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Stefan Sharkansky: The Retirement Spending Plan That Adapts as Markets Change
00:39:39
The statistician says rigid withdrawal rates often cause retirees to underspend. He has a formula that balances secure income with flexible spending.
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- [00:00]
Vanguard Announcer
Lots of firms throw a couple flashy funds your way and call it a day. But not Vanguard. Vanguard bonds are institutional quality. Institutional quality isn't a tagline. It's a commitment to your clients. It means top grade products across the board. So if you're looking to give your clients consistent results year in and year out, go see the record for yourself@vanguard.com audio. That's vanguard.com audio all investing is subject to risk. Vanguard Marketing Corporation Distributor Please stay tuned
- [00:28]
Morningstar Disclaimer
for important disclosure information at the conclusion of this episode.
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Christine Benz
Hi, and welcome to the Longview. I'm Christine Benz, Director of Personal Finance and Retirement Planning for Morningstar. Our guest on the podcast today is Stefan Sharkansky. Stephan is a Ph.D. statistician who specializes in finance. He wrote a provocatively titled paper, the Only Other Spending Role Article youe Will Ever need, which was published in the Financial Analyst Journal. Stefan has also developed a related website called the Best Third, designed to help people with their retirement spending plans and portfolio structures. In addition, he developed and operates the website personalfund.com which provides proprietary cost analysis of mutual funds to financial advisors. Steffan has a BA in Mathematics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, an Ms. In Computer Science from Stanford University, and an Ms. And a PhD in Statistics from the University of Washington. Steffan, welcome to the Longview.
- [01:28]
Stefan Sharkansky
Thank you very much. I'm delighted to be here.
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Christine Benz
Well, we're delighted to have you here and we do want to delve into your work on retirement planning. But before we do that, I wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about your background. So you have your doctorate in statistics. What got you interested in investing and especially retirement planning?
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Stefan Sharkansky
Well, I've been interested in investing for a long time and my doctorate in statistics is with a focus on financial econometrics. So I have the domain knowledge about finance and investing and the retirement planning planning specifically came from a very personal experience. A few years ago my wife asked me how much could we spend in retirement? And I said, well, gosh, I have no idea, but let me research that. And that got me into this rabbit hole of figuring out what is the best methodology for retirement planning, that is planning for the actual spending part of the retirement as opposed to the pre retirement planning. And that got me here.
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Christine Benz
Okay, so let's talk about the application that you've created. It's called the Best Third. And this Best Third idea is something that you come back to. Can you maybe just give us a little background on how you're using that term and what it means?
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Stefan Sharkansky
Yeah, it means that you could think of your Life as having 3/3. The first third is when you're growing up and going to school. The second third is when you're working and raising kids. And then the third third is when you're in retirement. The website is about helping you make the best of what should be the best third of your life.
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Christine Benz
Okay, so in the paper which was published in the Financial Analyst Journal, you talk about the kind of research shortcut that many have used and Bill Behnken's seminal research that starts with that 4% guideline. But you in the paper are quite critical of those sort of fixed rate spending systems because they lead to underspending, sometimes dramatically so. So people deprive themselves effectively during their retirement periods. Can you talk about that?
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Stefan Sharkansky
Yeah, absolutely. First of all, Bill BANYAN and the 4% rule deserves a lot of credit because it was the first systematic approach for spending down a retirement portfolio. Really? But it has come under criticism from a number of researchers and thought leaders over the years for a few reasons. And one is because whether it's 4% or whatever, the fixed rate happens to be, people's spending in tax situations during retirement isn't really constant. So having a constant withdrawal rate doesn't really fit the way people actually need to spend. And another part of it is, as you mentioned, is the underspending, and I found in researching the paper and running through the numbers with historical scenario data, is that in a median market scenario, if you follow the 4% rule, you would end up your 30 year retirement plan with half again as much wealth as you started with, adjusted for inflation. So what that means is that you are not spending as much as you could and you are leaving so much on the table for your heirs that you're not able to enjoy the quality of life in retirement that you can truly afford.
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Christine Benz
Our research very much corroborates that same finding that those fixed real withdrawal systems, and we use Monte Carlo simulations, but they oftentimes lead to very large leftover balances. I sometimes hear from retirees who say, well, I'm not too worried about that because I have children, grandchildren, but it does seem like at a minimum, people are losing some opportunities for lifetime giving, right?
