@calmmoneycoach: The order your returns arrive in matters more than the average That's how much your first decade decides everything. A bad market at 65 does damage a bad market at 80 never could Michael Kitces' term. **danger zone**, from his October 2016 piece on the portfolio size effect, and his window is the final decade before retirement and the first decade after. Ten and ten, not five and ten. **The clarification, on the 0.79.** That correlation is real and it's Kitces' own, from October 2014. But it's specifically between the real equity returns of your first decade and the **30-year safe withdrawal rate** on a 60/40 portfolio. Not "whether your money lasts," which is looser than what he measured. His verbatim line: the correlation "spikes to a whopping 0.79, with a clear predictive trend." For comparison, full 30-year real returns correlate only 0.43. Your first decade predicts your outcome nearly twice as well as your whole retirement does. The case study is New York Life's, from July 2017, and I checked every figure. 1974 retiree, depleted after 19 years, $2.2 million of lifetime spending. 1975 retiree, lasted 30-plus, funded $3.6 million, left over a million behind. Nearly identical average returns. Wade Pfau's numbers are his own too. A 50/50 portfolio averaged 5.08 percent real, but actual sustainable withdrawals ran from 4 percent for the 1966 retiree to 9.8 percent for the 1982 one. That entire spread is order. All of this is US data. There's no Canadian equivalent study, and I'd rather say that than imply one exists. You can't pick which market you retire into. You can pick how exposed you are when you get there.

Brian | Calm Money Coach

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Tuesday 18 August 2026 08:43:45 GMT