Tag: live off dividends

Returning to Living Off Dividends

There is a large body of personal finance advice that states that investing for dividends is unwise and tax inefficient. The argument is that when a company pays a dividend, the stock price must decline by the amount of the dividend to reflect the declining assets on the balance sheet. Hence receiving dividends is no different to simply selling shares except the difference is that the company makes the decision to sell rather than you. The argument goes that while you are working and earning a relatively high income, it is better to not receive dividends, which will be taxed heavily (because of your high income). It is better instead to let the earning accumulate as capital gains and then realise those gains after you retire when your income (and hence the tax bracket you’re in) drops.

About two or three years ago, I was strongly persuaded by these views (known as the dividend irrelevant theory). In a 2019 post titled My Changing Views, I said the following:

I believed that financial independence depended on dividends alone. If you generate high dividends, you will have enough to live off the dividends and become financially independent quickly. When I read back on my earlier posts (e.g. Dividends vs Capital Gains and 4% SWR vs Living off Dividends), I now notice that I seem quite cultish and stubborn in my views that dividends from Australian equities with franking credits was the only legitimate route to freedom and that anyone who does anything contrary to this is a slave! When I was in my twenties, I would dream of a life in my thirties, forties, and beyond flying around the world, relaxing on beaches, and living off dividends drinking coconut by the beach as I read books. Perhaps I am becoming more mature as I head into my mid-thirties. I have since relaxed my views on a pure Australian dividend focus. Even though I did invest in some foreign equities, I had the bulk of my investments in Australian equities, and one of the consequences of that is that capital gains were not as high. Had I invested in foreign equities, my net worth today would be much higher. Things may change in the future. I will not tinker too much with my portfolio. For all I know, the Australian stock market may perform very well, but what this illustrates is the importance of global diversification. Australia only makes up 2% of global equities, which is almost nothing, and you never know what policies may be implemented within a country that impacts on every single company in that country.

My scepticism of dividend investing and growing belief in the dividend irrelevance theory didn’t start in 2019. I had been thinking about it for a while. When I think about it today, I may have been strongly influenced by FOMO after seeing the performance of Australian equities (high dividends) relative to foreign equities (high growth). As a result, I did divert more money into foreign equities and even cryptocurrency. I also used my margin loan to leverage more into foreign equities.

Indeed, in the past few years, foreign equity and crypto (especially crypto) has outperformed Australian equity. In the past five years, Australian equity as represented by VAS went up 32% whereas foreign equity as represented by IWLD went up 58%. However, the total crypto market cap has gone up 20525% in the last five years.

Returning to living off dividends

Recently I have decided to shift my focus back to dividend investing. I have learned that going into debt and focusing on capital gains has some negative side effect.

I will not be selling my high growth and low yield investments (mostly foreign equity ETFs and crypto), but new money from my salary will now be invested into investments that pay high passive income e.g. Australian equity. (I am also looking into crypto staking as a way to earn passive income, but I am very new to this and that is a topic for another blog post.)

Sometimes it’s worth paying extra for professional service

According to the dividend irrelevance theory, receiving dividends is no different to selling shares except the company sells for you. In other words, the board of a company, a group of professionals, make the decision on how much earning to distribute to shareholders as dividends. Because professionals are making this decision, I like to use the term “professional dividends” as it contrasts with the term “homemade dividends.”

Homemade dividends refer to a form of investment income that investors generate from the sale of a percentage of their equity portfolio. The investor fulfills his cash flow objectives by selling a portion of shares in his portfolio instead of waiting for the traditional dividends. Usually, if a shareholder needs some cash inflow, but it is not yet time for a dividend payout, he can sell part of the shares in his portfolio to generate the required cash inflow.

Corporate Finance Institute

In my opinion, there is a benefit to relying on professionals to decide how much to spend and how much to reinvest. The 4% rule is a rule of thumb and is not perfect. It takes historic stock market performance in the US and assumes that what has happened in the past will likely happen in the future, but we don’t know if what has happened in the past can be extrapolated into the future. The high stock market returns of the past may have been fuelled by an abundance of natural resources, high fertility rate, and central bankers continually dropping interest rates. What happens now that natural resources are more scarce and the world faces climate change risk, low fertility rate, and interest rates dropping to near zero?

