Sustainable Withdrawal Rates During Retirement and the Risks of Financial Ruin

This paper describes the application of two different techniques for measuring sustainable withdrawal rates during retirement and the associated risks in running out of funds in the retirement savings pool. The first is a bootstrap simulation approach using recent Australian equity and bond market data. The second is a simulation-free analytical approach proposed in Milevsky and Robinson (2005). To illustrate, we compute and compare the probabilities of financial ruin for a retiree with a thirty year retirement horizon for some commonly recommended periodic withdrawal rates