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Stefan Sharkansky
Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I'm a big believer in the concept of give with a warm hand if you can, that is, make your gifts to charity and to your family members while you're still alive instead of waiting until the end of your life.
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Christine Benz
Yeah, me too. And you know, also the data show that people, when they inherit money from their children are often like in their late 50s, early 60s. Their financial fortunes are pretty well set by that life stage. Want to delve into your research, which builds on some research from Larry Siegel, who's previously been a guest on this podcast, as well as M. Barton Waring. And it's called arva, the system that Siegel and Waring discussed in their paper or annually recalculated virtual annuity. Can you discuss what ARVA is?
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Stefan Sharkansky
Yeah. It uses the word annuity and it tries to provide the main benefits of an annuity, a a steady and more or less predictable income stream while you're alive. And it contains two parts. One is a ladder of tips, treasury inflation protected securities, which provides a level of secure guaranteed, the closest thing to riskless guaranteed income that we have in the investment markets, along with, in the case of my paper, I concluded a stock portfolio where the withdrawals from the stock portfolio are amortized. And we can get into that details a little bit later. But it's a formula for withdrawing from the stock portfolio in such a way that you're mathematically guaranteed that you will not run out of money. But the withdrawals from the stock portfolio will vary with market performance. You take a larger withdrawal when the market's done well and a smaller withdrawal when the market has lagged a bit.
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Christine Benz
Okay, so while we're on the topic of annuities, I wanted to follow up on. So why TIPS versus an annuity? Just a simple income annuity that will last throughout someone's lifetime. Can you kind of compare and contrast those two different tools which would seem to kind of serve a similar function?
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Stefan Sharkansky
Yeah, they aim to serve a similar function. And an annuity has the advantage that it is guaranteed to last your lifetime. And you also benefit from the longevity risk pooling, sometimes called mortality credits, because people live different lifespans. And so the withdrawals that you can take as an individual kind of average out. And so you can, for many people, you can take a larger withdrawal while you're alive than you would if you set aside all the assets you needed to plan for a long lifespan. But that comes with a very big cost, which is inflation risk. And there are not on the market today any annuities which are truly indexed for inflation. And inflation is a big risk in retirement, especially if you're trying to plan for a very long lifespan, which is why you would have an annuity in the first place. And so your purchasing power from your annuity payouts will decline pretty precipitously toward the end of your life. Alan Roth had A really nice article about this on Morningstar last month where he compared annuities, which don't have the inflation protection with a TIPS ladder, which does have inflation protection, and he concluded pretty decisively in favor of the TIPS ladder.
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Christine Benz
Yeah, I know Alan has been banging the drum for TIPS for a long time, as have many folks in the Bogleheads community. I've heard working financial planners say that academics focus on TIPS, puts too fine a point on retirement spending, that in reality, many of their clients, even their fixed spending, might move around pretty significantly during their retirement years. So, you know, one planner mentioned to me that she has clients who maybe sell second homes, and so their expenses go dramatically down because they're no longer paying for upkeep for their second home. What do you say to that? You know, this idea of looking closely at our budget and trying to address those fixed spending needs with TIPS maybe puts too fine a point on things.
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Stefan Sharkansky
Well, if you approach it that way, then, yeah, I completely agree that because your fixed spending is likely to vary in ways that you don't anticipate from the outset, and so I don't think it makes sense to try to plan your spending too much. There are diminishing returns for doing that. And in my mind, the TIPS ladder is not there to fund your essential needs. Exactly. It's there to provide you with a secure base spending that you can count on, but it doesn't have to be a precise forecast of your exact spending.
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Christine Benz
Okay, so you thought to address a couple of issues that weren't specifically addressed in that ARVA research. And one was this idea of, if I'm allocating to TIPS for those fixed expenses and to stocks for everything else, how to set that allocation. Can you talk about how you approach that?
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Stefan Sharkansky
Yeah, the paper approaches it as you'd expect from an academic paper with a good deal of formalism.
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Christine Benz
Yes.
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Stefan Sharkansky
But in practice, what I would say is you start with just what level of. Of secure guaranteed income do you want? And you create the TIPS ladder to provide that level of income, and it just follows from there. The allocation just follows from there. You can specify with the TIPS ladder what spending you want in each year. And you could say, well, I just want a constant level of real income of, say, $100,000 every year, including TIPS and Social Security. And then you would match the TIPS ladder to provide the total cash flows from interest payments and bond principal repayments upon maturity to match that level of income. And different people will have different comfort levels. Some people will want to have that secure income cover what they believe to be their fixed needs and will say, you know, I just want some reasonable floor. And you know, you're going to get additional income from the stock portion of the portfolio. And some people would be more comfortable having the more upside from the stock portfolio at the cost of a little less certainty.
