Monte Carlo survivability + bucket strategy for early retirement. Model how bad first-decade returns interact with your cash / bond / stock buckets and stress-test against 1929, 1966, 2000, and 2008.
Model sequence-of-returns risk on your early retirement portfolio. 1,000-run Monte Carlo survivability, three-bucket cash/bond/stock allocation, and historical stress tests against 1929, 1966, 2000, and 2008 — the real math on when a bad first decade breaks a 30-year plan.
Get access to all premium financial simulators, save up to 10 scenarios per tool, and shareable scenario links.
Starting at $7.99/month · Cancel anytime
The order your returns arrive in matters as much as the average. Retire into a good decade and a 4% withdrawal rate rides out fine; retire into 1966 or 2000 and the same 4% breaks the plan within 20 years even though the long-run average is identical. The math is asymmetric — early losses come out of a portfolio you're also drawing from, so there's nothing left to compound when the recovery arrives. This tool makes that asymmetry visible in dollars and survival percentages.
You split your portfolio into cash (1–2 years of spending), bonds (5–10 years), and stocks (the rest). During market drops you spend from cash and bonds, giving the stock bucket time to recover instead of forcing you to sell into losses. It caps upside slightly in strong markets and lifts survival rates significantly in bad ones — the tool quantifies that trade-off across 1,000 Monte Carlo runs plus the four historical worst cases.
Derived from real history, honestly simplified. The 1929, 1966, 2000, and 2008 windows apply compressed annual real-return sequences for US stocks built from public datasets (Shiller, Damodaran) — enough to show exactly how each sequence punished withdrawals. Bonds use your expected bond return rather than per-year history, and the tool labels the windows as teaching illustrations, not full historical simulations. No black boxes: the limits are stated right on the results.