Well I’m 60, owned my own home and retired and I’ve been investing the past 35 years. my life would be pretty scorched earth trying to get by on $40K a year.
You should do some reading on what percentage of your retirement savings can be pulled out annually and the money last 35+ years. For a long time the stands was a 4% withdrawal but many have been questioning that lately.
If we're voting, I second this notion that Carp may have responded without understanding what he was responding to.
Two points;
1. The worst case historical scenario was the topic of discussion. Don't get confused here that that's not of interest to other people in the global investing community. It's the defining case, and
it's been studied to death, and so it's important to understand it. It's actually easy to understand: If you retired in 1966, and had some reasonable combination of stocks and treasuries, you could withdraw 4% a year
adjusting for inflation and the money would last you 30 years. The inflation is the reason that this is the worst case. In that specific case, 50/50 stocks and bonds are pretty much about as good as some other cocktail. The whole experiment has to be simplified.
2. Everybody is a genius in a bull market, always. The actual withdrawal rate could be a lot more than the worst case, but you don't know that ahead of time.
Actually, here's a third point. Safe withdrawal studies with which we're familiar are for US investors primarily in the 20th century. It's a very subjective result, because nothing in the USA got blown up in either of the world wars. There are many years in several countries where there is no safe withdrawal rate from stocks and bonds. You can consider international diversification based on that, but of course recent results have been pretty inferior.
