Will not be that bad

[question everything]

Now I know how much our RMDs will be. And the SS payments, so the reduction in our 2019 income will not be catastrophic. Down, but manageable. Of course, one cannot know about major expenses, or a stock market crash but... will see.

Glad that we had it at 50:50 since the bond funds kept, even went up a bit.

No, not ready to cash out. Not yet.

Happy 2019. Got to be better!

[pwb]

1. I use to move 100% to the bond fund whenever a republican was president.

Retired now and out of it all.
I know people who lost almost everything staying in the high risk high return funds.
I worked for the feds so it was easy to transfer from all the funds.

[progree]

2. Total returns of S&P 500 index fund under Republican presidents (Reagan thru Trump)

I use to move 100% to the bond fund whenever a republican was president

It looks like you avoided a bloodbath under Bush II. Reagan and Bush I had decent returns. I don't have total return data going back before 1976. By total return, I mean including reinvested dividends.

(Democrats have better records from some tabulation I saw in Forbes a few years ago, and going back to Truman).

The below are the total returns of VFINX, Vanguard's S&P 500 index fund. The Adjusted Close column includes reinvested dividends and other distributions, so is the basis of the below.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/VFINX/history

Measuring from the last close before Inauguration Day.

Total Average Annualized Returns of VFINX under Republican presidents
7.44% Benedict Dotard (1/19/17 close to 12/31/18 close)
-3.93% Bush I
14.47% Bush II
10.70% Reagan
.... Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford -- VFINX doesn't go back this far

=============================================================
Some people measure Benedict Dotard's returns from the election. Measuring from election afternoon close (11/8/16) thru 12/31/18 close, the average annualized return has been 9.78%

As for 2018, the year we just suffered through, the annualized total return is MINUS 4.43%.

Measured from the Sept 20 peak, the S&P 500 itself is down 14.5% (I didn't include reinvested dividends in this particular number, because that wouldn't change that number much over a 3 month period, maybe 0.5 percentage points at most)

As the bull market that began in 2009 continues to age, and Dottie gets more erratic, and as the new Congress harasses him ...

=============================================================
I'm not hawking VFINX, BTW, I use it because it is the oldest S&P 500 index fund, so the data goes back further than anyone else's (back to 8/31/76). There are other low expense ratio S&P 500 index funds out there, that might track the S&P 500 just as well or better. And S&P 500 ETFs too.

I use S&P 500 index funds because their returns include reinvested dividends (very important) and include (are net of) expenses (very important too). This is as close as one can get to investing in an index.

I have not found anything that will allow me to find the return of the S&P 500 itself, with reinvested dividends, from any date to any date of my choosing. And VFINX only goes back to 8/31/76. That's one reason why I haven't tried to figure out Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford's record.

[lastlib]

3. You can go

here for some major index info

S & P 500, 90-day T-bills, 10-year Treasuries, back to 1926 (the earliest complete data on the S&P500, matched to Ibbotson.)

not yet updated for 2018, of course...that'll likely take a few days, maybe a week.

[progree]

4. Thanks! That's quite a find

Unfortunately it is just by calendar year, so won't help when I need the return between 2 dates that aren't on year-end (or year-beginning) boundaries, but it's the best one of these I've seen of the annual calendar year returns. And I love the cumulative return column and the T-bill and T-bond data.

[lastlib]

6. When I worked in investment performance measurement,,,

I had access to monthly data on all sorts of investments and indices, back to 1952. I really wish I could've saved it somehow (for my own use). That was possibly the best job I ever had, except for the fact that my boss was a hydrophobic she-wolf (but that's another story.)

[pwb]

5. I was in the thrift savings plan.

If you look at it you can find all the different funds. What happened many times in the risk funds would be wide movement up and down for months one way and then months the other way. it became very uncertain and you could loose large sums very quickly and then gain back but slower. We didn't have the funds you mentioned but if you go to the site tsb.gov and follow the C fund for a year you will see over the year it is about even after ups and downs.

On the site tsb.gov go to share prices then annual returns and you will see the difference in Obama's eight years and trumps first two, big difference. Look under monthly returns for trump and you will see the risk and the certainty of the G bond fund.

I think you may enjoy the thrift savings plan site. It explains the funds and makes it easy for non financial people to understand.

Peace.

[progree]

7. For sure on Obama vs. Trump's returns

On the site tsb.gov go to share prices then annual returns and you will see the difference in Obama's eight years and trumps first two, big difference

Do you mean tsp.gov?

I did Investment Funds -> Share Prices and got to here.
https://www.tsp.gov/InvestmentFunds/FundPerformance/index.html

Yes, Obama's 8 years were great, without a doubt. He started at near the very bottom of the Bush crash -- the low point of the S&P 500 was on March 9, 2009, a month and a half after Obama took office.

I talk about that in the thread in my sig line, though it is updated only through last February

http://www.democraticunderground.com/111622439#post4

# Using the last closing before inauguration (G.W. Bush inaugurated noon Jan 20, 2001; Obama at noon, Jan 20, 2009; and Trump at noon, Jan 20, 2017)

# When Clinton left office and G.W. Bush took office, the S&P 500 index was at 1343.
# When G.W. Bush left office and Obama took office, the S&P 500 index was at 850.
# When Obama left office and and Trump took office, the S&P 500 index was at 2264.
# Thus under G.W. Bush, the S&P 500 index DROPPED 37%, from 1343 to 850.
. . While under Obama, the S&P 500 index rose from 850 to 2264, an INCREASE of 166% (a doubling plus an additional 66%, or 2.66 X)
# As of Thursday 2/1/18 close, the S&P 500 index is at 2822, an increase of 25% under Trump so far.

(Total returns - which includes dividends - are higher than the index gains by about 2% / year).

(I use the S&P 500 index rather than the Dow Jones Industrial Average index (DJIA) because it is a much broader index of U.S. stocks, containing about 75% of the total U.S. stock market by capitalization. I would rather use the Dow Jones U.S. Total Stock Market Index (^ DWC (without the space between the ^ and the D) but its history extends only back to 2004). Other U.S. total market indexes also extend back only a few years.

Update: as of 12/31/18 close, S&P 500 under Trump (from the 1/19/17 close through the 12/31/18 close) is up 10.74% without dividends and up 14.98% with dividends reinvested, so he lost a lot of ground since 2/1/18.

As for why I keep yammering about the S&P 500, it is a capitalization weighted index of 75 to 80% of the U.S. stock market by capitalization. I'd rather use a total U.S. stock market index as my measurement of the U.S. stock market, and get 100% of the U.S. stock market, but the indexes and funds that follow them don't go back very far.

And that for whatever reason, the S&P 500 is the benchmark most often used to compare other funds to. (By contrast, the Dow 30 industrials is a price-weighted selection of 30 so-called "blue chip" stocks).

I don't happen to own an S&P 500 index fund.

I've been investing in equities and bond funds since the early 1980s, so yes, I've experienced plenty of volatility -- having suffered through the 1987, dot com, and housing bubble crashes. In none of these cases did I sell equities, and was rewarded for hanging on in a few years as the market went on to new highs.

I prefer equities because, well, the risk is very much worth the return. The VFINX S&P 500 index fund has had an average annualized return of 11.18% since its August 31, 1976 inception, per
https://www.thestreet.com/quote/VFINX.html

During that time (8/31/76 - 12/31/18), it went up 88.78 fold.

Another view of the performance of equities vs. T Bills and T Bonds is at lastlib's link:
http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/histretSP.html

I'll explore the tsp.gov site some more, thanks much for the recommendation.