Drawdown & Safe Withdrawal Simulator — Australia
Accumulation calculators tell you when you can stop. This one tells you whether stopping was a good idea. It runs thousands of randomised market paths against your portfolio and spending plan, then reports how often the money lasted — and what the range of outcomes actually looks like.
The retirement you are testing
Everything here is in today's dollars.
That is a 4.00% starting withdrawal rate.
A 37-year retirement.
How you spend
Spend the same real amount every year regardless of markets. The classic Trinity study assumption, and the harshest test.
Adds an indexed government payment from age 67. Most Australian retirees receive at least a part pension.
Asset mix
Cash is whatever is left: 5%.
Success rate over 37 years
69.1%
Across 4,000 simulated market paths, that is how often the portfolio still had money at age 92. When it failed, the median run ran dry around age 81.
- Starting withdrawal rate
- 4.00%
- Safe spend at 95%
- $35,719
- Implied safe rate
- 2.38%
Save this scenario. Compare plans side by side, track progress, and export the full year-by-year schedule.
See plansRange of outcomes
Every simulated market path, summarised. The dark band holds the middle half of outcomes; the pale band holds 80%.
- Median path
- 25th–75th
- 10th–90th
Where you end up
The spread of final balances across every simulation. The leftmost bar is the share of runs that ran out of money; the last bar collects the top 5%.
- Median ending balance
- $1,122,272
- Poor outcome (10th)
- $0
- Good outcome (90th)
- $8,000,334
In today's dollars
Reading this honestly
What the number does and does not tell you.
A success rate is not a probability of a good life — it is the share of simulated paths where a rigid spending plan never hit zero. Real retirees notice a bad decade and adjust. That is exactly why the guardrails rule scores so much better than the fixed rule on identical assumptions: modest flexibility is worth more than a larger portfolio.
These paths are drawn from a normal distribution around the return and volatility you set. That is a reasonable model, but real markets have fatter tails and returns are not independent from one year to the next. Treat anything above roughly 90% as “the plan is sound, the risk is elsewhere”, and do not over-read the difference between 94% and 97%.
For most Australian retirees the Age Pension acts as a floor that a simulation like this ignores unless you switch it on. Turning it on is usually the single largest change to the success rate — and it is the more realistic assumption.
How this works
What are the odds my money outlasts me?
Sequence of returns is the real risk
Two retirements with identical average returns can end very differently depending on when the bad years arrive. A crash in your first five years forces you to sell more units to fund the same spending, and the portfolio may never recover. That is why an average return is not enough and a distribution of paths is.
Everything is in real terms
Returns, spending and final balances are all inflation-adjusted, so a dollar in year one means the same as a dollar in year forty. This makes the success rate directly comparable to the Trinity study and other published safe-withdrawal research.
Flexibility beats size
Switch the spending rule from fixed to guardrails and watch the success rate move. Being willing to trim spending by ten percent in a bad stretch is usually worth more than several years of extra saving — and it is a far cheaper form of insurance.
What the model assumes
Annual returns are drawn from a normal distribution around the mean and volatility you set, with a correlation between shares and bonds. Real markets have fatter tails and some mean reversion, so treat the exact percentage as an indicator rather than a forecast.
Keep going
Other Australian calculators
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The full projection: earliest retirement age, the bridge years, and whether the money lasts.
Coast FIRE
Find the point where you can stop contributing and let compounding finish the job.
Barista FIRE
Model part-time income covering part of your spending while the portfolio keeps growing.
Lean FIRE
Independence on a deliberately small budget — and an honest test of whether it survives.
Fat FIRE
A no-compromise retirement, where contribution caps and tax become the binding constraint.