@Catch22 - Thanks. You’ve covered the bases well. And you were extremely prescient (and correct) about the value of bonds for many years when I and others here were doubters! Credit to you!
Any affinity I may hold for bonds today relates only to relative value near term when compared to equities. I do find it intriguing that a lot of “hedged-equity” funds are actually parked 90% in Treasuries currently. (SWAN for example).
Regards

Hi @hank
I looked again at what I wrote, and the expression of my language is pretty crappy.
I was picking on the folks who seem to think they are able to see the future so far away. The big kids have had too many forecast misses for interest rates since the 2008 melt; at least based upon their salary and access to data.
My IG bond thoughts are more directed to gov't. issue, vs corp.
Quandary:
a state of perplexity or uncertainty over what to do in a difficult situation.
The quandary being: Fed. taper.........well, if the Treasury stills needs to sell bills, notes and bonds to run the house of America; who will buy these if the Fed. tapers too much and doesn't want more Treasury paper?
Lots of folks still need and want U.S. debt.
The question becomes, as usual, supply and demand.
'Course the potential problem today is that rates beyond the control of the Treasury or the Fed. are already low and less swing room than in years past.
I still feel the big kids still don't really know what direction for yields, cause we're still in the "this time is different mode"; and more warped from Covid and all of the affects.
To a point, if there remains enough buyers; yields will go down; and the prices will increase, which is where the money is made.
This write likely didn't help one bit to express much of anything.
I'm attempting to have a decent thought path too late at night for me today.
Remain curious,
Catch

Keep subtracting one. So that one goes from, say, dividing by 19 years to dividing by 18 years ... down to dividing by 1 year. At that point, one must take everything out.
Which is a good thing. Otherwise one would have to divide by zero the next year :-)
https://www.irs.gov/retirement-plans/required-minimum-distributions-for-ira-beneficiaries

Couple thoughts. Not my expertise.
- If I were very young and saving for 25+ years out, a good actively managed time tested global fund is what I’d use. Heck, with a 25-35 year time horizon until even the first withdrawal, that’s about all I’d use. TEMWX was a great fund in the 70s and for several years beyond. (Went downhill after Franklin took over).
- Here’s one of the first things I learned from our plan’s advisor (whom I don’t begrudge for the 4% commission he was raking in). Says Bob: “Global’s better because if the U.S. becomes overvalued they’ll simply take the money and move it to other areas of the world that aren’t overvalued.” Made sense to me than and still does.
- You might already be invested in a global fund without realizing it. Recently I looked at the Lipper stats for sedate conservative PRSIX which I’ve long held. It’s currently invested 61% in North America. I can pin down about 25% shown to be on other continents. Doesn’t add up to 100. Might be that the fund’s substantial cash & “other” holdings aren’t assigned to any particular geographic area.

RMDs for inherited IRAs are grandfathered - if you have an existing inherited IRA from which you are taking RMDs, you can continue as if nothing had changed. You do not need to deplete them within 10 years.
https://www.irahelp.com/slottreport/stretch-ira-lives-some-beneficiaries
These RMDs cannot be combined with RMDs for all other T-IRAs.
And as I noted in a previous post above, calculating the RMDs for these IRAs under the new tables is not as simple as merely looking them up. I am concerned that there is a nontrivial chance that custodians will err in their OPTIONAL calculations.

RMDs for all T-IRAs can be combined and taken from ANY ONE T-IRA. Brokers'/funds' calculations are OPTIONAL services they offer - I subscribe to those to just double-check my own calculations. Some firms also have contractual signups for calculating AND distributing RMDs but they are good only for straightforward situations.
RMDs for all 403b can be combined and taken from ANY ONE 403b.
Then the spoiler. RMDs for 401k must be taken from each 401k (i.e. they cannot be combined like the 2 situations above).
Note that the RMD tables are changing on 1/1/22, and the IRS will come out with 2022 RMD worksheets LATER so as not to confuse people. But the new RMD tables were decided in 2019/2020, and were initially to go into effect on 1/1/21, but that was delayed to 1/1/22.
RMDs from Inherited IRAs - the old rule requited annual RMDs. But with the IRA stretch gone, the IRAs must be depleted within 10 years and one can do it in any way, gradually, or all at once by the 10th year.

