The Retirement Stress Test
How long your money lasts, and how much of your life it pays for.
The problem this exists to solve
Every retirement calculator I have used gives you a single number. Enter your expenses, your age, an assumed rate of return, and out comes a figure. Six crores. Four crores. Whatever it is, it arrives with an air of authority, and most people write it down and start working towards it.
That number is usually a coin flip wearing a suit.
It is a coin flip because it assumes one fixed rate of return every year for thirty or forty years, when real markets arrive in an order and the order matters enormously. Retiring into a bad decade is a different problem from retiring into a good one, even when the average is identical. A single-rate calculator cannot see that difference, so it hands you the average outcome and lets you assume it is the safe one.
There is a second problem, and it took me longer to notice.
Even calculators that account for market swings usually stop at one question: does the money run out. That sounds like the right question until you look at what a surviving portfolio can actually look like. A corpus can last thirty years by cutting your spending to the bone and keeping it there. No travel. No restaurants. Nothing beyond essentials, year after year. Technically the money lasted. The retirement did not.
When I tested one set of numbers properly, the result came back ninety percent likely to survive. The same simulation showed that in those surviving runs, the person spent thirty-seven percent of what they had planned. For twenty years.
The money lasted. The life did not happen.
That gap is what this tool exists to show you.
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Sneha Rege writes about money, behaviour, and the decisions in between.
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