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Investing for Dividends

Investing for dividends is one of many strategies investors use to identify stocks for their portfolios. Among the strategies I identified in my post on what you need to know about stocks, this is not one that I have ever used.  So I reached out to one of my Twitter followers who uses it to get more information, Dividend Diplomats (aka Lanny and Bert) to get some real-life insights. With Lanny’s and Bert’s help, I will:

  • define dividends.
  • talk about the criteria that Lanny and Bert use for selecting companies and why they are important.
  • show some historical returns for dividend-issuing companies.
  • explain the tax implications of dividends on your total return.

What are Dividends?

A dividend is a cash distribution from a company to its shareholders. The amount of the dividend is stated on a per-share basis.  The amount of cash you receive is equal to the number of shares you own times the amount of the dividend. When companies announce that they are going to pay a dividend, they provide two dates.  The first is the date on which share ownership is determined (also known as the ex-dividend date).  The second is the date on which the dividend will be paid. For example, a company might declare a 15₵ dividend to people who own shares on May 1 payable on May 15. Even if you sell your stock between May 1 and May 15, you will get 15₵ for every share you owned on May 1.

When a company earns a profit, it has two choices for what to do with the profit. Under one option, the company can keep the profit and use it to support future operations. For example, the company might buy more equipment to allow it to increase the number of products is makes or might buy another company to expand its operations. Under the second option, the company distributes some or all of its profit to shareholders as dividends. My experience is that companies that are growing rapidly tend to keep their profits, whereas companies that can’t find enough opportunities to reinvest their profits to fund growth tend to issue dividends.

Dividend Diplomats – A Little Background

Lanny and Bert have been blogging for over 5.5 years and have been best friends for 7.  They both are pursuing the same goal of reaching financial freedom and retiring early to break the “9 to 5” chains.  They hope to achieve financial freedom through dividend investing, frugal living, and using as many “personal finance” hacks as possible to keep expenses low and bring in additional income. For more information about the Dividend Diplomats, check out their web site at www.dividenddiplomats.com.

Why Use the Investing for Dividends Strategy

As you’ll see in future posts, I have used several strategies for my stock investments, but have never focused on investing for dividends.

My Preconceived Notions

I have always considered investing for dividends as most appropriate for people who need the cash to pay their living expenses, such as people who are retired. I am retired, but currently have cash and some bonds that I use to cover my living expenses. As I get further into retirement, I will need to start liquidating some of my stocks or start investing for dividends.

Lanny’s & Bert’s Motivation

So, when I started reading about Lanny and Bert, I wondered why people who are still working (and a lot younger than I am) would be interested in investing for dividends.   Here’s what they said.

“There were a few different motivating factors.

Lanny had endured a very difficult childhood, where money was always limited and his family had struggled financially.   Due to this, he personally wanted to never have to worry about money, period.

Bert was not a dividend growth investor until he met Lanny.  Once he talked to Lanny, learned about dividend investing, and saw the math, he was sold and hasn’t looked back since.

Therefore, we are looking to build a growing passive income stream so we can retire early and pursue our passions.  Building a stream of growing, truly passive dividend income has always been a very attractive option to us.  We love the fact that dividend income is truly passive (outside of initial capital, we don’t have to lift a finger) and we are building equity in great, established companies that have paid dividends throughout various economic cycles.

Second, the math just makes sense.  It is crazy how quickly your income stream grows when you are anticipating a dividend growth rate of 6%+ (on average).  Lanny writes an article each quarter showing the impact of dividend increases and we have demonstrated the impact of dividend reinvesting on our site in the past. When you see the math on paper, it is insane. “

Lanny and Bert provided links to a couple of their posts that illustrate the math: Impact of Dividend Increases and Power of Dividend Reinvesting.

Lanny’s & Bert’s Strategy

Lanny and Bert developed a dividend stock screener that helps them identify undervalued dividend growth stocks in which to consider investing.  At a minimum, the companies must pass three metrics to be further considered for investment:

  • Valuation (P/E Ratio) less than the market average.
  • Payout Ratio Less than 60%. (Unless the industry has a higher benchmarked figure. i.e. oil, tobacco, utilities, REITs, etc., then they compare to the industry payout ratio.)
  • History of increasing dividends.

They don’t consider dividend yield until later in the process.  They never advocate chasing dividend yield at the risk of dividend safety. That is, they would rather a dividend that has very low risk of being reduced or eliminated (i.e., safety) than a higher dividend be unsustainable over the long term.