TRP is trying to get some of their bigger investors away from the online mutual fund supermarkets so they can reduce the amount of their management fees they have to pay to Fidelity, Schwab, etc.
For several years I've considered returning our accounts directly to TRP out of loyalty and appreciation for the excellent investment management our accounts have received through PRWCX and Giroux. Around 80% of our investments are in TRP funds (primarily PRWCX). I moved our accounts first to TDA and now at Schwab, why should they be getting a big chunk of the management fees, what are they adding to our investment returns in those funds?
But, up until now there has been no personal financial incentive otherwise to make the move back to TRP. Now that the new Summit program has dramatically lowered the hurdle to access institutional shares ($50,000 rather than $1 million) at the lower ER and also gives access to closed funds like PRNHX, I'm seriously considering making the move. Any non-TRP funds we want to invest in can still be done so through a TRP brokerage account. Being able to park our investments in the institutional shares will potentially add TENS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS to our returns over the next number of decades if we are blessed to live that long.
I've wondered why more fund shops haven't followed the lead of organizations like Grandeur Peak who will let shareholders purchase the cheaper institutional shares at far lower minimums if they invest directly with the fund rather than through brokers. Kudos to TRP for finally coming around.
Please let me know if I am overlooking something here.

There are several references to articles in Barron's. For those interested, I have been doing weekend summaries from Barron's for several years that are released on Saturday mornings. Some recent ones can be found at this link at the open read-access site,
https://ybbpersonalfinance.proboards.com/board/12/market-insights

A very good point,@yogibear. BRUFX has lost assets every year since 2016. I was one who bailed a couple of years ago.

This is such a great resource for me during distribution season. What are you guys doing with this data? I use it to create estimates of what my clients will receive in distributions before the end of the year, determine which funds to put off buying, and (some years, not this one) tax loss harvesting out of funds that will pay more in dividends than the capital gains would be.
I assume I'm not the only one who is going to these sites and typing the numbers into excel? Next year.... what do you think about also having a shared google sheet?

Love "experts" predictions, see (link)
Example: In 05/2012 (article)
Question:You have become famous for your cyclically adjusted 10-year price/earnings ratio. What do the latest numbers say about future stock market returns?
Shiller: we found a correlation between that ratio and the next 10 years' return.
If you plug in today's P/E of about 22, it would be predicting something like an annualized 4% return after inflation.
FD: reality, the SP500 made 15+% average anually since that date and much better than countries with lower PE10.
==============
I would love if markets collapse because I would be out. I have been doing it for years and why my biggest loss from any top since 2018 was less than 1%. I made money every week in March of 2020.
How do I know? VIX is one of my indicators, the rest is in a lock box.
The key is to be mostly invested. I'm in the market at 99+%(never cash) at 90+% of the time.

In a sense, the whole claims system is a game. The insurers do everything they can to come up with excuses to deny or delay paying the fair amount on claims.
My doctor's office had a claim denied because they had not stated explicitly that the coding was in ICD-10 (the current coding system) rather than ICD-9, which had been obsolete for years. They had to refile with no changes, just a declaration that it was coded correctly.
Medicare Advantage insurers game the government by trying to make their customers appear as sick as possible. The way the system works, "To provide an incentive for insurers to cover sicker patients, the plans are paid commensurately more for their care."
So the insurers push customers to accept a one time in-home visit from an insurer's clinician to find any condition that would get the insurer more money. Of course that's not what the insurers tell their customers the visit is for. And it raises all our costs.
"If you are healthy and the visit results in an increased risk score, you won’t have to pay more for your care. But the higher Medicare reimbursement your insurer receives may contribute to the nation’s rising health care costs."
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/medicare-advantage-when-insurance-companies-make-house-calls-201512168844
In this game, I find I'm more on the side of the providers. Especially PCPs, where as @sma3 noted, margins are razor thin. Which is not to say that I haven't seen gross abuses of the system by providers. But I haven't seen nearly the level of nickel and diming that the insurers do that drives up administrative costs. Just MHO.