One of the principles of index investing is that you let the market decide rather than engage in “active investing.” The idea of letting an index weight companies by market capitalisation is that you have a higher exposure to companies that the market deems as better. In my opinion, the same idea applies to dividends. Generating homemade dividends seems like active investing. You are making very bold predictions about the sustainability of your wealth when using rules of thumb such as the 4% rule. By relying on the boards of multiple companies to decide the dividend payout ratio, you are crowd-sourcing what professionals and the market believe is an optimal amount of earnings to distribute as dividends. When boards make this decision, they are considering many factors such as risks they foresee in the future. When COVID-19 hit, many companies decided to reduce dividend payouts based on their judgements. Even if the judgment of these boards are not great, if a company pays out too much in dividends then the market should be able to detect this and reduce the share price, which, assuming you’re investing in a market cap weighted dividend ETF, means that your exposure to these types of companies is reduced.

We rely on professionals for many things in our lives e.g. accountants, lawyers, doctors, and even personal trainers. Often it is better to relying on professionals rather than do it yourself. The same idea applies to dividends.

Investing is emotional

One of the benefits of letting boards and professionals decide how much to distribute as dividends is that it takes out emotion. If you are generating your own homemade dividends by selling down stock, you will likely be overcome with emotions. If you sell too much, you might deplete your wealth before you die. If you sell too little, you will deprive yourself right now, and a stock market correction in the near future may wipe out all those gains anyway.

If you try to take away this emotion by relying on rules of thumb such as the 4% rule then you run the risk of being overly simplistic and extrapolating historical performance into the future. By outsourcing this decision to professionals and the market, you reduce emotion significantly.

When saving money, it is often advised that you should “pay yourself first” or “set and forget.” You should ideally automate everything so that you don’t need to think too much about it. Those who try to time the market tend to mess things up. The same logic applies to homemade dividends vs professional dividends. Living off dividends is automatic. Everything occurs in the background and you only see the dividends hitting your bank account.

A bird in hand is worth two in the bush

Another argument for dividend investing is that we do not know if a catastrophic market crash will hit us in the future. If we live off dividends rather than let those earnings compound on a company’s balance sheet, then certainly the growth of our net worth may be lower, but we spend more today, which can help address feelings of deprivation associated with aggressive frugality. If we focus entirely on capital gains, who is to say that just before we retire or during our retirement, an enormous market crash won’t wipe away everything? At least if we invest in high dividends and spend all our dividends, even if everything collapses near the end, we can look back and be happy that we lived off dividends.

Living off Dividends vs the Four Percent Rule – Part 2

According to Wikipedia, financial independence is defined as “the status of having enough income to pay for one’s reasonable living expenses for the rest of one’s life without having to rely on formal employment.”

Financial independence does not mean you have e.g. a late-model luxury car, an expensive house, a nice watch, or even a paid-off house. If you have to work, you’re not financially independent because you are dependent on your job.

So how do you live off your investments forever? There are two main ways to achieve this: (1) live off dividends and (2) sell assets according to the “four percent rule.”

In a post I made back in 2018 titled 4% Safe Withdrawal Rate vs Living off Dividends, I claim that it is better to live off dividends because it is easier:

 [It] is better in my opinion to simply live off your investment income (dividends, rent, interest, etc) as there is no calculation involved and no work. Everything is on autopilot. That being said when living off dividends there is a trade off between income and growth (see The Problem with HVST) and this is where I think the four percent rule can be used as a guide. If your dividend income is more than 4% of your net worth, invest more in growth assets whereas if your dividend income is less than 4% of your net worth, invest in income-producing assets.

Living off dividends is indeed simple. Suppose you have $1 million. You invest it in a high dividend ETF (e.g. IHD, SYI or VHY) and that is it. The dividends will be paid to your bank account, which you live off.