That’s why they don’t look at yield initially.  It allows them to focus on the important metrics that help them gain comfort over the safety of the dividend.  Here is a link to their Dividend Stock Screener.

Payout Ratio

Lanny and Bert mention that that one of their key metrics is a payout ratio. A dividend payout ratio is the annual amount of a company’s dividend divided by its earnings per share.  For more about earnings per share, check out my post on reading financial statements.

A dividend payout ratio of less than 1 means that a company is retaining some of its earnings and distributing the rest. If the ratio is more than 1, it means that the company is earning less money than it is paying out in dividends.

I worked for a company that had a payout ratio of more than 1. When I first started working there, the company had more capital than it could use. The company was returning its excess capital to its shareholders through the high dividend. After several years, the company’s capital approached the amount it needed to support its business. If it had cut its dividend to an amount lower than its earnings, the stock price might have decreased significantly. Instead, the company was sold. Had the company not been sold, its shareholders might have had both a decrease in future dividend payments and a reduction in the value of their stock at the same time.  This double whammy (dividend cut at the same time as a price decrease) is a risk of owning a stock in a dividend-issuing company especially those with high dividend payout ratios.

Performance – Lanny and Bert’s View

Lanny and Bert are not assuming they can do better than management or the market.  As noted above, they tend to focus on companies with a dividend payout ratio less than 60%.  This approach allows for all three of increasing dividends to shareholders, share repurchases, and internal growth for profit.  Also, this approach ensures the company is continuing to invest in itself as well.  You can’t pay a dividend in the future if you can’t grow, or even maintain, your current earnings stream.  Therefore, if revenues are stagnant or shrinking, the safety of the company’s dividend comes into question.  Companies “can” pay out a dividend that is larger than your earnings over the short-to-medium term.  However, it is not sustainable as was the case with the company for which I worked.

Historical Performance

I was curious about how stocks that met Lanny and Bert’s criteria performed. I have a subscription to the ValueLine Analyzer Plus. It contains current and historical financial data and stock prices about hundreds of companies. I looked at two time periods.  I first looked at the most recent year (November 2018 to November 2019).  Because I was curious about how those stocks performed in the 2008 crash, I also looked at the ten-year period from 2003 to 2013. I would have used a shorter period around the 2008 crash and the period thereafter, but didn’t save the data in the right format so had to look at time periods for which I had saved the data in an accessible manner.

How I Measured Performance

For both time periods, I identified all stocks for which the data I needed for the analysis were available at both the beginning and end of the period.  There were 1,505 companies included in the sample in the 2018-2019 period and 952 companies for the 2003 to 2013 period.

I then identified companies (a) whose dividend grew in each of the previous two fiscal years, (b) whose dividend payout ratio was less than 60% and (c) whose P/B ratio was less than the average of all of the companies in the same. That is, I attempted to identify the companies that met Lanny and Bert’s criteria. There were 332 companies in the 2018-2019 period and 109 companies in the 2003-2013 period that met these criteria.

ValueLine ranks companies based on what it calls Timeliness, with companies with Timeliness ratings of 1 having the best expected performance and those having a rating of 5 having the worst expected performance. Because I suspected that Bert and Lanny’s screen would tend to select more companies with favorable Timeliness ratings than those with poorer ones, I looked at both the overall results, as well as the results by Timeliness rating.

November 2018 – November 2019

In the most recent year, the stocks that met Lanny’s and Bert’s criteria had an average total return (dividends plus change in stock price) of 11% as compared to 8.5% for the total sample. That is, in the current market, dividend issuing companies meeting their criteria returned more than the average of all companies.

Interestingly, when I stratified the companies by Timeliness rating, it showed that for companies with good Timeliness ratings (1 and 2), the Lanny’s and Bert’s companies underperformed the group. For companies with two of the three lower Timeliness ratings (3 and 5), though, Lanny’s and Bert’s companies not only did better than the average of all companies in the group, but also did better than even the group of companies with a Timeliness rating of 1! It looks to me as if their approach might identify some gems in what otherwise appear to be poorer performing companies.

The chart below shows these comparisons.