Very insightful for sure. I went back to view her YouTube interviews in the last 10 years and they are consistently informative. Toward the end she picked Cathy Woods’s ETF, AKKK as an example of innovation that drive this economy.

Yes, I understand what you're expressing/your point. Charts lend a nice view, for me.
When bonds had more correlation to equity moves, this chart provides an interesting view. If one was really astute about market moves, a sell/buy rotation between EDV (Vanguard long bond) and SPY would have paid a handsome return over the years. From the chart begin (limited by EDV inception) one's money would have returned the same value through March, 2017, for EDV and SPY. Most folks would never guess this, if the question were on an exam.
And yes, one may still make money with hard play in bonds............as in a play between TBT (rising rates) and TMF (falling rates); or others.
You may plug in any of the tickers you listed, as the chart link is an active/to use chart.
CHART

@Catch22 - Thanks for the chart. As you know, TAIL isn’t designed to make money over longer periods. The manager expects negative returns most years. So, not sure what to compare it to in a day and age when stocks only go up.
Others I’ve looked at:
SWAN About 90% treasuries and buys longer dated call options on the S&P (passive management)
DRSK About 90% investment grade corporates and buys longer dated call options on selected stocks.(active management)
FTLS About 70% long and 25-30% short on selected stocks (active management)
Here’s my favorite one conceptually - DFND, which shorts stocks that it thinks will pay lower dividends in the future and goes long on stocks it thinks will grow their dividends. It’s considered defensive in the sense that investors tend to rush into dividend paying stocks during times of market stress. Generally good reviews. The problem is it bounces around a lot and is currently on an uptick. I would only buy in after a prolonged period of weakness.

One can use Portfolio Visualizer (PV) to see how he arrived at the age 70 investment portfolio values. PV shows slightly lower values. That is possibly because when one asks PV for a 6% rate of return, it doesn't use 6%/12 (0.5 basis points) for the monthly return, but 0.487 basis points (compounds to 6% annually). Just a guess.
Here's the PV setup for 6%. Mouse over the graph for the 8 year (age 62-age 70) result.
On the withdrawal side (after age 70), the video makes two simplifying assumptions:

• You will die at age 90. 5% withdrawal x 20 years = 100%. That leaves longevity risk.
• The real rate of return of the portfolio is zero. This addresses @bee's point that the portfolio grows over time. The video's portfolio does grow in nominal returns at precisely the rate of inflation.

bee does a nice job with PV in showing how one might have invested in the past. Kudos for incorporating a couple of bear stock markets in the mix. That said, there are two implicit, and IMHO fairly aggressive, assumptions made:

• The funds selected (or any fund of one's choosing) will continue to outperform the market. I've added a 60/40 S&P 500/bond market mix (rebalanced annually). This didn't survive 15 years. PV link.
• The markets going forward will produce real returns similar to those of the past 20 years. Schwab is projecting average real returns over the next decade of around 4.5% in the stock market and negative bond returns. And that's before considering higher inflation - the projection was from last May, before inflation took off.

Source page: https://www.schwab.com/resource-center/insights/content/why-market-returns-may-be-lower-in-the-future
With respect to sheltering the portfolio from taxes via a Roth IRA: this assumes that the part time worker is not already putting that money into an IRA (and maxing out), else contributing more to an IRA might not be an option. In any case, one could not contribute even half the age 62 benefits to SS. $1400 x 12 mo = $16,800. Including the $1K catch up amount, the max that one can contribute to an IRA is $7K.
Looking at the Roth conversion option: let's assume one is in the 12% tax bracket, no state taxes. If one converted $140K and somehow managed to remain in the 12% bracket, then that would use up the $16.8K in SS, thus effectively adding that amount to the Roth IRA. In reality, that would move one into the 22% or 24% bracket; hardly a good strategy. Not to mention that this would make more of the SS benefits taxable. Further, in order to execute this plan for eight years, one would need to have $1.12M in a traditional IRA available for conversion.
This has a better chance of being feasible if one is in a higher tax bracket (that would reduce the amount of the conversion necessary to incur $16.8K in taxes). However, given the correlation between income and longevity, the higher income person is also more subject to longevity risk and thus would likely benefit more from the lifetime income guaranteed by SS.

