Alas, poor 4% rule. I knew it well. The rule was born in 1994, the creation of financial advisor William Bengen, who studied historical market data back to 1926 and asked a simple question: what withdrawal rate would have survived every 30-year retirement period in stock market history? His answer was 4%. His research was … Read more
“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” — Ferris Bueller, 1986 Ferris Bueller understood something that most retirement planners don’t. In this choice movie, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, all of the adults thought Ferris was reckless, and irresponsible. But Ferris understood at seventeen … Read more
The 25x rule gives you a number. But retirement planning has too many variables — Social Security, spending patterns, taxes, healthcare, timeline — for any single multiplier to capture.
Here’s why the retirement question you should be asking isn’t “how much do I need?” but rather: “what’s my probability of success?
