What happens when you finally want to live off of your portfolio? Most withdrawal methods call for a combination of spending dividends and selling shares to cover the rest. But what if you wanted to live only off of dividends from your stocks and the interest from bonds? I was curious to see how this would have worked out historically.

Let’s say you had $100,000 invested in a mutual fund, and you had to live off the dividend income produced from those shares without any additional buying or selling. I found historical price data and dividend distributions for select funds from Yahoo Finance that went back to 1987-1990, and added up the trailing 12 months of dividends to see how much money they would have generated over a year’s time.

The Vanguard Wellesley Income Fund (VWINX) is a low-cost, actively-managed fund which has been around since 1970. It is composed of approximately 35% dividend-oriented stocks and 65% bonds (mostly corporate for higher yields). This conservative allocation is designed to create a steady income stream with less focus on capital appreciation. Let’s see how $100,000 invested in 1988 would have done in terms of income:

In 1988, interest rates were relatively high and $100,000 of Wellesley shares would have created nearly $9,000 of annual income. In 2012, that same set of shares would be worth $156,000 and your income would be about $5,400 annually. The income produced had some swings, but overall did not seem to track with inflation although the share price did better. According to the CPI, $100,000 in 1988 would buy as much stuff as $180,000 today.

The Vanguard 500 Index Fund was the first index fund available to the public and is now one of the largest funds in the world, passively following the S&P 500 index of large US companies since 1976 and thus always 100% stocks. Even though this is not a dividend-focused fund, it still does produce a regular stream of dividends from the companies it tracks:

In contrast, $100,000 of the Vanguard 500 Fund would have only created about $2,700 of income in 1988, but that income has grown over the next 24 years to about $8,800 today in 2012. Also of high significance is that the value of your $100,000 worth of shares from 1988 would be worth around $500,000 today.

This is just a limited snapshot of two funds, but it would suggest that you can’t just buy an income-oriented fund that has a large chunk of bonds and expect to sit back and spend whatever dividends are spit out. However, things would have turned out much better if one was reinvesting a big chunk of those Wellesley dividends when the overall yield was high. I can still envision a income-oriented portfolio, but I will have to set a reasonable withdrawal rate that isn’t too high and have the discipline to plow the rest back into buying more shares.

Just as theorized by a previously-mentioned academic paper about target funds, a new Bloomberg article talks about how some mutual fund providers like PIMCO and Invesco are now adding things like commodities futures, options, and currency swaps into these all-in-one funds. Will all these bells and whistles be worth the added cost? I doubt it, but differentiation is important in marketing. The article also included some interesting stats about these funds:

Investments in the [target date retirement] funds have swelled more than 380 percent since 2005 to about $343 billion as of September, according to the Investment Company Institute, a Washington- based trade group for the mutual-fund industry. […]

The majority, or 53 percent, of plan sponsors that automatically enroll participants in 401(k)s use target-date funds as the default investment, according to a 2011 report by the Plan Sponsor Council of America, a Chicago-based trade group.

There are more than 40 target-date mutual fund families employers may choose from and some sellers also offer them in collective trusts or customized versions, said Jeremy Stempien, director of investments for the retirement solutions group at Morningstar Investment Management. “We can see tremendous discrepancy, tremendous differences among asset managers,” said Harvard’s Pozen, who’s also a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “I don’t think most people understand what they’re getting.”

Fidelity, Vanguard and T. Rowe Price Group Inc. controlled about 75 percent of the target-date assets in 2011, according to Morningstar. The average fee for a target-date mutual fund last year was about 1.1 percent, according to Morningstar, which included all share classes and retirement years such as the 2030 or 2040 funds.

Fees for the funds at Pimco and Invesco averaged about 1.2 percent. Vanguard, which mainly uses three broad-market index funds in its series, had the lowest expenses at about 19 basis points, or 84 percent less than the more expensive funds. A basis point is 0.01 percentage point.

Vanguard reported yesterday that in 2011 about 64 percent of new enrollees in 401(k) plans administered by the company invested solely in a target-date fund. The Valley Forge, Pennsylvania-based firm managed about $100 billion in the funds as of Feb. 29, according to spokeswoman Linda Wolohan.

I don’t invest in any of these funds, but I keep track of them because they are where the industry is heading. I have recommended Vanguard Target Retirement 20XX funds to family members, but have adjusted the “date” to match their own situations.

If you have a 401(k) plan or similar, then you most likely have a target-date mutual fund (TDF) as the default option. This is a direct result of the Pension Protection Act of 2006 (PPA). These funds contain some mix of stocks and bonds, and the asset allocation changes according to a “glide path” as you reach your “target date” of retirement, and were designed as a stupid-proof, low-maintenance option for investors. But did this turn out to be a good thing or a bad thing?

The Freakonomics blog notes a new academic paper Heterogeneity in Target-Date Funds and the Pension Protection Act of 2006 [pdf] by Balduzzi and Reuter. Heterogeneity is just a fancy word for they tend to be very different from each other even though the yearly dating system can make them seem similar. For example, the WashingtonRock 2020 Fund could be completely different than the LincolnStone 2020 Fund. Why? Their theory is that because every 401(k) now would have a target date fund inside, then every fund provider would have to create a target date fund. However, you wouldn’t want your TDF to be the same as the other guys’ TDF, so you’d make yours slightly different, right?

Here is a glide path comparison done by State Farm showing the paths of the major providers Fidelity, Vanguard, and T. Rowe Price:

(click to enlarge)

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