The Passive Investing vs Active Investing Debate

A search on Google for passive investing vs active investing yields 1,330,000 results with plenty of support on both sides of the fence.  In brief passive investing is a method where you buy an investment product that simply tracks an index.  They are commonly called index trackers and with this method you expect to do no better than the index it is tracking after expenses.

In contrast active investing is a method where you pay a financial professional higher expenses than those of a passive tracker and in exchange he or she is supposed to beat an index s/he is measured against.

Beating the index is the critical point as research I’ve quoted before shows that somebody entrusting their money to a UK financial advisor or investment manager will be paying an average 2.56% annually for financial planning services and financial product expenses.

Let’s demonstrate the effect these expenses can wreak with a simple example knowing that UK equities have ‘only’ returned a real 5.0% over the last 116 years.  Passive Punter self invests £10,000 into a UK Equity Passive Fund which sees expenses of 0.25% and then promptly forgets about it for 20 years.  Assuming that fund returns a real annualised 5.0% before expenses over that period our Passive Punter ends up with a real £25,298.  So far so good.

It’s starting to get Interesting (Part 2)

A lot of very thoughtful comment last week so I thought it might bring some value to the collective if I expand on my musings a little more.  Wandering Star I think hit the nail on the head – for me this FI (Financial Independence) moving to FIRE (Financially Independent Retired Early) lark is no longer about finances but now about psychology and so that’s where I’ll focus today.

I think The Accumulator also makes a good point with “I admire your willingness to play out your doubts in public. It is helpful on a personal level, while at the same time we, your audience, can't help but cheer, hiss, wince and cover our eyes from the galleries.”  I don’t believe I’ve ever claimed to know what I’m doing but what I have tried to always do is learn, experience and then share both the outcome and the journey.  I hope my tossing and turning proves helpful – the other option is to do that behind the scenes and then just communicate surety but I that doesn’t seem as useful from where I sit.  I guess it goes without saying that not for a second did I ever expect to find myself where I am today.  I honestly thought I’d reach FI, soon after convert that into FIRE and then ride off into the Mediterranean sunset.  So just what is going on...

It might be helpful to start with putting some backstory on the table.  I apologise to those who’ve read my book  as you’ll already know some/most of this.  I genuinely come from pretty humble beginnings which means that if I get this wrong I have nowhere to run.  This also means no top up inheritance to come should it all get a bit lean later in FIRE.  Thinking this through and for me it’s more than just a risk to manage.  I’d go so far to say it’s actually a fear.  I have seen and been part of poverty.  It’s not fun.  This is definitely having an impact despite me knowing I have enough.  Shucks, when I look at my wealth today my withdrawal rate if I went today would be less than 2.5% and that comes with knowing that additionally 47% of my spending could become discretionary if/when we see a very bad bear market.  One of the benefits of a quality of life for me costing very little.

It’s starting to get Interesting

Time since my One More Year call has passed by incredibly quickly.  In fact so quickly that if I’m to stick strictly to it resignation day is now just a few a short weeks away.  At the time of my last post this was looking to be an incredibly 100% easy call with Brexit being just over a year away as well as an employer who had apparently decided I was now Mr Average.

Enter 2 events that have shifted that to 20% work on a bit longer to 80% FIRE to the Med in 2018.

The first is the draft Brexit Withdrawal Agreement which was published on the 19 March 2018.  As somebody moving to the Med keeping my EU rights is a very important consideration.  With that in mind, if I’m reading the Agreement correctly, I now gain no advantage by being in the Med by Brexit day, the 29 March 2019, when compared with setting up my new home during the Transition Period, which is now agreed by both the UK and EU as ending on the 31 December 2020.  Brexit pressure off.

When the Stars Align

It’s not always sunny on The Med

The past few months have seen me pass through my annual work performance review, my annual salary review and a new HR initiative which seems to have been designed to suppress salaries (read suppress the salaries of the highest performers).  The results of all that for me were that despite my strong work ethic (first into the office, last out of the office and 60-70 hour work weeks) and strong results (but which fell short of very ambitious/impossible? objectives) I managed to receive the worst performance review since I entered the world of work which nicely dove tailed into an annual salary increase well below inflation.

This most definitely doesn’t fit into my Saving Hard by Earning More strategy, which in the past has resulted in healthy earnings increases.  I’m not sure what objective the company were trying to achieve but my interpretation is that it’s now time to move on.  Normally, that would have been a new job in a new company for more reward but this time around that’s not necessary as I now have another option – FIRE.  The stars really are aligning nicely.

Click to enlarge, RIT earnings improvement since saving hard by earning more

On the topic of FIRE my One More Year, after a slow and frustrating start that now seems to be passing quickly and without a worry in the world.  Financial plans between now and a summer FIRE are also synchronising nicely:

• collect one more bonus;
• maximise my pension contributions to just below the tapered annual allowance for 2018/19;
• which if my annualised returns continue as they have since starting on this journey should see me nicely just on the underside of the Pension Lifetime Allowance (LTA) by age 55; and
• then use that bonus (plus some salary) to fill my and Mrs RIT’s 2018/19 ISA allowances of £20,000.

Snakes and Ladders

Well it looks like asset prices don’t always go up.  Of course I’m not surprised by this revelation but the mainstream media did seem surprised with headlines such as “Dow loses 7 million points in the session” and “Worst market performance since dinosaurs roamed the earth” but then of course they need sensationalism as they’re attention seeking.  The market action even meant that it made the first news item on the radio for a couple of days.  It could almost be 2008 again.  It would be enough to scare people off investing if they did nothing more than listen to news sound bites.

What has really happened thus far?  I say thus far because the market can of course continue to fall...  Or it might flat line...  Or it might go up again...  By my calculations this week the S&P500 has fallen 5.2%, last week it fell 3.9% and the week before that it actually gained 2.2%.  In contrast the FTSE100 this week fell 4.7%, last week fell 3.9% and the week before that fell 0.8%.

This is what has happened to a couple of single indices and makes for great news items but how has this impacted a long term investor who buys, holds and rebalances a variety of global asset classes.  I like to think I’m one of those so let’s use my real world portfolio as a comparator.  This week my wealth has decreased by 2.3%, last week it decreased by 1.5% and the week before that it decreased by 0.4%.