- You either buy the 30-year TIPS or buybuild a TIPS ladder, with shorterTIPS of different maturities and reconsider your strategy. This means that, if you retire in 2020, you could arrange for 1/30th of your real yields become negative. Shorter TIPS exposeto mature in 2021, 1/30th in 2022, and so on until 2050. None of this will work if you sell the bonds before they mature, because then you lesswould expose yourself to fluctuationschanges in interest rates. (see point 4If rates go up, the value of your bond falls and you will make a loss if you sell, but not if you hold to maturity). By extension, this method will not work with TIPS ETFs. You have to hold the securities yourself and arrange the expected payments (both interest payments and principal repayments) so that you do not have to ever sell the TIPS.
- The real yield is non-negative on purchase (or else you'll have to satisfy yourself with less than 3.33% of the starting amount each year).
- Either a) It is invested in a tax-sheltered account, or b) The after-tax yield is non-negative
- Interest rates don’t rise steeply. Because your strategy requires withdrawing more money (3.33%) than you are receiving in interest, you will have to sell some of the capital to make the desired withdrawals, meaning that your TIPS are exposed to fluctuations in interest rates. This is especially the case with 30-year TIPS.
- The issuing authority, the US treasury in this case, does not default
- You die on schedule after 30 years.
Point (65) is important. Note that the graph above shows you the maximum withdrawal that always worked for a 30-year period in the past for a given allocation of stocks and bonds. This means that at these maximum withdrawal rates, with 1% of the starting retirement years you would have gotten exactly 30 years of withdrawals. But with the other 99% of the starting years, you would have gotten more years than this, giving you a buffer in case you lived more than 30 years in retirement. With TIPS and 3.33% withdrawals, you have no such buffer, if you don't die before the end of year 30, you will run out of money.