Gold is the real U.S. stock market (log scale, left). On the right axis (%): the blue dashed line is the 10-year Treasury yield (what bonds and cash earn) and the red line is inflation. When they're close, bonds barely keep up with rising prices; the early-1980s gap between high yields and falling inflation is what made bonds shine. Drag the purple line to set the year your retirement begins.
Each line is one stock/bond mix, from all-bonds (blue) to all-stocks (gold), through your retirement plotted by age. They all start at the same nest egg and take the same yearly withdrawal. Solid is real market history; a faint dashed tail means those years ran past our data and use average returns. A line hitting the bottom means that mix ran out of money. With "today's dollars" on, balances are shown in retirement-year buying power and the withdrawal rises with inflation — so the early-1980s growth shrinks to its real size.
| Stocks % | Bonds % | Cash % | Lowest balance | Ending balance | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Adjust inputs to see how each mix ended. | |||||
Each row is one stock/bond/cash mix run through the retirement era you picked. "Lowest balance" is the scariest point along the way; "Outcome" flags whether the money lasted to your end age.
What this page is showing
Imagine eleven retirees who all save the exact same nest egg and decide to spend the exact same amount every year. The only thing they do differently is how they split their money between stocks (risky, higher-growth) and bonds and cash (steadier, lower-growth). One holds no stocks at all; the next holds 10%; and so on up to one who's all-in on stocks. Then all eleven retire in the same year and live through the same real market history. The chart is their eleven stories side by side.
Because everything except the stock/bond mix is held identical, any difference you see between the lines is caused by that one choice — interacting with the market they happened to retire into. That's the whole point: there's no allocation that's best in every era, and this lets you see it.
Sequence-of-returns risk
While you're saving, a crash can almost be good news — you're buying shares cheaply, and you have years for them to recover. Once you retire, it flips. Now you're selling a slice of your portfolio every year to live on. If a crash hits in your first few years, you're forced to sell while prices are low, which permanently shrinks the pile that's supposed to recover. Two retirees with identical average returns can end up worlds apart purely because of the order those returns arrived in. This is sequence-of-returns risk, and it's why the year you retire into matters so much.
Why more stocks isn't simply better
Over a long enough stretch, stocks beat bonds — so you might expect the all-stocks line to always win. In retirement it often doesn't. A heavy-stock portfolio that meets a crash in year two or three can fall so far that the yearly withdrawals finish it off before the recovery arrives. A more balanced mix falls less, so it survives the early storm and still has enough left to grow. But lean too conservative and the opposite danger appears: with little growth, steady withdrawals slowly bleed the portfolio dry over a long retirement. The "right" answer lives somewhere in the middle, and exactly where depends on the era — drag the line and watch it move.
Why the worst case matters more than the average
When you're spending from a portfolio, you don't get to experience the "average" outcome — you have to survive the actual path, including its lowest point. That's why the table shows each mix's lowest balance, not just where it ended. A mix that briefly plunges near zero has effectively failed even if the market later roars back, because by then you may have run out of money to withdraw. Planning for retirement is less about chasing the best case and more about making sure the worst case is survivable.
What a withdrawal rate is (and the 4% rule)
A withdrawal rate is the percentage of your savings you spend in your first year of retirement. The famous version is the 4% rule: research found that retirees who took 4% of their nest egg in year one — say $40,000 from $1,000,000 — and adjusted from there rarely ran out over a 30-year retirement. Lower rates like 3.5% are even safer, trading a bit of yearly income for more cushion against a bad market.
Notice the rate is a percent of your portfolio, not your salary. That's why this page first projects how big your nest egg gets, then multiplies by your withdrawal rate to set your income. Drag the market era and you'll see that number move — retire after a strong run and the same 3.5% buys a richer retirement; retire after a weak stretch and it buys less, before a single crash has even hit your withdrawals.
Keeping the mix in balance
Each year's income is funded by selling a slice of every holding in proportion, and then the portfolio is rebalanced back to its target mix on the schedule you choose. This is the standard approach most financial advisers recommend: you hold a steady stock/bond balance rather than letting it drift. Rebalancing quietly works in your favor, too — in a year stocks have fallen, restoring the target means buying stocks while they're cheap; in a year they've surged, it trims them back — so your risk level stays put instead of creeping up as you age.
The same nest egg and the same withdrawal
For a fair fight, all eleven mixes start with the identical nest egg and take the identical dollar withdrawal every year — not a percentage of each one's current balance, but a fixed amount set by your withdrawal rate times the starting nest egg. So if you retire with $1,000,000 at a 3.5% rate, every mix spends $35,000 a year, every year. That isolates allocation as the only difference and makes the lines directly comparable.
Why you "retire into" a year of history
The retirement you care about is in the future, and nobody has the future's returns. So instead of guessing, this page drops your retirement directly on top of real market history and lets you choose which stretch that is. "Retire into 2000" means your withdrawals play out over the actual returns of 2000 onward — dot-com crash, 2008, COVID, and the recoveries between. The real market plays the role of "an uncertain future," because to someone retiring in 2000, all of that was the future.
