My boss was trying to give me good advice a couple years when he suggested I buy a house even though I'd only live there for two years because "equity." I played that game a decade ago and all I saw was "closing costs."
I got that early in my career, I was in a HCOL area for a specific 2 year contract, and was told the previous person who had that contract made more money selling their place after 2 years than salary during that time. We had never owned, but that still told me it was a housing bubble. So we rented, and at the end of 2 years, the landlord was trying to sell it. They had one (1) person come look at it in 6 months. Bubble over, and we moved on to another state, as expected. . .
On the topic of this thread, I did recently give a financial presentation to a non-profit I'm a member of that got a bequest on how to invest it for the long term. I'm betting nobody else on this forum thought of this solution: do a 65/35% mix of index funds and fixed income, rebalance once a year, and don't take out more than 4% a year. :) I dressed it up nicely with data from links I've seen here, and some graphs, and they were shocked at how simple it could be. I added an extra rule to be more conservative, since they don't NEED the money, if the total account doesn't go up by 4% in any one year, don't take anything out that year.
Anyway, one person in the meeting was outraged that I could suggest something so risky. "Didn't I know the market just hit all time highs?" (Answer, yes, it does that regularly, the market goes up over the long term.) "Didn't I know the market went down 90% in the Great Depression?" (Answer, yes, this model was back tested against that, and that is why SWR is only 4%.) "The Fed has pumped 1 trillion into the economy, and the worldwide economy is about to collapse!!" (Answer, as I showed, this model has been tested against the markets of 16 other advanced economies as well as ours, for a total of roughly 1700 years of market activity, and it works as long as you don't have WW 2 on your territory.) He finally left the meeting as he "couldn't listen to this insanity" any more.
I suspect I'll have a bit more trouble with him, but he'll be outvoted by the other people who really liked what I presented. The only argument I'll have is about using stop loss orders, which guarantee you will miss any market bounce back from a dip.
