks at $5.2 is the same thing as 1 stock at $10.5)
so yes, from your gains perspective it is the same thing but the source of where the increase in your portfolio is entirely different
Just to make sure I am following correctly, is this referring to the process which:
corporations have had their costs go up roughly 2% per year since 1928, so they have raised their prices roughly 2% per year, making it so that cost increases (labor/good/services/whatever) are "passthroughs" (assuming margins stay the same), passing along increases to customers (who have roughly had their pay increase 2% per year)
and because of this, corporations have stayed profitable (more profitable in dollars, "the same" profitable in percentage given margins/inflation?), and share prices have grown?
> since 1928 dividends plus inflation accounted for 99.7% of the nominal wealth produced, as of 2008, by investing in stocks.
OK, so strip out inflation to get real rather than nominal returns, and it becomes "stock investment produces almost all its returns in dividends over a long period". Which is .. not that surprising? Because dividends are ultimately why people buy stocks in the first place? The present value of a stock is after all the "net present value" of the expected flow of dividends.
> Because dividends are ultimately why people buy stocks in the first place?
I would disagree, I feel like the mojority of stonk owners think dividends are passe companies, and a real company would reinvest its earnings or buy back stock. I disagree with these people. I think a company that has no intention of paying a dividend is merely an over produced digital collectible.
stock buybacks are more tax efficient than dividends, but I disagree they are remotely the same thing. There is plenty of empirical evidence that a stock buyback does little to the stock price in the long run, and I would much rather have the decision what to do with the money even though its less tax efficient.
I think it probably would surprise a lot of people. But you're absolutely right that the Finance 101 argument for how a stock should be valued is the net present value of its dividend stream. Largely fail at the individual firm level of course for various reasons (and is a naive estimate for those many reasons) but it shouldn't be too surprising that it works in aggregate.
> presumes an investor who never needs to spend the dividends or interest received. No real investor, individual or institution, has that luxury.
I don't understand this. It's like saying: I don't have the luxury to sell off some of my growth stock. It makes no sense, you sell when you need money, and you re-invest the dividends unless you need money, same thing.
I was going on to make a comment about how many firms that have IPO'd of late are never been profitable. These firms have not paid any dividends and may never. Yet these firms are hyped up to lure in the retail investor, yet the evidence presented in this paper is that compound growth of dividends is the route to wealth.
That's because there's this quite "sticky" situation of not every human being being the same. Nobody likes to talk about it and you get shunned or imprisoned for even thinking about it, but the world has actually groups of people with varying levels of intelligence.
I really hope so. The US has had major interests in not having this completed, and getting this up and running only just to spite them would be worth it.
A solution to this (from a non-diabetic) would maybe to always be eating a keto-like diet. It's not easy, but far easier than having to constantly juggle 100s of carb combinations.
"Diet" might even be the wrong word, more like a lifestyle.
> I continue to think Apple should have never released AirTags to the public, and should discontinue it. It's a very limited income stream, with limited use cases, and significantly increases the average person's risk of stalking.
You sure have a lot of strong opinions on what apple "should" do.
Don't like it? It's a free market. Don't buy it and if you're afraid of being stalked, check out the app they released.
I wonder how come all you people come out of the woodwork now that Apple released this thing, yet when Tile did there was no such forced concerned anywhere.
reply