However, there are many problems with relying on dividends. Typically Australian investors have relied on blue chip Australian stocks for dividends because of favourable tax treatment (due to franking credits). The problem is that these stocks tend to be concentrated among a handful of companies and historically Australian high dividend payers have performed poorly. It makes sense that high dividend paying stocks underperform because each dollar paid out in dividends is a dollar not reinvested in the company. Because the company pays out the profit as dividends, it is not able to use that money to further grow the company. The chart below demonstrates the underperformance of high dividend paying stocks by comparing an Australian high dividend ETF (black) with the broader Australian equity market (orange). For the sake of comparison, the Nasdaq 100 is represented in blue, which is the NDQ ETF tracking an index that consists mostly of technology companies that historically pay low dividends but instead reinvest profits for growth. Major companies in NDQ are Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, etc.

High dividend ETF IHD (in black) underperforms the broader Australian stock market (represented by STW in orange) and significantly underperforms the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 index (represented by NDQ in blue). Source: Bloomberg

In contrast to the simplicity of dividends, implementing the four percent rule is more difficult, but there is considerable evidence that this approach is better, not only due to it being more tax efficient but also because the assets you invest in tend to earn more (as demonstrated in the above chart comparing the Nasdaq 100 ETF vs an Australian high dividend index ETF). Suppose you have $1 million. Rather than invest this in high dividend stocks or ETFs, you invest it in high growth stocks or ETFs that focus more on capital gains rather than dividends. You can choose NDQ, a Nasdaq 100 ETF, but if you want more diversification across countries and sectors, a good high growth ETF is VDHG, which invests in 90% global equities and 10% bonds. (Another ETF similar to VDHG but with slightly lower fees is DHHF.)

How to implement the 4% rule

When you retire, rather than rely on dividends, you simply sell off 4% of the value of the investments each year, so if you have $1 million you sell off $40k and then live off that for the first year. The expectation is that after you sell $40k then you will have $960k, but if we assume 7% annual growth then the next year your net worth will grow to $1.027 million and then you withdraw 4% of this, which is $41,088. This higher withdrawal in the next year accounts for inflation. (Note there is some uncertainty about whether, in this example of retiring with $1 million, you simply withdraw $40k each year or if you withdraw 4% of the new balance each year. I believe the latter option is safer because it explicitly accounts for inflation.)

The “four percent rule” is controversial with many arguing that it is only designed to last you thirty years. However, a simple fix to this problem is to withdraw 3% of your portfolio each year rather than 4% and, in my opinion, anything below 3% is far too conservative. Based on FireCalc.com, although the 4% rule fails with 95% probability after 30 years, the 3% rule is highly likely to last you forever. Basically if you are retiring in your 60s or 70s, you should be able to get away with the 4% rule, but if you retire any earlier, you should use the 3% rule instead.

The chart below made using FireCalc.com provides a simulation of historic stock market returns using the 4% rule and shows that over 70 years there is a good change you will not run out of money after 70 years but there is approximately a 10% probaility that you will (represented by lines going down below the horizontal red line).

Simulation showing the 4% withdrawal rate has an approximately 10% probability of failure over 70 years. Source: FireCalc.com

However, using the 3% rule, there are no probability where you lose your money (based on historic stock market performance), even under the assumption that you retire in your 30s and live for 70 years.

Simulation showing a 3% withdrawl rate being highly likely to last you forever. Source: FireCalc.com

The reason why selling off assets is more tax efficient is because capital gains are not realised until you sell the assets, which means you can sell them when you retire. By selling off assets when you retire, you do so when your income is low, which exposes more of your capital gains to low (or zero) income tax brackets. However, dividends are taxed once they are paid, which means that while you are working and accumulating assets, you’ll pay taxes on dividend income while your income is relatively high.

Capital gains are subject to Australian income tax rates once the capital gains are realised.

What will I do?

