Subject: Re: OT: Fair Value for RSP, QQQE
Jim, wife and I are 83 no kids-no need for any money to be left. How would you invest in annuities,TIPS,RSP,QQQE,BRKB,Other?
Pension and soc sec cover our expenses.

Addressing that kind of question is pretty fraught, as everyone's set of circumstances is unique.

There are two approaches I think are worth considering, in addition to anything else you've considered.

If you're pretty well off, you don't really have to worry much about market gyrations, but it's nice to have a positive return on your portfolio anyway, so you can stay invested.
Put the whole portfolio into some good quality equities.
Each quarter, gather up the dividends received and top that cash up to be a total of (say) 1.2% of the current portfolio value by selling the same fraction of each position you hold.
Repeat for life. The money will last forever provided the investments don't go bust. The payments will be somewhat irregular, but if you've picked good things it will go up a bit in real terms over time.
Depending on your personal stance on equities, the portfolio might be one or more index funds. I lean towards 60/40 Berkshire and QQQE, but that's just me. Pick whatever makes you confident in its longevity, not highest returns.
How much variation in income might you expect? A bad rolling year might be 35% lower in real terms than the highest rolling year in the prior three years.
Assuming the assets you pick generate value at a rate of inflation + 4.8%/year or more, the portfolio and the income will rise indefinitely. But you will never get an income of more than that percentage of the [current value of] portfolio, and you'll never get to spend the capital.

What I do NOT recommend is trying to run down your portfolio, spending the capital gradually. No matter what scheme you choose, that approach always seems to have an unacceptably high chance of going broke. I am particularly annoyed by the popular retirement sites that tacitly assume that what can happen in future is no worse than what's happened in the last 100 years, and frequently also assume that the returns starting from recent high valuations are likely to have the same distribution of outcomes as portfolios starting when things were generally cheap and the broad market was usually paying a 4-6% dividend and real bond yields were high. You can't estimate when you'll die, and you can't estimate when you'll run out of money with a run-down scheme, so you definitely can't make the latter happen just before the former with any amount of spreadsheet calculations and historical data.

The other direction of approaches, which I am often a fan of, is the "two prong" solution I mentioned above. Handle the longevity risk as a separate problem.

The general idea is to divide the the portfolio in two.
Spend the bigger chunk in a straight line over a fixed number of years. Let's say 10 years, till you and your spouse are both 93. Play with the numbers.
Save back a smaller part, perhaps by buying a single 10 year TIPS bond now, to buy an immediate annuity at that future maturity date: eliminate longevity risk.
You'll likely get a very good income at that time relative to the cost of the annuity.

That leaves the question of what to put the bigger part of the money into that you'll be running down.
Not to sound dark, but it's probably not so many years that the rate of return matters very much. You might find TIPS were just fine, and there won't be any down years at all, and they don't go bust. If the numbers work well (a bit if), why work hard and lose sleep?

It's not too hard to figure out about what this would provide you with.
Here's a site that will create a typical TIPS ladder for you, for the bigger part. https://www.tipsladder.com/
Here's a random site that will give you a quote for an immediate annuity if you were (say) age 93 today, without requiring your contact details.
https://www.schwab.com/annuiti...
It's not wildly crazy to guess that the income from an immediate annuity for someone age 93 now will not be so different from the income for an immediate annuity purchased 10 years from now for someone 93 then. This generalization is not true for younger people when the prevailing interest rates dominate, but is much more true for older people where the mortality tables dominate.

Example: Each $100k put into an 10-year TIPS ladder today will currently get you 10 years of an inflation adjusted income of $11040/year.
At that point, buy a single or joint annuity as appropriate with the money that was held back.
For every $100k you need in real funds a decade from now, you'll have to put about $84k into a TIPS position now. You get inflation protection plus a small real yield.
That annuity won't be inflation adjusted after purchase, so plan on getting one that gives you a higher income than your portfolio run-down phase to handle several years of unknown inflation 10+ years from now. Maybe 20-25% higher?
At the moment, an immediate single life annuity for a male age 93 would get you an income for life (not inflation adjusted) of about 26%/year of the purchase cost. As mentioned, ten years from now the rate is pretty likely to be comparable, even if prevailing bond rates are different.

Jim