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DIY Investor

Sequence risk explorer

simulator

What if I retire into a bad decade?

Runs your withdrawal plan from every historical starting year since 1928, so you see the spread rather than one average.

Your retirement plan

That is a 4.00% initial withdrawal rate.

30 years
60%
0.20%

Drag this up and watch the success rate fall.

1966

The same plan, started in every year from 1928

69 overlapping 30-year retirements.

Start years the money lasted
99%
Worst start year
1966
Best start year
1982
Median ending balance
$1,532,495
Worst 10% ended with
$436,650

Outcome by the year you retired

Same portfolio, same withdrawal, same plan. Only the starting date changes.

$0$2.0M$4.0M194019601980
  • Money lasted (68 start years)
  • Ran out (1 start years)
Each column is one retirement start year, showing what was left at the end in today's money.

Retiring in 1966 versus 1982

Two retirees, one plan, opposite outcomes — from the order the returns arrived.

$0$2.0M$4.0M$6.0MYr 0Yr 5Yr 10Yr 15Yr 20Yr 25Yr 30Retired 1966Retired 1982
  • Retired 1966
  • Retired 1982
Both in today's money. The difference is not skill, and it is not the average return.

Periods worth looking at

About this data

S&P 500 annual total return, dividends reinvested, 10-year us treasury constant-maturity annual total return, and us cpi-u, december to december, 1928-2025. Stored to 0.01 of a percentage point, which moves 98 years of compounding by under 0.001%. US-only by design. The US was the strongest major equity market of the last century, so these returns are an optimistic base case, not a neutral one.

Why this matters

While you are contributing, the order of returns is almost irrelevant — multiplication commutes, and a crash early in your career is arguably good news because your ongoing contributions buy more units at lower prices.

Withdrawal reverses this completely. Selling to fund spending from a portfolio that has just fallen 30% means liquidating far more units for the same income, and those units are not there for the recovery. Two retirees with identical average returns can end up in completely different positions.

Notice also what moves the success rate. Raising the fee slider by one percentage point usually does more damage than a fifteen-point change in the equity share. And the single most effective response — retaining the ability to cut spending after a bad year — is one this rigid-withdrawal model cannot represent at all, which means the real failure rate for a flexible retiree is lower than what you see here.