Set the line late — close to today — and your retirement eventually runs out of real history. Those leftover years are projected at average returns and drawn dashed, so you can see exactly which part is real and which is a smooth guess. The earlier you retire into our data, the more of your retirement is tested against genuine crashes, and the more you can trust what the chart shows.
Why the market chart uses a log scale
A normal chart — a linear scale — spaces equal dollar gaps equally. That sounds fair, but it badly distorts a market that grows over time. The S&P went from about $100 in 1980 to over $5,000 today, so a $200 move looks the same whether it's a crash from $300 to $100 (a brutal 67% loss) or a tiny ripple from $5,000 to $4,800 (a 4% dip). On a linear chart the early decades get squashed into a flat line and only recent swings look dramatic.
A log scale fixes this by giving equal percentage moves equal height. A 20% drop takes up the same vertical space whether the market is at $1,000 or $5,000. Because your portfolio rises and falls in percentages — a 30% crash hurts the same no matter the index level — the log view is the honest one. It's why the 1987, 2000, 2008, and 2020 crashes are all clearly visible on the selector and can be compared at a glance. That's the whole point: you're choosing which era to retire into, so you need to actually see how rough each one was.
Why those crashes look small in hindsight
Look at the market chart and you'll notice something reassuring: the 1987 crash, the dot-com bust, the 2008 financial crisis, and the 2020 COVID drop — each terrifying while it happened — now look like small notches on a line that keeps climbing. That's the reward for a long time horizon. Every one of those crashes was fully recovered, and then some, within a few years. For a young saver, this is the whole argument for holding stocks and not panic-selling: given enough time, declines have always been temporary.
But here's the catch this page is built around. Those crashes only look small if you weren't forced to sell into them. A 25-year-old who rode out 2008 saw their balance recover and grow. A 66-year-old who retired in 2007 and had to sell investments every year to pay the bills locked in those losses — they never got to wait for the rebound. Same crash, opposite outcome. That is sequence-of-returns risk again, and it's exactly why a calm-looking dip on this chart can still sink a retirement that happens to start right on top of it. The chart's reassurance is real for savers and a trap for new retirees.
How bonds and cash are modeled (an important assumption)
Bonds here earn the 10-year Treasury yield as a steady return, and cash earns that yield minus 1.5 points. Crucially, they have no price risk in this model: they always earn their (positive) yield and never lose value. Real bond funds don't work that way — when interest rates rise, existing bonds fall in price, and when rates fall, they gain. So this model leaves out the bumps a real bond holder feels in both directions.
This is why a "0% stocks" mix can sometimes grow even while you withdraw from it. Retire into the early 1980s, when the 10-year yielded 13–14% (you can see it on the blue line of the chart above), and a bond-heavy portfolio earns more than a 7% withdrawal takes out — so the balance climbs. That part is roughly realistic for bonds held to maturity, but remember those sky-high yields came packaged with high inflation, so the real growth was far smaller than the dollar figures suggest.
Inflation and "today's dollars"
Money buys less over time, and over a 30-year retirement that effect is enormous. With "Show in today's dollars" turned on, the page does two things: it raises your withdrawal each year to keep its buying power constant, and it converts every balance back into retirement-year dollars. Turn it off to see raw nominal dollars instead.
This is exactly what tames the early-1980s puzzle. Those 13–14% bond yields came with high inflation, so in nominal dollars a bond-heavy mix looks like it soared, but in today's dollars most of that "growth" is just prices rising — the real picture is far more modest. High yields and high inflation travel together, which is why looking at nominal dollars alone is misleading.
The inflation series used here is the Atlanta Fed's Sticky-Price Core CPI (excluding food and energy). It's a smooth, slow-moving measure, so it understates sharp energy-driven spikes like 1979–80 and 2021–22 — meaning the real figures shown are, if anything, a touch generous in those periods. For retirement years beyond our data, inflation is assumed to continue at 2.5% a year.
What this model doesn't include
The stock series here is the broad U.S. stock market from the Fama/French research data — a total-return series that already includes reinvested dividends. Bond and cash returns ignore price risk, as described just above. There are no taxes or transaction fees. Treat the comparisons between mixes as the lesson, not the absolute dollar amounts. Source: Kenneth R. French Data Library (U.S. market return = Mkt-RF plus RF); bonds and cash use the 10-Year U.S. Treasury yield.
Key takeaway
There is no single "right" amount of stocks for retirement — it's a balance between two opposite dangers. Too aggressive, and a crash early in retirement can sink you. Too cautious, and slow growth lets steady withdrawals drain you over time. The safest mixes are usually somewhere in the middle, and the best choice shifts depending on the market you retire into. Use this page to build intuition, not as a prediction, and talk with a qualified financial planner for real money decisions.