Tony Peterson;241797 wrote:Harry
These returns do not look so hot if you calculate then in prospective real terms, factoring in a possible annual depreciation in the value of money @ 10% (or more? or less?).
Hi Tony, I hope you are keeping well
It's a fair question. Big picture, what I'm trying to do is plan for our investments getting to something like the following structure one day:
2 year's forecast expenses - cash on deposit (mostly with HL active savings which we find to be decent)
A further 3 years' forecast expenses - held in lower volatility stuff - All Weather, Wealth Preservation, Short Duration Bonds, Gilts etc etc
Everything else - equities and longer duration stuff
And what I've discovered this year is that the lower volatility "stuff" is actually still quite volatile! For example, these allegedly lower volatility investments (all the usual forum suspects) are negative for me over 12 months. Thus perhaps I need more certainty in this lower volatility bucket. hence gilts.
Our context today is that our unearned income does not cover our living expenses while we are supporting the kids and there are still a few years of that to go. In other words, if we go too quickly towards the above structure we are likely to be in "sequence of returns risk" territory and I want to avoid that.
And so, the attraction of gilts maybe is to (a) have some guarantee of preservation of nominal capital and to (b) help in our quest to equalise our expenses with unearned income.
Simply put, if I knew I could get an IRR on a 5-10 year gilt of 5%+ per annum in a SIPP / ISA wrapper I would probably chuck a fair bit at it while the kids are still around.
On your point about inflation, we currently have that under control in terms of our expenses. If we see our personal inflation rising it might affect the planned structure but it would probably just result in the kids inheriting a little less in the grand scheme of things. Not a massive concern currently!!
Happy to be challenged though, it's a helpful thread this
Best regards
Harry