Post #790 by Mark on the Retirement Investing board

Personal Finance Topics / Retirement Investing

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The key is the sequence of returns. Assuming spending is roughly constant + inflation, a bad sequence of returns early in the retirement period can lead to a busted portfolio.

This is indeed the key! If you look at the safe withdrawal studies, you will see that while overall returns over the period is important, the sequence of those returns is even more important. That's why, when a 60/40 30-year safe withdrawal results in about 4%, the ones that fail at 4.1% (anything over about 4%) are the two periods beginning in 1928/29 ("The Great Depression") and beginning in 1966/67 ("The Great Stagflation"). The reason those periods fail is because their early years had a terrible sequence of returns.

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