Retirement calculator

Shaded bands show where 80% (light) and 50% (dark) of simulated outcomes fall; the line is the median run. Your return sliders are treated as the compound average, so the median tracks the deterministic chart above and the spread shows what market randomness does around it.

Nudges retirement age, Social Security claiming age, spending, expected return, volatility, and longevity one at a time (holding everything else fixed) and re-runs a 250-trial Monte Carlo test for each, to rank which input your success rate is most sensitive to.

Annual portfolio withdrawal

For each year of retirement, the gross portfolio withdrawal this plan actually takes — following your bracket fill withdrawal strategy and RMDs — to fund the spending set in the Spending card (after Social Security and pension income), and what percentage of that year's balance it represents.

Starting from the $1.04M balance at first retirement (65), each row shows the gross amount this plan's simulation actually withdraws under your bracket fill strategy — covering that year's planned spending after taxes, Social Security, and pension income, and never less than the RMD once it applies — then grows what's left at your 3.5% real return in retirement.

Each row uses the pre-tax balance at the start of that year, divided by the IRS Uniform Lifetime Table factor for each spouse's age. The pre-tax balance shown reflects this plan's modeled withdrawals — changing the withdrawal strategy or spending will change how fast pre-tax depletes, and therefore these numbers. Pre-tax spending is the portion of that year's planned spending the portfolio must fund — the right yardstick for whether the RMD matters, since Social Security and pension cover the rest. When the RMD's post-tax value stays at or below it (—), the RMD is irrelevant: the plan withdraws that much anyway. When it exceeds it, Forced excess shows the after-tax cash the RMD pushes out beyond that year's needs — this is the same value shown as "Reinvested in brokerage" in the Annual portfolio withdrawal card's tooltip. All values are in today's (real, inflation-adjusted) dollars.

Sequence of returns risk

Two plans can earn the exact same average return over retirement and still end very differently — it depends on whether the bad years land early, while withdrawals are draining a smaller, newly-retired balance, or late, after years of growth have built a cushion. Each scenario below withdraws following the same bracket fill strategy as the rest of the plan and only changes when a downturn period hits.

All three scenarios start from the $1.04M balance at first retirement (65), split across pre-tax, Roth, and taxable brokerage accounts the same way the Balance at age card does, and withdraw each year following your bracket fill withdrawal strategy. Withdrawals also never fall below the Required Minimum Distribution once it applies — any RMD cash left over after spending is swept into the taxable brokerage account, same as the real plan. The early- and late-downturn scenarios both stress 5 years so the blended portfolio return averages -10.4% (vs. the 4.5% implied by your retirement allocation). During those years, the bonds/cash buffer (40% of the portfolio, earning ~0.88% real) is spent first — so equity (60% of the portfolio) isn't sold at crash prices. Equity returns -18.0% in stress years, calibrated so the blended result hits -10.4%. After each normal year the portfolio rebalances back to the 60/35/5 stocks/bonds/cash target. Normally, withdrawals taken from an already-shrunken balance early in retirement leave less principal to recover later, making an early downturn worse than a late one. With RMDs enforced, a large pre-tax balance also forces bigger required distributions — and bigger tax bills — independent of market timing, which can offset or even reverse that classic pattern. In this plan, the early-downturn scenario ends lower ($0.00M vs. $0.39M). Tip: pick a flexible spending strategy in the Spending card to model cutting back during these downturn years — flexibility is one of the most effective defenses against a bad sequence.