We've summarized several articles from the Journal of Financial Planning on this site.  Their articles on retirement withdrawal rates are extremely important for anyone who does not want to outlive their money.  Here's an article that gives us strategies on "harvesting" (creating a cash flow) from their retirement accounts.

I hope everyone survived tax season.  It can be stressful.

There's some help on that front from a new study published in the April issue of the Journal of Financial Planning. Authors John Spitzer, an economics professor at the State University of New York at Brockport, and Sandeep Singh, a finance professor there, looked at various combinations of retirement portfolios to see which harvesting strategies made the most sense.

Here's what they found:

-- If you take out less than what your investments earn on an after-tax basis every year, it doesn't matter how you withdraw your funds. To be sure of doing that, you'd have to stick with a "safe" withdrawal rate of 4 percent a year. So if you had a $500,000 well-diversified nest egg, you could probably withdraw $20,000 in the first year and 4 percent of what's left each year without running out of money. If you need more than that, say 7.5 percent of your savings in the first year, you'll have to do some juggling to make your money last as long as possible.

-- If your portfolio is split between stocks and bonds, deplete the bonds first. The study found that if you spend the first seven years of your retirement pulling money out of bonds and letting your stocks ride, your money will last three years longer.

There is a bit of a risk here: Most experts say that as you age, it's safer to keep a higher percentage of your portfolio in bonds to guard against stock market losses.

These findings run directly counter to that and suggest that bigger withdrawals require the greater risks of stock investing. In any portfolio that's divided between two assets, "it is clearly better to first take distributions from assets that have a lower expected return rather than a higher one," the authors say.

Here's the summary Reuters article and the original article written by John J. Spitzer and Sandeep Singh from the Journal OF Financial Planning (April 2006).