SCENARIO SIMULATOR
Portfolio Stress-Test Simulator
Most retirement calculators show what happens if the market behaves perfectly. Yours won't. We run your plan through six real-world stress scenarios so you find out which ones break it before they actually arrive.
Deterministic simulation, not Monte Carlo. Scenarios are calibrated against actual historical periods. Educational only, not financial advice.
Your Plan
Pre-retirement only
In today's dollars, inflation-adjusted
Rest in bonds
Long-run assumption
Why Standard Calculators Lie By Omission
The 4% rule was derived from historical data including the Great Depression and 1970s stagflation. It bakes in some bad scenarios. But it's still a backward-looking average, and "average" is not what your plan has to survive. It has to survive the actual sequence of years that happen to land on top of your retirement.
Six scenarios this tool runs against your inputs:
- Baseline: long-run averages. 10% stocks, 4% bonds, 3% inflation.
- Early Recession: stocks down 25% year 1, down 10% year 2, then 3 years of strong recovery. The 2007-2009 pattern.
- Late-Career Crash: a 30% one-year drop hits 5 years before retirement. Tests whether you have time to rebuild before drawdown begins.
- Stagflation: 6% inflation for 8 straight years. Stocks return 4%, bonds 2%. Real returns turn negative. The 1970s.
- Job Loss: 24 months of zero contributions plus a $50,000 forced withdrawal mid-career. Then normal resume.
- Lost Decade: stocks return 0% real for 10 straight years, then revert to long-run averages. The 2000-2009 pattern.
A plan that survives the baseline but breaks under three stress scenarios is fragile. A plan that survives all six is overbuilt and you might be over-saving. The right answer is somewhere in between: survive most scenarios, fail a few in ways you understand and can compensate for.
Common defenses when scenarios break: lower the withdrawal rate to 3-3.5%, hold a 1-2 year cash buffer for sequence risk, raise stock allocation in early career and lower it near retirement (the bond tent), or build flexibility into the spending plan so you can cut $10k in a recession without breaking the math. Pair this with the sequence-of-returns calculator to focus specifically on retirement-start risk, the retirement projector for full accumulation-plus-drawdown, and the FIRE number calculator for the target balance.