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Christine Benz
So in the paper you discuss using individual TIPS bonds, the ladder TIPS portfolio, which is what you prefer, versus using TIPS funds. So bundles of TIPS that are managed either or in an ETF or mutual fund, you favor the individual bond portfolio. Can you talk about that?
- [12:55]
Stefan Sharkansky
Yeah, absolutely. And so you have the individual TIPS bonds and the important thing is that you hold them to maturity. Because when you hold TIPS to maturity, you know pretty exactly with as much certainty as anybody can have with anything in the stock market that at when those bonds mature, you are going to get a known quantity of funds return to you in cash. That is adjusted for inflation. But with the individual bonds, you can know with high certainty exactly what you're going to be getting in terms of spendable income over the next 30 years. But with tips ETFs or funds, you don't have that same certainty. Those are volatile assets that fluctuate as interest rates change. The value of those funds will go up and down just like any other bond fund. And if interest rates go up, then the value of the bond funds, the TIPS funds that you own, will decline and therefore you cannot get certain withdrawals from those funds.
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Christine Benz
Okay, following up on that in the paper, you take pains to note that TIPS yields will be ephemeral, that the real yield that you receive over your particular drawdown period will be kind of luck of the draw depending on the interest rate environment. Does right now and not wanting you to be a market timer, but does it seem like an especially lucrative or opportune time to buy TIPS right now? One of our guests recently made that point that he felt like TIPS were being woefully under recognized.
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Stefan Sharkansky
Yeah, I agree with your guest point. And just to clarify, the yield on your TIPS ladder is ephemeral, but it is locked in at the outset. Once you buy your TIPS ladder at a particular yield, it's fixed for you for the next 30 years. You're immune from changes in that real yield once you've bought your ladder. And yes, now is a particularly favorable time to buy a TIPS ladder. The real yields on the long term bonds are about 2.8%, which is historically quite high. And it is a favorable time to be buying those tips.
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Christine Benz
Yeah, just to clarify on sort of the fleeting nature of TIPS Yields. I guess my point was that if I retire in 10 years, maybe look at a completely different situation.
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Stefan Sharkansky
Exactly. Yes.
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Christine Benz
Yeah. So tips are tax inefficient that we generally want to hold them in something that is going to shelter us from the distributions that they're making. So I was reading some posts on the Bogleheads forum and there were some comments from early retirees who were saying, well, you know, this isn't even though I like the concept, this isn't that useful to me because I'm not yet 59 and a half, I can't withdraw from my IRAs. Have you thought about it? Sounds like maybe you're working on an approach that would help younger retirees.
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Stefan Sharkansky
Yeah. And Bogleheads first of all is a great forum. I learn a lot from participating in those discussions. But yet tips, like all other bonds, are not tax efficient. So when you have a choice of where to locate your stocks, where to locate your bonds, bonds should always be located in your tax deferred accounts where you're not as concerned about the income that they throw off. That's bad in a taxable account. And also they're slower growing. So you have the opportunity cost to put your higher earning assets in the taxable and tax exempt accounts where you can make the most of that growth. But when you don't have a choice, your only option is to use a taxable account before you get to the 59.5 or unless you have one of the exceptions to early withdrawals, then your set of options is limited. If you want the stability of bond income, then you're going to have to eat the tax inefficiency. Otherwise you could be all in stocks which are more tax efficient but. But with the downside, they're more volatile and the withdrawals are going to be less predictable. But tips have certain tax disadvantages even relative to nominal bonds. But it actually all comes out in the wash I think because with nominal bonds you have to worry about inflation, with tips you don't have to worry about inflation. So you either pay slightly higher taxes on the TIPS or you pay the hidden tax of inflation on your nominal bonds. With muni bonds, well, they don't have the same negative tax consequences, but they're still nominal. So you're still at risk for inflation. And also unless you're in a very high tax bracket, your after tax yields on munis will not be as good as your after tax yields on other kinds of bonds. So based on the options that are available to you in a taxable account, TIPS May still be the best of the available options for you even in early retirement when you have to hold them in a taxable account.
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Christine Benz
Yeah, I was talking to a planner friend, not about your tool specifically, but she builds a portfolio of laddered nominal bonds with a little bit of cushion or wiggle room built in to address fluctuations in household spending. What do you think of that approach of not using TIPS but instead using nominal bonds plus a buffer?