2003 to 2013

Over the longer time period from 2003 to 2013, the companies meeting Lanny’s and Bert’s criteria didn’t do quite as well as the average of all companies. In this case, the stocks meeting their criteria had a compound annual return of 5% as compared to 7% for all stocks in the sample. Without more data, it is hard to tell whether the difference in return is the sample of dividend-issuing companies is small, because those companies didn’t fare as well during the Great Recession or something else.

I looked at the total returns by Timeliness rating and the results were inconsistent for both the “all stocks” group and the ones that met our criteria. A lot can happen in 10 years! Nonetheless, it was interesting to see that the dividend-yielding stocks that had Timeliness ratings of 5 in 2003 out performed all other subsets of the data. So, while these stocks didn’t have quite as high a total return over the 10-year period in the aggregate, there are clearly some above-average performers within the group.

Tax Ramifications of Dividends

One of the drawbacks of investing in companies with dividends, as opposed to companies that reinvest their earnings for growth, is that you might need to pay taxes on the dividend income as it gets distributed.

Types of Accounts

If you hold your dividend-yielding stocks in a tax-deferred (e.g., Traditional IRA or 401(k) in the US or RRSP in Canada) or tax-free (e.g., Roth IRA or 401(k) in the US or TFSA in Canada), it doesn’t matter whether your returns are in the form of price appreciation or dividends. Your total return in each of those types of accounts gets taxed the same. That is, if you hold the stocks in a tax-deferred account, you will pay tax on your total returns, regardless of whether it is interest, dividends or appreciation, at your ordinary income tax rate. If you hold the stocks in a tax-free account, you won’t pay taxes on any returns.

The only type of account in which it matters whether your return is in the form of price appreciation or dividends is a taxable account. In the US, most people pay 15% Federal income tax plus some additional amount for state income taxes on dividends in the year in which they are issued. They pay taxes at the same rate on capital gains, but only when the stock is sold, not as the price changes from year to year. In Canada, the difference is even greater. Dividends are taxed at your ordinary income tax rate (i.e., they are added to your wages) and capital gains are taxed at 50% of your ordinary income tax rate and only when you sell the stock.

Dividend Reinvestment

When you earn dividends from a company, you often have the option to automatically reinvest the dividends in the same company’s stock. This process is a dividend reinvestment plan. Lanny and Bert take this approach.

Dividend reinvestment plans are terrific ways to make sure you stay invested in companies that you like, as you don’t have to remember to buy more stock when the dividend is reinvested. The drawback of dividend reinvestment plans is that you will owe tax on the amount of the dividend, even if you don’t receive it in cash. If you reinvest 100% of your dividends, you’ll need to have cash from some other source to pay the taxes unless you hold the investments in a tax-free or tax-deferred account.

Illustration

Let’s assume you are a US investor subject to the 15% Federal tax rate and pay no state income tax. You have two companies you are considering. You expect each to have a total return of 8%. One company’s return will be 100% in dividends, while the other company issues no dividends. You plan to own the stock for 10 years. Your initial investment will be $1,000 and you will pay your income taxes out of your dividends, so you reinvest 85% of the dividends you earn each year.

At the end of the 10th year, you will have $1,931 if you buy the company with 8% dividends. If you buy the company with no dividends, your stock will be worth $2,159. After you pay capital gains tax of $174, you will have $1,985 or 2.8% more than if you buy stock in the company that issues 8% dividends.

If you pay Canadian taxes, the difference is even bigger because of the much lower tax rate on capital gains than dividends. Over the full ten-year period, you will end up with almost 11% more if you buy stock in the company with no dividends than if you buy stock in the dividend-issuing company.

As such, you’ll want to put as much of your portfolio of dividend-issuing stocks in a tax-deferred or tax-free account as possible to minimize the impact of taxes on your total return.

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Retirement Savings: How Much Do You Need

Retirement Savings

Retiring is one of the riskiest financial decisions you will make. On the day you retire, you can calculate your net worth. You won’t know, however, how much retirement savings you need because you don’t know:

  • how much you will actually spend on day-to-day expenses
  • how much those expenses will be impacted by inflation
  • whether you’ll have significant medical or other expenses
  • how long you will live or
  • what returns you will earn on your investments.

I retired a little over a year ago and realized that, even though I have a lot of money saved, it wasn’t enough to give me confidence we wouldn’t run out.  I took on a large consulting project to help cover our expenses for the next year or two. Researching this post, though, added even more confidence as we have more than enough to meet some of the simple rules of thumb.   We will see what happens.

