Mini test 004 / Retirement withdrawals / Dividend income
Could Texas Instruments dividends cover a 4% withdrawal?
A post viewed more than 13,000 times says Texas Instruments fell more than 80% after the dot-com peak and took roughly seventeen years to recover. It correctly notes that a retiree whose expenses were fully covered by dividends would not have needed to sell shares. A reply raised a harder example: what if the retiree planned to withdraw 4% of the starting portfolio? We checked whether the dividend was large enough.
Only if the retiree planned to spend less than 0.1% of the portfolio each year.
A hypothetical $1 million invested at the reported 2000 high of $99.78 bought about 10,022 shares. Texas Instruments declared $0.085 per share in annual dividends, producing about $852. A 4% starting withdrawal was $40,000. The dividend therefore covered about two cents of every dollar the retiree planned to spend.
01 / What the retiree still needed
The first-year cash gap was about $39,148.
The dividend income did not remove the need for another source of spending money. The retiree needed cash, bonds, employment income, or share sales to fund the rest. This comparison ignores taxes and trading costs, which makes the dividend look as useful as possible.
Someone could choose to spend only the $852 dividend. But that is a starting spending rate of about 0.085%, not the 4% retirement example raised in the conversation beneath the post.
Avoiding every share sale worked only by making the spending target almost fifty times smaller.
02 / The dividend really did grow
The 2,400% growth claim is approximately right—and still incomplete.
Texas Instruments paid $2.12 per share in dividends during 2017. Compared with $0.085 in 2000, that was an increase of about 2,394%.
If the hypothetical retiree somehow kept all 10,022 shares, the 2017 dividend was about $21,247. That still covered only 53% of the original $40,000 spending target before allowing for seventeen years of inflation.
A large growth percentage can start from an income amount that is far too small to fund retirement.
03 / What this does not prove
This is not a complete withdrawal simulation.
A reply to the post says a retiree who started at the peak and followed the 4% rule would have run out of TXN shares by January 2009. Testing that separate claim requires the exact entry date, withdrawal dates, inflation increases, dividends, and prices at every sale.
This mini test asks a narrower question that the published company figures can answer directly: did the dividend eliminate the need to sell shares? At a 4% starting withdrawal, it did not.
At a 4% starting withdrawal, the cash-flow condition fails before any assumption about the later share-price path is needed.
04 / What to compare instead
Compare dividend dollars with spending dollars.
Before treating a dividend portfolio as self-funding, calculate the income it produces at the starting price and compare that with the actual withdrawal target. A history of dividend growth does not close a large starting gap by itself.
A complete retirement test would then compare the whole portfolio—including diversification, cash or bonds, inflation, taxes, fees, and any share sales—with a simple total-return plan.
Judge the plan by whether all of its cash flows fund the promised spending—not by the dividend growth percentage alone.
The full receipt
What exactly did we check?
The cash-flow calculation
| Hypothetical starting position | Amount | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Portfolio | $1,000,000 | An invented round number—not a real retiree |
| TXN price | $99.78 | Reported 2000 quarterly high |
| Shares | 10,022 | $1 million divided by $99.78 |
| 2000 dividend | $0.085 a share | About $852 from all shares |
| 4% starting spend | $40,000 | Before later inflation increases |
| Cash still needed | $39,148 | From something other than the dividend |
Primary and direct sources
The claim came from this X post. A Texas Instruments filing reports the split-adjusted 2000 high on the company investor site. The 2000 dividend appears in the company's annual-report record at the SEC. Texas Instruments publishes the 2017 total on its dividend history page.
Limits
This mini test uses a quarterly high rather than reconstructing one exact purchase, and it does not reproduce the later daily price path. It ignores inflation, taxes, fees, dividend timing, reinvestment, and every share sale. It does not test a diversified dividend strategy or recommend Texas Instruments.
This is educational research, not personal financial advice.
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