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Stefan Sharkansky
Without knowing more about the details of how this planner approaches that, it's hard for me to imagine how nominal bonds would be more effective even in combination with something else. How it would be more effective or more straightforward than simply using a TIPS ladder to provide stable income with inflation protection.
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Christine Benz
Yeah, I think the thought was that it enabled her to get slightly higher yields and maybe better diversification across different bond sectors. But I can't speak to it either. Specifically wanted to switch over to discuss the risky components. So we've talked about tips, and that's the allocation that I might make to meet my fixed living expenses. Then with this risky portfolio, we're putting any leftover assets into stocks. You've arrived at a 100% equity weighting for that portion of that portfolio, not a balanced portfolio or anything else. Can you talk about how you got there?
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Stefan Sharkansky
Yeah, absolutely. I did. In the paper. I looked at different combinations of stocks and bonds. The more traditional style of 60, 40, 80, 20, 40, 60, a few different blends. And I found that the 100% stock portfolio was not any riskier in the sense of downside than the blended portfolios, but they had significantly higher upside. The withdrawals you would get from the 100% stock portfolio were more volatile and variable. But that variability was all on the upside, not on the downside. So, simply put, there's no benefit and a cost to including bonds in that portion of the portfolio. But having said that, sometimes people look at this and say, oh, 100% stocks. That seems very risky. No bonds in there. Well, in fact, you have bonds in the forms of your TIPS ladder. So you still have. With this approach, you still have a blended portfolio of stocks and bonds. It's just that the way you hold those bonds is in the form of a TIPS ladder as opposed to the more traditional bond funds.
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Christine Benz
Yeah, that makes sense. So in terms of calculating that payday from the equity portfolio, can you walk us through how that would work?
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Stefan Sharkansky
Yeah. So there's a formula that's used to calculate the withdrawals. Say you do annual withdrawals, you make the withdrawals each year, and it's an Amortization formula. It's very similar to the formula that is used for calculating your payments on a residential mortgage. It is designed to, in the case of the mortgage, pay back the loan with interest over a fixed period of time in the case of a mortgage with a constant payment every month. So the same formula is applied to your stock portfolio kind of with the assumption that the formula is developed with the assumption that you have a known fixed return on the stock assets over the lifetime that you hold it. And of course, we know that the return isn't going to be fixed, but the formula calculates based on the assumption of a fixed return. And it computes the percentage for every year based on the number of years you have left in your plan. What percentage would you withdraw from your stock portfolio on the simplified assumption that the return is going to be fixed. And that gives you a fixed percentage to work with every year that you calculate from the outset. I create my plan now and I know that 10 years from now I withdraw exactly. I'm just making up a number. I don't have the exact number in front of me. I withdraw exactly 9% of whatever is the value of that portfolio in year 10. So we have these fixed percentages based on that amortization formula. Now, of course, in reality, the returns are going to vary over time. So we'll just take out the 9% that particular year of whatever the value is. So that actual dollar value is unpredictable, but the percentage value is predictable. And so because we're taking out these fixed percentages over time, we know that we can't possibly ever run out of money. But the value that we withdraw in terms of dollar value is going to vary every year based on whatever the market performance has been up to that time.
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Vanguard Announcer
Lots of firms throw a couple flashy funds your way and call it a day. But not Vanguard. Vanguard bonds are institutional quality. Institutional quality isn't a tagline. It's a commitment to your clients. It means top grade products across the board. So if you're looking to give your clients consistent results year in and year out, go see the record for yourself@vanguard.com audio that's vanguard.com audio all investing is subject to risk. Vanguard Marketing Corporation Distributor okay, so the
- [24:08]
Christine Benz
system addresses sequence risk in that way. And that I would be constrained to whatever percentage I've laid out for myself if I happen to hit a sequence of bad returns on that equity portfolio.
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Stefan Sharkansky
That's right, you have a sequence of bad returns. You're just going to take out a smaller dollar value every year. On the other side, if you happen to have a great sequence of returns, you get to spend more or give away more to your family and charity.
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Christine Benz
Right? So you employ historical returns in your analysis. Why do you think they are better than using Monte Carlo simulations?
