The high cost of low returns and yields

Retirement isn't what it used to be. No one knew it at the time, but the 1980s were the Golden Age of Retirement. Pensions were generous back then. Whether you invested in stocks or bonds, the proverbial wind was at your back.

Today, things are different. Retirement will be more difficult in the next 30 years than in the last 30 years.

How can this be? Simple. The returns on stocks and bonds are expected to be lower in the future than they have been in the past. This expectation of lower returns doesn't come from a worrywart oracle. It comes from simple arithmetic.

In the past, stocks provided a good deal of their return as dividends. Many provided a yield of 4 percent, and the long-term average yield has been about 3 percent. Today, stock yields are lower than 2 percent. The same happened to bonds. While you could typically rely on U.S. Treasuries to yield about 5 percent in the past, the current yield on a 10-year Treasury is a bit over 2 percent.

Those two factors suggest that a typical balanced portfolio - 60 percent stocks, 40 percent bonds - which could be expected to provide an 8 percent annualized return in the long-term past might now be expected to provide a return of 6 percent.

The reduction in return guts the long-term survival odds of the portfolio. It increases the chance that many retirees will die broke. The loss of return reduces the 30-year portfolio survival rate from 94 percent to only 77 percent.

Unfortunately, even this projection may be on the sunny side. Beyond accounting for reduced starting yields, some analysts are suggesting that stocks and bonds are priced very high today. Reader mail indicates many agree. Reversion to the mean says that future valuation levels will be lower. Another dour suggestion: Long-term corporate growth will be lower in the future.

Keep on this way, and it isn't surprising that some analysts expect really dismal future returns. Each reduction in assumed return reduces the odds your portfolio will last longer than you do.

If you'd like to see this for yourself, I've got a website for you to visit. It's called 'portfolio visualizer” (www.portfoliovisualizer). The product of Finnish computer scientist Tuomo Lampinen, his free online calculator does 'what if” portfolio calculations at eye-blink speeds.

With it, you can back-test portfolios, do simulations, do factor analysis, find asset correlations and develop efficient frontiers.