Age 55
The fictional household begins retirement at 55 and models the plan through age 95.
SEQUENCE-OF-RETURNS STUDY
The household never changed.The market sequence did—and 65 outcomes ran short.
We held retirement age, spending, Social Security, contributions, allocation, and life expectancy constant. Then Ask Linc replayed the plan across 685 overlapping historical market sequences.
THE PLAN
One retirement plan, tested over and over against different starting markets.
$84,000/year
Annual retirement spending stays fixed in the model rather than changing from one historical test to another.
$1,400,000
The household starts at age 52 with the same investable assets and the same balanced allocation in every test.
$36,000/year
The same Social Security assumption begins at age 67 in every historical sequence.
THE RESULT
Same plan. 620 histories lasted. 65 did not.
620 of 685
The plan lasted through age 95 in 90.5% of the historical windows tested.
65 histories
Nothing about the household changed in those tests. The difference was the order and timing of historical returns and inflation.
4.9%
The first-year portfolio withdrawal is the same at the start of each test; what follows is a different historical market path.
43 years
Each historical path is long enough to cover the full modeled horizon, rather than stopping after a few favorable years.
WHY ORDER MATTERS
An average return can hide the thing retirement withdrawals make dangerous.
A retiree is not simply compounding money. They are also withdrawing from the portfolio. A large decline early in retirement can force more assets to be sold while prices are depressed, leaving less capital available for a later recovery. The same disappointing returns arriving much later can be materially easier for a plan to absorb.
That is why Ask Linc does not judge this plan using one assumed average market return. The engine replays complete historical paths month by month. In this example, that produced both successful and depleted outcomes from the exact same household assumptions.
THE BAD STARTS MATTER
A retirement model should not quietly delete difficult history.
Ask Linc’s retirement engine explicitly preserves historically difficult starts such as 1929, 1937, 1966, and 1973 when constructing full-history tests. Those periods matter because removing early bad sequences can make the same retirement plan look materially safer.
The test set for this example starts in July 1926 and runs through July 1983, using market data through June 2026. Every tested start has enough data to cover the full 43-year modeled horizon.
WHAT THIS PROVES
Sequence risk is not an abstract warning in this plan—it changes the observed outcome.
Path dependency
The same plan produced both surviving and depleted outcomes solely across different historical market paths.
Why stress testing matters
A single expected return would collapse all 685 historical paths into one number and hide the 65 failures.
A future probability
90.5% historical survival is not a 90.5% forecast. The windows overlap and the future can differ from the past.
A universal safe withdrawal rate
This result belongs to this household, horizon, spending level, income timing, and allocation.
Next: see which changes eliminated the 65 historical shortfalls → or browse all Ask Linc research.
START WITH THE DECISION
Stress-test the path, not just the average.
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