In this post, I’ll provide some insights about how to think about a target you might want to set for your retirement savings.  As a follow up, I’ll talk about how much you need to save to meet your retirement savings goal in this post.

4% Rule and Multiply by 25 Rule

As I checked to see what others were saying on this topic, I found a very common theme for determining how much you need to save for retirement.  In some places, it was called the 4% Rule and, in others, the Multiply by 25 Rule.  Being the math geek that I am, my first thought was that 4% = 1/25 so they are the same thing!  It turns out that, in the nitty gritty details, the Multiply by 25 Rule is intended to tell you how much you need to have available on the day you retire while the 4% Rule guides you in how much you can spend in your first year of retirement.  Nonetheless, as explained below, they both result in the same amount needed in savings on your retirement date.

4% Rule for Retirement Spending

The 4% rule is intended to tell you how much you can spend from your retirement savings each year.  Let’s say you have $1,000,000 in invested assets when you retire.  It says you can spend 4% of that amount or $40,000 (including all of your expenses and taxes) in your first year of retirement.  In each subsequent year of your retirement, you can spend $40,000 increased for the cumulative impact of inflation since you retired.   The 4% Rule assumes that you are invested 50% in stocks and 50% in bonds.

4% Rule Illustration

The graph below shows the amount you can spend each year (blue bars which use the left axis scale) and the amount you’ll have remaining at each age (red line which uses the right axis scale) if you retire at 65, inflation is 3% per year, bonds earn 2.5% and stocks earn 7% annually. These assumptions are similar to long-term average assumptions that are common these days.

As you can see, in this scenario, the amount you can spend increases from $40,000 when you are 65 to almost $100,000 a year when you are 95 solely due to inflation. In the first few years, your spending is less than your investment returns, so your savings increases.  After you turn 72, your savings exceeds your investment returns so your savings starts to decrease.

4% Rule Background

The 4% rule was developed by William Bengen and is presented in detail in a 1994 study published in the Journal of Financial Planning.  (If you like numbers and graphs, check out this paper. It is a surprisingly easy read.)

Using historical data from 1926 to 1991, Bengen found that there were no 50-year periods in which a retiree would run out of money if his or her initial withdrawal rate was 3.5% or lower.  With a 4% initial withdrawal rate, the shortest time period in which the savings ran out was 33 years.  In only 10% of the scenarios did the money last for less than 40 years.

If you turn this rule around and know how much you want to spend in your first year of retirement, say $60,000, you can calculate the amount you need to have saved by dividing that amount by 4% (=0.04).  In this example, you need $1,500,000 (=$60,000/0.04) in savings on the day you retire using this rule.

Multiply by 25 Rule for Retirement Savings

The Multiply by 25 Rule says that the amount you need in retirement savings is 25 times the amount you want to spend in the first year of retirement.  Using the example above in which you want to spend $60,000 in your first year of retirement, you would calculate that you need $1,500,000 (=25 x $60,000) in savings.  As I said, the math is the same for determining how much you need to save because multiplying by 25 is the same as dividing by 0.04.  It is just that the rules are stated from different perspectives (how much you can spend given the amount saved as opposed to how much you need to save giving how much you want to spend).

When do you need more or less?

As indicated, those rules make assumptions that might not be right for you. There are a number of personal factors that impact how much you need in retirement savings.

Your Risk Tolerance

The 4% Rule assumes that you invest half in bonds and half in stocks. Some people are willing to take more risk by investing more heavily in stocks. Other people can’t tolerate the ups and downs of the stock market, so invest more heavily in bonds. As shown in this chart below, taken from my post on diversification and investing, the higher percentage of stocks in your portfolio, the higher your average return (the blue lines) but the more likely you are to lose some of your principal (the portion of the whiskers that fall below 0).

If you plan to put more than 50% of your retirement assets in stocks, you can withdraw a bit more than 4% each year. Turning that around, it means you need a bit less than 25 times your estimated expenses in your first year of retirement. The table below was copied with permission from a March 19, 2019 article from Schwab found at this link.  It shows how your time horizon (see below) and investment risk impact the 4% Rule.

Life Expectancy and Retirement Age

The analysis underlying the 4% Rule focuses on a retirement period of 30 years.  If you retire in your mid-60s, it would imply that you would most likely have enough money to last through your mid-90s.  If you are in poor health or have a family history of dying early, you could consider spending a bit more than 4% (that is, multiply by less than 25 to determine how much you need to save).

