Your retirement
A bucket-strategy retiree (spending cash first, growth last). Change anything; all of history re-runs instantly.
Spin the wheel: every start year since 1928
Each cell is a complete retirement. Click one to read how it went.
That retirement, year by year
Shaded bands are real drawdowns — the market below its prior peak. The dashed line is where you started.
Year-by-year table — show your work
How the math works
What runs under the hood
This is the bucket simulator's engine pointed at real history instead of assumptions: S&P 500 total returns, 3-month T-bill rates, and CPI, 1928–2025 (NYU Stern / Damodaran data). Your spending starts at the amount you set and rises with each year's actual inflation — retirees in 1974 got an 11% cost-of-living raise whether they liked it or not. Each bucket earns its growth share of that year's S&P total return and the rest at that year's T-bill rate — 15% growth in Bucket 1, 50% in Bucket 2, 85% in the reservoir, the bucket simulator's defaults. "In a drawdown" is observable, not assumed: the total-return index sits below its prior peak. While it does, nothing is refilled: Bucket 1 drains, then Bucket 2, then the reservoir. Afterwards no more than the year's spending plus one catch-up year is sold from the reservoir each year until the buffer is back — rules a real retiree could actually follow.
What the colors mean
Red: the money ran out before your plan-to age. Amber: it survived, but finished below your starting balance in nominal dollars — decades of spending consumed most of it. Green: it survived with the starting balance intact or better. All figures are nominal; a 1928 dollar and a 2025 dollar are very different things, which is why the story panel talks about depletion and drawdowns rather than comparing ending balances across eras.
Why the same plan lives or dies
Sequence-of-returns risk, made concrete. Thirty-year returns since 1928 run from 8.0% to 13.6% a year depending on the start year — a wide range, and sequence matters even more than the average: retiring into a decade that opens with a crash plus inflation (1966, 1929, 1973) means selling assets at depressed prices to fund withdrawals that inflation is raising, and the portfolio never recovers its footing. Retiring into 1982 means the opposite. Same behavior, same spending discipline, wildly different endings. The buffer you set above is the knob that buys time through the bad openings; watch how the red years respond to it.
What this tool is not
Not a prediction — 98 years of history is one draw from the universe of possible futures, and includes nothing worse than the Great Depression, nor anything better than the postwar boom. No taxes (the withdrawal-order and marginal-rate tools carry that side of the story), no fees, no Social Security or pensions offsetting withdrawals, annual granularity only, and no behavior changes mid-retirement — this retiree never cuts spending, which real people do. The point is the spread of outcomes, not any single cell.