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Stefan Sharkansky
Yeah, that's a great question. And this was the one aspect of the paper that was most informed by my education as a statistician. When you do a Monte Carlo simulation of market returns or any kind of simulation, it depends on having a, a mathematical model of how the world works that describes the world reasonably well and how market returns behave over time. And if you don't have an accurate model, if your assumptions aren't correct, then what you're simulating the predictions of the simulation will only be so useful. And unfortunately we simply do not have a really good model of how market returns behave over the long term. They don't follow a really clean, well understood process. They're random. But there's also an element of unpredictability in returns that is more unpredictable than a lot of the clean mathematical simulation thinking. And so these assumptions that go into the kind of Monte Carlo assumptions that nearly everybody does is based on certain model assumptions that don't actually map very well to the way markets have actually behaved. I'll use a hardcore statistical term here. We're assuming that returns on stocks and bonds are what's called IID bivariate normal. Some listeners will know what that means, but it's a simplifying assumption that doesn't really explain how markets have actually behaved in the past. And for example, one key thing which I point out in the paper is that stock market returns have long term mean reversion, which means that you have a run up like the dot com bubble and it was followed by a correction, the dot com bust and then the dot com bust was followed by a long run up. Similarly, after the stock market crash of 1929, it was a big crash, but then stocks returned. So stocks always returned to something of a mean level. And that's not captured in any of the Monte Carlo simulation paradigms that I've seen. And it does in fact lead, and I point this out in the paper, it leads to the fact that simulations will provide different results than markets have actually performed in the past. And the specific example I gave in the paper is that the classical model of IID bivariate normal would have assumed that there's more downside risk risk to a 100% stock portfolio than to say a blended 6040 portfolio, when in the historical record the Opposite is actually true. Because of the mean reversion, stocks have had a lower downside risk than this classical modeling paradigm of Monte Carlo simulation would have predict. So that's why I looked at the historical returns to see how markets have actually behaved instead of simulations. And we know that the future is not going to match exactly any conclusion of a simulation. And it's not going to match the historical record, any particular scenario in the historical record exactly. But I believe that looking at the historical record of 150 years, which is the data set that I used, it gives us, I think, a realistic range of the possibilities of how markets might behave in the future. And, and so we can. Unless you're convinced that the future is going to be far worse than anything we've seen in the past 150 years, including two World wars and the Great Depression, et cetera, then the range of what we've seen in the past will be a reasonable guide to the range that you might see in the future.
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Christine Benz
Well, yeah, I wanted to follow up on the mean reversion piece, especially because you do use US equities as the core kind of risk asset and it seems by many accounts the US market is quite expensive today. Sequence risk could be a real consideration for new retirees. So can you talk about that, that perhaps your work has an overly rosy view of how the US market might perform in the future, even over like a 30 year drawdown, given how extended US valuations appear to be today, I
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Stefan Sharkansky
have no view, Rosie or not, about what the US market is going to do in the future. I have absolutely no ide. And the methodology that I describe doesn't depend on any particular view of the market. You take a particular percentage out every year and if the markets do well, you'll get more. If the markets do less, you won't get as much, but you will always get something. And again, unless the future of the market is far worse than anything we've seen over the last 150 years, history provides us with a realistic, a reasonable range of what you might experience.
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Christine Benz
Okay, I wanted to follow up just on US versus Global. Taking just a US Total Stock market index, which is the approach that you would support, versus using some sort of a total global market index. Can you discuss what you see as the pros and cons of US versus being more global?
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Stefan Sharkansky
Yeah, well, first of all, the paper only looks at US returns because that's the data that I had available to me. There's a wonderful free open source data set of US stock and bond returns going back to 1871. It was compiled by Professor Robert Shiller of Yale, Nobel Prize winner. And it's a terrific data set that a lot of people use. So that was an easy way to get data on the US stock market. Unfortunately, there isn't a comparable data set for non US markets. If there were, I would have used that the paper and analyze that as well. So that's why the paper focuses on the US markets. It's strictly a matter of data availability and I think it's entirely reasonable for people who want global diversification to use a global fund. I just don't have the data to give me the historical range of what the returns on that might be. But I just wanted to leave a point that other researchers have looked at international markets. Dimson, March and Staunton, known as dms, their three British academics, they looked at long term historical returns going back to 1900 of US and international and they found that the US market did outperform international markets fairly substantially and without any greater risk. And in today's markets, with the integration of global economies and multinational corporations, the US market returns and the international market returns, they're pretty highly correlated. It's not clear how much diversification it would actually give you and this is my personal belief only, and I wouldn't try to convince people of this necessarily, but I think there are structural differences between the US economy and other countries that our regulatory environment, our degree of innovation that kind of does favor the U.S. there is something of American exceptionalism. But again, it's entirely reasonable to want global diversification. And that's another very reasonable choice for using this methodology is to use a global fund instead of a US only fund.