Regarding the annuity option: we don't know where the cost figure comes from, or what type of annuity it is. Though I agree with what I think is @JonGaltIII's assumption - life only, no inflation adjustments. One can buy joint and survivor annuities, but they cost more. I don't believe there are any inflation adjusted fixed immediate annuities left on the market, but there should still be some that provide for annual increases of a fixed amount (say, 2%). Of course those also cost more.
If there is the possibility of a surviving spouse, that just makes SS look even better. With SS, if the spouse with the larger benefits dies first, the surviving spouse gets those benefits instead of one's own. Unless one expects both spouses to live past the break even point (~82 give or take), the optimal strategy is often for the lower benefit spouse to take SS early (62) and the higher benefit spouse to defer to age 70.

@Old_Joe
I retired in 2019 after 40 years in primary care medical practice, both self employed and as an employee.
When I was self employed, my livelihood and the salaries of all of our employees depended on the knowledge and expertise of the billing staff, who worked long hours to get us every dollar they could out of the insurance companies. Despite many hours talking to them, I still do not understand medical billing. We paid these folks good salaries to sit on the phone for hours and wrangle with other staff at Blue Cross for example, over $15 or $20. But we figured if they spent 30 minutes collecting $50 we were ahead of the game.
A lot of physicians don't bother, or hire a billing service, who just tries once. In primary care, however, the margins are so thin ( our overhead never dropped below 55%) every dollar counted.
I think we would have been better off charging $50 a visit, cash. We would have needed far fewer staff, but it was unclear ( and I could never get an answer) if we didn't take insurance, if our patients would have had any of their tests or prescriptions covered. That is where the real costs in health care are, not doctor's salaries, especially primary care.
Once I joined a hospital owned practice, it was their problem, but I can tell you collections and efficiency fell off the cliff.
It is in the financial interest of the insurance companies to make this as complicated as possible, as they live off of the 25% America spends on administrative expenses. Highest in the world!

I think we all need to be aware of the potential catastrophe if we enter a prolonged bear market. People who are depending on their equity returns to live on will be hurt very very badly.
While the 1930s are probably not a useful comparison, as the Fed was nowhere to be seen, many of us lived through the 2000 to 2013 crash. While there was a "recovery" to a previous high by 5/29/2007, within five months things went south again, and did not recover until 2013.
Taking the two periods together, it was over 13 years of no returns. The PE fell from 35 to 8.
While the Fed is obviously more willing to intervene now, with rates at near zero, and the deficit enormous, there may be less they can do.

Re TAIL (etf)
I’ve come upon a better description of the strategy. In particular, the fund (TAIL) relies on intermediate, rather than long term treasuries (as I earlier stated) for ballast, while purchasing put options. The manager explains that under normal conditions, the fund is expected to lose money.
Excerpt: “The Cambria Tail Risk ETF seeks to mitigate significant downside market risk. The Fund intends to invest in a portfolio of "out of the money" put options purchased on the U.S. stock market. TAIL strategy offers the potential advantage of buying more puts when volatility is low and fewer puts when volatility is high. While a portion of the fund's assets will be invested in the basket of long put option premiums, the majority of fund assets will be invested in intermediate term US Treasuries. As the fund is designed to be a hedge against market declines and rising volatility, Cambria expects the fund to produce negative returns in the most years with rising markets or declining volatility.”
Source https://www.cambriafunds.com/tail
Here’s a related bit of information cited in “Up & Down Wall Street” (Barron’s, Nov. 15). Eric Metz, an options trader is credited by Randall Forsyth as providing the following advice:
“Metz (recommends) taking advantage of a current anomaly in the options market. Premiums on calls on the Nasdaq are higher than those on put options—the reverse of the usual skew. Typically, hedgers pay higher premiums on puts to ensure against the downside of their holdings. But bullish enthusiasm currently is making for higher premiums on upside calls.”

@Observant1: the PV charts are really helpful. I had noted MIEIX and SCIEX as good performers when I looked rapidly for LB international funds. What strikes me is how relatively poorly the investor in international equities has been rewarded over the past 10 years and beyond as measured by the Vanguard Total International index on your linked chart. Very revealing.