On the other hand, if you plan to retire at 45 and want to have enough money to last until you are 95, you’ll need to save more.  The Schwab table above shows planning horizons up to 30 years.  Based on the numbers in the table, it looks like you could subtract about 0.1 percentage points from the numbers in the 30-year row for each year your planning horizon extends beyond 30 years to estimate how much you need to save.

For example, if you want to be highly confident (90% sure in this case) you will have enough money to last for 50 years, you would be looking at 20 years beyond the 30-year horizon.  Multiplying 20 years by 0.1 percentage point is 2.0%.  According to the table, you can spend 4.2% of your savings in the first year with a Moderately Conservative portfolio and 90% (highly) confident that you won’t run out of money in 30 years.  My approximation would subtract 2.0% from 4.2% to estimate that you could spend about 2.2% of your savings in the first year if you wanted to be 90% confident you won’t run out of money in 50 years.  You could then divide your estimated first year expenses by 2.2% or multiply by 45 to estimate how much you need to save.

Other Sources of Income

Some people’s employers provide defined benefit retirement plans.  These plans generally pay a flat amount every month starting at normal retirement age (as defined by the employer) until death.  In the US, people who have worked or whose spouses have worked are eligible for Social Security benefits, as discussed in this post.  Many other countries have similar programs.

When you are estimating how much you need to save for retirement, you can consider these sources of income.  If all of your other sources of income increase with inflation, it is a fairly straightforward adjustment.  You just need to subtract the income from these other sources from your first-year-of-retirement expenses before applying the 4% Rule (as adjusted for other considerations).

For example, if you plan to spend $100,000 a year in retirement and have $40,000 of Social Security and defined benefit plan benefits,  you would subtract $40,000 from $100,000 to get $60,000.  Using the Multiply by 25 Rule, you would multiply $60,000 by 25 to get $$1.5 million instead of multiplying the full $100,000 by 25 which would indicate you need $2.5 million in savings.  In this example, you need $1 million less in savings because you have other sources of income.

Unfortunately, most defined benefit plan benefits do not increase with inflation.  The math for adjusting the Multiply by 25 Rule is fairly complicated.  I’ve developed a simple approximation that you can use that will get you close to the correct percentage.  To approximate the adjustment to the amount you Multiply by 25, divide your defined benefit plan income by 2 before subtracting it from your first-year expenses.

You Want to Leave Your Assets to your Beneficiaries

I remember being a teenager and having my father explain to me how much I needed to save for retirement.  The approach he proposed was that you could spend 2% of your assets which is equivalent to a Multiply by 50 Rule.  (No wonder I was nervous about my finances when I retired!)  His logic was as follows:

  • Invest in the stock market and get a 10% return.  (He did this analysis a long time ago, when stock market average returns, inflation and taxes were all considered to be a bit higher than they are today, but not by so much as to make the logic faulty.)
  • You will pay taxes of 40% of your returns, which makes your after-tax return 6%.
  • Inflation will be 4% per year.  Because he wanted his investment income in every year to cover his expenses without dipping into the principal, he had to re-invest 4 percentage points of his investment return so he would have 4% more investment income in each subsequent year.
  • Subtracting the 4% reinvestment from the 6% after-tax return leaves an amount equal to 2% of his investments that he could spend each year (excluding taxes because he separately considered them).

So, if you are like my father, you will want to save closer to 50 times your first-year retirement expenses, rather than 25 times.  It is important to remember that my father’s Multiply by 50 rule applies to your expenses excluding income taxes and the Multiply by 25 Rule applies to your expenses including income taxes, so they aren’t quite directly comparable.

Liquidity of your Assets

As indicated above, the 4% Rule assumes your assets are invested 50% in stocks and 50% in bonds. You may have other assets that contribute to your net worth, such as equity in your home, your personal property, a family farm and rental property, among others. These other assets are all consider illiquid – that is, you can’t convert them to cash easily. Further, some of them are assets that you never want to have to convert to cash to cover expenses, such as your home and personal property.

As you project how much you will have in retirement savings, you’ll want to exclude any equity in your house as it isn’t available to invest.  A portion of it may be available at some point if you plan to downsize, but you’ll want to be cautious about including it in your savings plan.  Other of these assets, such as rental property, could be liquidated to cover retirement expenses.  In your planning, though, you’ll need to make sure you consider the selling costs (e.g., real estate agent’s commission) and taxes you need to pay on capital gains and that they may not generate a return as high as underlies the 4% Rule.