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Christine Benz
The system that you've developed is meant to address lifetime consumption, so to encourage people to spend what they've managed to save. Can you talk about how one might use this approach if they have a very strong desire to leave a bequest after they're gone? How would it interact with a bequest mode of.
- [33:18]
Stefan Sharkansky
Yeah, absolutely. So the paper contemplates but doesn't go into much detail with the bequest motive. But the website that I developed to help people implement this methodology, it does allow you to specify a bequest motive. You can specify a legacy reserve that would come from the stock portion of your portfolio. If you want to be absolutely certain you're going to leave a particular bequest, then you can also add that to your tips ladder. Make sure that the end of tips ladder has a certain extra amount for your bequest. But typically people will take the bequest from their stock portfolio which has the most opportunity for growth, and you can set a particular dollar amount that should be left in your portfolio at the end of your plan. And so people think of it as a bequest, but it can also be used as an end of life reserve in case you either live much longer than you had, anticipate you'll have a reserve left over for yourself, or if you need end of life care that's expensive, that reserve can serve that purpose as well and with whatever is not spend will go to your estate.
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Christine Benz
Yeah, that's helpful. Kind of a fourth bucket. As I've talked about it, I wanted to talk about whether there are any other additional aspects of retirement planning that fascinate you that seem kind of like unplowed terrain and that we might expect to see you working on in the future.
- [34:47]
Stefan Sharkansky
Right now my focus is on the best third and improving that experience and adding a lot more capabilities to that platform on things like Roth conversions and management of your withdrawals over time and just a richer, more complete user experience. Handle the specific needs of early retirees and the different options that they have SIP plans to enable them to tap their retirement funds earlier than 59 and a half.
- [35:24]
Christine Benz
Yeah, I will say I had fun playing around with the tool. I appreciated the output, it made sense to me. And I also appreciated the attention to the tax character of our household portfolio assets and sort of made recommendations about how we would allocate them. So I thought it was a very cool tool. One question we've been putting to a lot of our guests is who are their go to reads or listens, whether columnists or podcasts? Can you talk about where you go for information?
- [35:52]
Stefan Sharkansky
Oh, absolutely. First of all, you folks at Morningstar, you do terrific work on this subject and I send out a bi weekly newsletter to the users of the best third. And I always include links to other articles and I've linked to several you've written recently, other writers like I mentioned already, Alan Roth, who writes in different places, including sometimes at Morningstar and then from the Wall Street Journal. I also like Ann Tergerson in Jason Zweig.
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Christine Benz
Yeah, they all do an amazing job. Last question for you, Stefan, is you were on Jeopardy. And you actually won quite a nice sounding trip from that experience. Can you talk about.
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Stefan Sharkansky
Yeah, so that was a lot of fun. That was in 1994. And yeah, I before Jeopardy. I studied. I read so many trivia books to just cram my brain. And then when I got to the actual show, none of nothing that I studied was actually helpful and if I
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Christine Benz
had A lot like life, huh?
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Stefan Sharkansky
A lot like life. Yeah. It was such a fun experience though. Alex Trebek was such a gracious and charming, charming host, just like he appeared on on tv. The hardest thing about playing Jeopardy Was getting the clicker. I tried to click and it was just really hard for some reason to get called. But my one regret is not bidding all my money in Final Jeopardy. Had I bet all of my money in Final Jeopardy, I would have tied for first on the cash and go on to play again. But I did come in second and had a wonderful trip to St. Thomas.
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Christine Benz
Amazing. Well, congratulations on that and on this research. Thank you so much for being here with us. Stefan.
- [37:47]
Stefan Sharkansky
Well, thank you very much Christine. I really enjoyed it.
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Christine Benz
Thank you. Thank you for joining us on the Longview. If you could please take a moment to subscribe to and rate the podcast on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, you can follow me on social media, hristinebenz on LinkedIn or christinebenz on X. George Cassidy is our engineer for the podcast. Jessica Bebel produces the show Notes each week and Jennifer Garrett copy edits our transcripts. Finally, we'd love to get your feedback. If you have a comment or or a guest idea, please email us@thelongvieworningstar.com until next time. Thanks for joining us.
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Vanguard Announcer
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