DIY Financial Planning
Your financial future, guided by market history, powered by math, shaped by insight.
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Retirement withdrawal methods fall into two classes based on how spending is determined. In responsive spending methods, spending adjusts to portfolio performance, balance or some other factor- through guardrails, annuity designed formulas, or other dynamic strategies. In non-responsive spending methods,…
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Lifestyle Withdrawal Rate: A New Approach to Retirement Spending
Discover Princeton Asset’s Lifestyle Withdrawal Rate, a withdrawal method that calculates how much you can initially withdraw based on your preferred retirement spending pattern.
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Building Wade Pfau style Tax Maps with Princeton Asset’s Income Tax Calculator
A standard tax return answers one question: what do you owe this year? A tax map answers something harder: what does additional income actually cost you – after taxes, Medicare premiums, ACA subsidies, and every other variable that shifts when…
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How to Calculate the All-In Cost of a Roth Conversion
Roth conversions are one of the most complex tax planning strategies available to retirees. Determining how much to convert has always been more complicated than simply looking at your current tax bracket. A conversion increases taxable income, but it can…
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Drift or Rebalance? A Portfolio Backtesting Guide
Investing doesn’t stop once you pick your portfolio. Over time, markets move, and your carefully chosen allocation begins to drift. The key question becomes: what if anything should you do about it? Princeton Asset’s, portfolio backtest tool supports several approaches,…
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Princeton Asset Portfolio Backtest – Asset Class Data Sources
Princeton Asset backtests stitch together multiple data sources per asset class prioritizing investable proxies. This post explains our source hierarchy and shows exactly which series feeds each ticker.
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First Principles Portfolio Construction
For decades investors have been told to begin portfolio construction with a “simple” question: Should I be a passive investor or an active investor? The question sounds reasonable but is the wrong question.
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Are Total Market Index Funds Passive, or Just the Default Benchmarks?
One of the most interesting aspects of the passive investing debate is not the evidence itself but the definitions used to draw the conclusions. Throughout this series, we have examined whether broad market-cap-weighted index funds, such as VT, should automatically…
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Passive Investing Is a Process, Not a Product
A common claim in modern investing is that VT (Vanguard Total World Stock ETF) represents the most “pure” form of passive investing because it owns the “total market.” That framing sounds precise. It is not.
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Conflating Total Market Fund Expense and Return Efficiency
Many investors assume that total market index funds are efficient portfolios because they are low-cost, broadly diversified, and associated with CAPM and modern portfolio theory. But this argument often conflates two different ideas: expense efficiency and return efficiency. A portfolio…
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