Retirement Monte Carlo Simulator

How often does a withdrawal rate run out of money? Drag a slider and 100,000 simulated retirements rerun.

Withdrawal rate4.0% ($40,000 a year per $1,000,000)

Years in retirement30 years

Stocks60% stocks, 40% bonds

Results

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Failure rate

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Paths that ran out

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Half of failures by year

Returns are real (inflation-adjusted) and drawn from a normal distribution each year.
Stocks average 8.0% a year, with a standard deviation of 18%.
Bonds average 2.5% a year, with a standard deviation of 8%.
Stock and bond returns have a correlation of 0.1.
The portfolio is rebalanced to your stock share every year.
You withdraw at the start of each year. The withdrawal is a fixed share of the starting balance, held constant after inflation.
No fees or taxes.
The return figures are rounded assumptions, not fitted to data. Model error can move the estimate in either direction.
Every setting uses the same 100,000 market histories, and sampling error is about ±0.2 percentage points.
The starting balance doesn't change the failure rate under this model.
Real markets crash more often than a bell curve predicts; see Catastrophic Financial Risks.
This is an illustration, not financial advice.