Interactive tool
Saving has a finish line. Spending doesn't, and the question that follows nearly everyone into retirement is whether the balance they've built can carry the life they want. Set your numbers below, then see something most calculators skip: how the order of your returns, not just the average, changes the answer.
Built by Jesse Plunkett, CEPA, CRPC · Last reviewed July 11, 2026 · Verify on 
The illustration runs from this age to 105.
Everything you plan to draw on: IRAs, 401(k)s, brokerage, cash.
What your accounts must cover after Social Security, pensions, and any other income.
A steady rate no portfolio can promise. Try a few and watch how sensitive the answer is.
Your withdrawals rise by this much every year so your lifestyle keeps pace.
Your balance year by year at a steady return
Same average return, three different orders
How the comparison is built: the rough-start and strong-start lines reorder the same set of yearly returns, two sharp down years and the rest lifted so all three lines share one 30-year average. With no withdrawals they end at the same balance. Withdrawals are what break the tie.
This is an educational illustration, not a projection of your accounts, a withdrawal plan, or a recommendation. It uses a constant assumed return that no investment can promise, withdraws a full year of spending at the start of each year, and leaves out taxes and fees, both of which reduce what you keep. The rough-start and strong-start lines reorder hypothetical returns to show how timing affects outcomes; they don't predict any market. Talk with your advisor and tax professional before setting a withdrawal strategy. Everything is calculated in your browser. Nothing you enter is sent or stored unless you choose to send a question.
The average return gets all the attention. In retirement, the order those returns arrive in can shape the outcome just as much. Here's why, and what you can actually do about it.
While you're saving, a bad year early is almost good news: you buy more shares at lower prices and have decades to recover. Once you're withdrawing, the logic flips. A bad year early means you're selling investments at depressed prices to fund your life, and the shares you sell can't recover, because they're gone. Two retirees can earn the identical average return over 30 years and end up years apart in how long their money lasts, purely because of when the bad years landed. Planners call this sequence of returns risk.
The balance is at its largest early in retirement, so a percentage loss then removes the most dollars, right when withdrawals are also taking their bite. The same percentage loss twenty years in hits a smaller balance and has fewer withdrawal years left to compound the damage. That's why the strong-start line above can finish comfortably while the rough-start line runs dry, on identical average returns.
You can't schedule the market's bad years, but you can decide how you respond to them. Retirees who can trim spending 10% or so after a rough year, skip an inflation raise, or delay a large purchase give their portfolio time to recover instead of selling into the decline. A withdrawal plan with a little give in it survives sequences that would break a rigid one.
Every dollar of monthly spending covered by Social Security or a pension is a dollar your portfolio never has to produce in a down year. That's one reason claiming age deserves more thought than it usually gets: a larger guaranteed check permanently lowers the withdrawal rate this page is stress-testing. See how claiming age changes your check with the Social Security timing tool.
Holding a year or two of planned withdrawals in cash or short-term reserves means a bad market year doesn't force you to sell investments at the bottom. It costs some growth in the good years, which is the premium you pay for not locking in losses during the bad ones. How much cushion fits you depends on the rest of your income picture.
This tool treats every dollar the same. The IRS doesn't. A withdrawal from a Traditional IRA is taxed as ordinary income, a Roth withdrawal usually isn't taxed at all, and a taxable brokerage sale falls somewhere in between. The same monthly spending can require noticeably different gross withdrawals depending on which accounts it comes from, and the order you tap them in is a planning decision of its own. Compare how the account types are taxed with the Roth vs. Traditional tool.
Pre-tax accounts come with required minimum distributions starting in your early to mid 70s, whether you need the money or not. If your plan was to spend gently and let the balance ride, RMDs can force out more taxable income than you intended. That's a coordination problem between this page and your tax return, and it's solvable with planning ahead of time.
A 2.5% inflation rate sounds gentle until you compound it: prices roughly double over 28 years at that pace, which is a plausible length for a retirement that starts in your early 60s. The tool builds this in by raising your spending every year. Plans that skip that step tend to look better than they should.
Questions about how this fits your situation? That's exactly what a first call is for.
Ask it here and I'll reply personally. Sending a question doesn't add you to any email list.
How long your money lasts depends on spending, taxes, account order, and what you do in the bad years. A short call is enough to see whether your pieces fit together.
It depends far more on your spending than on any rule of thumb. Drawing $4,000 a month with spending rising 2.5% a year and a steady 6% return, $1 million can carry a 65-year-old into their late 90s. Raise the spending or hit bad markets early and the answer shortens by years. Run your own numbers above.
It's the risk that bad market years arrive early in retirement, while your balance is largest and withdrawals are ongoing. Selling investments at depressed prices to fund spending locks in losses that never get the chance to recover, so two retirees with identical average returns can see very different outcomes.
It's a benchmark, not a plan. The rule came from research testing which starting withdrawal rate survived the worst 30-year stretches in U.S. market history. It assumes rigid inflation-adjusted spending and a fixed portfolio, and most retirements don't look like that. Use it to sanity-check your rate, then plan around your actual life.
No. Every withdrawal here is shown pre-tax, and in practice what you keep depends on which accounts the money comes from. Traditional IRA and 401(k) withdrawals are taxed as ordinary income, Roth withdrawals generally aren't taxed, and brokerage sales are taxed on gains. Your spendable number is smaller than the gross one.
Almost always. Everything is handled virtually, so where you live is rarely a barrier. The only exception is a handful of states where I'm not registered yet, and if that's you, I'll tell you on our first call.
Yes. It's free to link to and free to embed on your own site using the code in the "Cite or embed" section below. Please keep the attribution and disclosure lines in place.
Writers, teachers, and other advisors are welcome to reference this tool or place it on their own page. Both options below keep the calculator with its assumptions, its disclosures, and a link back here, which is what makes it useful to a reader who lands on it somewhere else.
Plunkett, Jesse. “Retirement Withdrawal Calculator.” True Stewards Advisory, https://truestewards.com/retirement-withdrawal-calculator. Accessed [date].
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