Early in my journey towards financial independence, I focused mainly on accumulating high dividend ETFs e.g. IHD and even HVST (see The Problem with HVST). When investing in purely Australian equities, I discovered that not only did my investments underperform but I also needed to pay taxes every year. To address this problem, I used a margin loan to borrow against my ETFs and diversify into international and emerging market equities more (e.g. I made some good bets on technology ETFs). Having a margin loan has its pros and cons, but one of the pros is that the interest on the margin loan is tax deductible, which helps to offset the tax paid on the dividends from Australian equities. Today Australian equities make up approximately half of my equities with the other half in international equities and a small amount of emerging market equities. Although I have a margin loan, I have started dabbling in NAB Equity Builder. NAB EB allows you to borrow at a lower rate compared to a margin loan.

While I am moving towards growth rather than dividends, I am still holding onto my high dividend ETFs. My plan is, rather than choose between dividends or growth, I will simply aim for both. There are many benefits of dividend investing e.g. franking credits. Furhermore, even though Australian high dividend stocks have underperformed in the last decade, there may be hope in the future as these companies enter the post-COVID future. If I sell Australian dividend stocks and use the proceeds to purchase global tech stocks, there is a very real risk that I will sell low and buy high, so rather than sell, I prefer to simply leave my Australian dividend stocks and ETFs. It should also be noted that there are other ETFs on the ASX that pay high dividends but do not invest in Australian equities e.g. UMAX uses options against the S&P500 to generate income; EBND invests in emerging market bonds and pays approximately 5% monthly; and TECH focuses on global tech stocks that have strong moats, and surprisingly this ETF has a dividend yield of approximately 9% paid yearly. I will discuss these non-Australian high-yield ETFs in a separate future blog post.

Property vs shares

Although it is clear that I have a bias towards shares over property, the strategy of selling down high growth ETFs exposes yet another benefit of shares vs property, which is the ability of ETFs to be sold in small chunks. If you have a $1 million property, you cannot sell half of it because no one will want half a property. You must sell it all in one go. Suppose you make $500k capital gains. Then $18200 of that will be exempt from tax while the rest of it is subject to tax, so you’ve managed to avoid tax on $18200. Now suppose you have $1 million in ETFs, which we will assume is $1 million all in VDHG. Rather then being forced to sell all of it in one go, you sell half of it in one year and the other half the next year. By doing this you realise $250k in each year. This exposes $36400 to the tax free threshold. By being able to sell smaller portions, you make the most of the tax free threshold.

Thanks to ETFs being highly divisible, I can sell off small amounts of ETFs each year thereby spreading capital gains across multiple years and exposing more capital gains to low tax brackets. Furthermore, any capital gains on assets held over one year receive a 50% CGT discount.

Another benefit of investing in ETFs rather than property is that you can sell ETFs cheaply e.g. selling one property will cost you about $20k to $30k in real estate agent commissions, but with ETFs you will pay about $20 or $30 to sell (or even $9.50 for discount online broker SelfWealth).

Other benefits of ETFs vs property is you avoid stamp duty and land tax. You also have access to franking credits.

Of course, in all fairness, there are some downsides of ETFs vs property e.g. the interest rate on NAB EB and margin loans are higher than those on mortgages, and although you can achieve leverage of about 70% using NAB EB or margin loans, you are able to achieve leverage of 80% up to 95% with property. In my opinion, even if you are able to achieve more leverage against property, it doesn’t necessarily mean you should. Leverage can magnify gains but also magnifies losses should the market go through a downturn. When leveraging into ETFs, you are able to diversify within the portfolio defensive assets such as bond ETFs (e.g. VDCO), hybrid ETFs (e.g. HBRD) or even gold mining ETFs (e.g. GDX), which reduces volatility. When you leverage into a property, you are all in one property in one place, exposed to an universified asset in one location. Many believe that property is safe compared to the volatility of the stock market, but if you invest in a highly diversified ETF, it is safer than investing in one property. The lack of volatility in property is actually the result of poor price discovery mechanisms rather than because property is inherently safer than shares. Once property is listed and exposed to the same price discovery mechanism of shares, property is highly volatile as evidenced by the price charts of residential REITs.

Disclosure: I own IHD, SYI, HVST, NDQ, UMAX, EBND, TECH, HBRD, and GDX.