Emekliler: Bu yatırım size garantili % 5 güvenli para çekme oranı sağlar

Retirees: This investment gives you a guaranteed 5% safe withdrawal rate

Mark Hulbert

Thu, August 20, 2026 at 2:01 AM GMT+3 6 min read

Now appears to be the first time in history you can lock in a government-guaranteed 30-year inflation-adjusted withdrawal rate of 5%.

All you need to do is build a 30-year ladder of TIPS — the U.S. Treasury's Inflation-Protected Securities. You would construct the ladder out of individual TIPS maturing at each point between now and 2056, holding them until they mature. It would take about an hour to build and you would need to do nothing else for the next three decades. The website TIPSLadder.com (a free and great public service) shows you precisely how many bonds of each maturity to purchase to support a so-called safe withdrawal rate — that is, the rate that can be supported in virtually all scenarios.

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I say that now appears to be the first time you could secure such an attractive withdrawal rate — historical data are not readily available, so I can't be 100% certain. But Kevin Esler, TIPSLadder.com's founder, said in an email that he is fairly confident that at no other point since 30-year TIPS were first offered in 2010 did "a 30 year TIPS ladder provid[e] a 5% Safe Withdrawal Rate."

This attractive safe withdrawal rate may not last long. According to two market historians — Edward McQuarrie, an emeritus professor at Santa Clara University, and William Bernstein, a neurologist and founder of money-management firm EfficientFrontiers.com — the last time TIPS yields on maturities of less than 30 years spiked to close to current levels, in 2008, they stayed that high for just one month. "You snooze, you lose. The time to buy TIPS is now," the pair wrote in the newsletter Advisor Perspectives on Aug. 13.

The Bengen rule

To put a 5% safe withdrawal rate in historical context, recall that for years, the rule of thumb in retirement finance was that a diversified stock-bond portfolio could only support a 4% SWR. This rate was originally known as the Bengen rule, named for William Bengen, who reported in a 1994 article in the Journal of Financial Planning that there had been no 30-year period over the prior 75 years in which a portfolio made up of 50% stocks and 50% bonds didn't support a 4% inflation-adjusted withdrawal rate for those 30 years. (Bengen referred to the SWR as the "safemax" rate.)

Researchers subsequently discovered that even a 4% SWR was not really safe, however, since it turned out that there in fact were 30-year periods in history in which a 50/50 stock/bond portfolio would have prematurely run out of money trying to support a 4% inflation-adjusted annual withdrawal for 30 years.

One study found that the SWR for a stock/bond portfolio was actually just 1.9% — less than half of Bengen's 4%. That study was conducted by Richard Sias and Scott Cederburg, finance professors at the University of Arizona; Michael O'Doherty, a finance professor at the University of Missouri; and Aizhan Anarkulova, a finance professor at Emory University. The study is titled "The Safe Withdrawal Rate: Evidence from a Broad Sample of Developed Markets."

A few caveats

Attractive as TIPS ladders are at today's rates, there are several things you should keep in mind. One is that, after producing enough income to support a 5% inflation-adjusted withdrawal for 30 years, a 30-year ladder will be worth zero at the end of that period. Nothing will be left in case you live longer than 30 years or want to leave anything to your heirs.

One way of responding to these possibilities is to allocate only a portion of your retirement portfolio to a 30-year TIPS ladder. Some financial planners suggest allocating 80% of your retirement portfolio to the ladder and 20% to a stock-market index fund. Notice that the 80% allocation to the TIPS ladder supports a 4% SWR, which is what financial planners used to believe was the most you could realistically expect. That in turn means that the 20% you allocate to the stock market can compound for those 30 years without the threat of premature withdrawals — a strategy that history suggests will produce handsome long-term returns despite significant volatility along the way.

Another caveat to keep in mind is the tax treatment of TIPS. If you're holding them in a taxable account, the IRS charges you tax each year on the amount by which the principal of each TIPS increased that year because of inflation — even though your wallet won't capture that inflation adjustment until the TIPS matures many years subsequently. This so-called phantom tax can quickly add up, especially when inflation is high. As a result, most financial planners recommend holding a TIPS ladder within an IRA or other tax-deferred account. In a study that McQuarrie posted last year on the Social Science Research Network, he concluded that, taking numerous factors into account, probably the best asset location for a TIPS ladder is a traditional IRA rather than a Roth.

Regardless, note that the SWR supported by a 30-year TIPS ladder changes by the day as TIPS yields change. As this column was being written on Aug. 19, for example, the SWR slipped from 5.0% to 4.9%. If the 5.0% SWR rate from earlier this week turns out to be the high for this cycle, as McQuarrie and Bernstein suggest is possible, then you have little time to lose.

Mark Hulbert is a regular contributor to MarketWatch. His Hulbert Ratings tracks investment newsletters that pay a flat fee to be audited. He can be reached at .

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