You've heard it over and over, the 4% rule, but what if you could safely withdraw 5% instead

and not run out of money?

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen,

and with me as always is my cash flowingflowing co-host, Scott Trench.

Mindy, it's been great to accumulate a large amount of financial knowledge and then decumulate that with our audience over these last six, seven years.

And today, we are super excited to be joined by Frank Vasquez, host of the Risk Parity podcast and a former lawyer-turned

retirement strategist. Frank challenges conventional wisdom, and today he's going to walk us through

how our portfolio designed for risk parity might support a higher withdrawal rate without

increasing your chances of failure, failure defined as running out of money at any point in your

life. Frank, welcome to the show. Thank you. It's good to be here. Frank, first, you say that the

average retiree, the fire community, can really spend up to 5% with the right portfolio. What is that?

Second, I would like to ask you about a couple of contradictions I observe in the

fire community, right? One is an observance, almost a religious adherence to the Boglehead philosophy

of investing in low-fee index funds with 100% of the portfolio, and the incongruity of that,

again, I'm using the word religious adherence to this philosophy with withdrawing at something higher than the 4% even

the 4% rule or higher.

The second one would be in our world at bigger pockets with real estate investing.

It's a little harder wrap my head around at least the idea of selling

off my rental properties and harvesting that equity to spend, whereas it's not a challenge at all

to spend a reasonable approximation of the cash flow generated by those portfolios,

which could be four or five, even a little bit higher from a percentage point perspective.

And that's one of the reasons why I made some changes in my portfolio towards real estate. So could you answer those three

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