Irregular Large Expenses

The analysis that supports the 4% Rule assumes that you have the same expenses every year and that they change due only to inflation. That’s not how life works! You may want to be like me and want to take an expensive vacation every three or four years in retirement, you’ll likely have to replace your car at least once in retirement or you could have major home repairs if you own your home.  In addition, end-of-life medical bills can be very expensive.

As you are determining your first-year retirement expenses, you’ll want to include amounts for any such expenses in your budget at their average annual cost.  For example, let’s say I want to take a vacation (in addition to my already budgeted travel expenses) every five years that has a total cost of $10,000.  I need to add $2,000 (= $10,000 per vacation divided by one vacation every 5 years) to my regular annual expenses for these big vacations.  Similarly, if I plan to buy a $25,000 car every 15 years, I need to add $1,667 (= $25,000/15) to my annual expenses.  In both cases, you would add these amounts to your budgeted expenses before you divided by 4%.

How to Set Your Personal Target

So, what can you do to estimate your personal retirement savings target? Follow the following steps.

Make a Budget for Today if You Don’t Already Have One

It is hard to estimate your expenses in retirement, but it is very helpful to understand what you are spending today.  If you don’t have a budget or haven’t tracked your expenses to see where your money is going, I suggest starting there.  Here is a link to a post I wrote with a spreadsheet to help you monitor your expenses.

Estimate Your Expenses in Your First Year of Retirement

Next, look at your current budget and/or spending and estimate how it would change if you were retired today.  On what types of things might you want to spend money in the future that you don’t spend now?  Might you want to buy special gifts for your grandchildren that are more extravagant than what you spend for your children’s gifts now?  Also think about expenses you have now that you won’t have in the future, such as commute expenses and possibly a separate wardrobe for work.

Be sure to think about Social Security (or equivalent) and income taxes. In addition to Federal income taxes, you may pay state or provincial and possibly local income taxes.  If you plan to live somewhere else in retirement, it might have a higher or lower tax rate.  In the US, Social Security taxes are 6.2% (12.4% I you are self-employed) of your wages up to the limit ($128,400 in 2019).  As you adjust your budget, you can eliminate Social Security taxes and will want to think about whether your state or provincial and local tax rate will be substantially different from their current rates.

Some people say that your expenses will decrease by 20% when you retire.  In my very short retirement, I find I’m spending more than I expected as I have more time to do things and many of them cost money.  This post from Financial Samurai provide some insights as to how retirement might impact your expenses.

Increase Your Retirement Expenses for Special Purchases

Do you want to travel? How often do you think you’ll need to buy replacement cars and how much do you think you’d spend if you bought one today? What other expenses might you have that aren’t in your budget? For each of these expenses, divide the amount by the time between them to estimate an average annual cost, as I illustrated earlier in this post.

Adjust Your Budget for Inflation

All of the amounts you’ve estimated so far are in today’s dollars.  That is, they reflect the current prices of every item.  You’ll want to increase these amounts for inflation between now and the time you retire.  Over long periods of time, annual inflation has averaged 3% to 3.5% though it has been a bit lower recently.  To adjust your budget for inflation, you’ll want to multiply it by 1.03n, where n is the number of years until you retire.  Don’t like exponents?  The table below provides approximate multipliers by number of years until you plan to retire.

Years 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45
Factor 1.15 1.35 1.55 1.80 2.10 2.45 2.80 3.25 3.80

Subtract Other Sources of Income

If you think you’ll have a defined pension plan benefit or will receive social insurance (Social Security) benefit, you can subtract those amounts from your inflation-adjusted budget.  My post on Social Security provides insights on how to estimate your benefits for my US readers.

Figure Out your Risk Tolerance and Length of Retirement

If you want to be almost 100% confident you will have enough money to last for your full retirement, regardless of how long it is, and leave most or all of your principal to your heirs, multiply the difference between your inflated budget (excluding income taxes) and other sources of income by 50 to derive your retirement savings target.

If you plan to be retired for only 10 years, you can multiply by a number as low as 10, according to the chart from Schwab. Where between those two numbers you choose is up to you. The longer you expect to be retired, the more conservative your investments and the more confident you want to be that you won’t run out of money, the higher your multiplier.