How Long Will Your Money Last in Retirement?

How long your money lasts in retirement depends on four things: how much you have, how much you withdraw each year, the return your portfolio earns, and inflation. As a rough guide, withdrawing 4% of a portfolio a year has historically lasted about 30 years — but your own runway depends on your specific numbers.

There is no single answer that fits everyone, because the same pot of money can last a decade or forever depending on how hard you draw on it and how markets behave. The honest way to think about it is not as a fixed lifespan but as a balance: as long as your portfolio earns at least as much as you withdraw, in real terms, it can in principle last indefinitely. The danger comes when withdrawals plus inflation outpace returns.

The four drivers

Four levers decide how long your savings hold out. Portfolio size is your starting capital — the bigger the pot relative to your spending, the more cushion you have. Withdrawal rate is the percentage you take each year, and it is the lever you control most directly. Returns are what the remaining balance earns, which depends on your asset mix and on markets you cannot control. Inflation quietly raises the amount you must withdraw over time, so a sum that covers your costs today will fall short in twenty years unless your withdrawals grow with prices.

Worked example. A $1,000,000 portfolio with $40,000 annual withdrawals (4%) earning ~5% after inflation can last roughly three decades. Raise withdrawals to $60,000 (6%) and the runway shortens sharply. The lesson is that small changes to the withdrawal rate have an outsized effect: spending an extra two percentage points a year does not just cost more, it draws down the very capital that would have compounded to fund later years.

Sequence-of-returns risk

A run of poor returns early in retirement is far more damaging than the same returns later, because you are withdrawing from a shrinking balance. Two retirees can earn the identical average return over thirty years yet end up worlds apart simply because one met a bad market in year one and the other met it in year twenty. The early loss is permanent: money sold to fund spending in a downturn never recovers when the market rebounds.

This is why retirees often hold a cash buffer and stay flexible on spending in down years. A year or two of living expenses in cash means you can pause selling shares while prices are depressed, letting the portfolio heal. Trimming discretionary spending during a market slump — rather than withdrawing a fixed sum regardless of conditions — is one of the most powerful ways to stretch how long money lasts, and it costs nothing but discipline.

Putting a number on your own runway

Because the four drivers interact, the only reliable way to see how long your money will last is to model your own figures rather than rely on a rule of thumb. Plug in your portfolio size, your real (after-inflation) spending, a sensible return assumption and an inflation rate, and you will see the runway shift as you change each input. If the topic is new to you, the 4% rule is the standard starting point — it links a sustainable withdrawal rate to the size of pot you need.

For most people the practical goal is not to make the money last for a known number of years but to make it last for life with a comfortable margin, which usually means a slightly lower withdrawal rate and a willingness to flex spending. To estimate your own numbers — including a semi-retirement scenario where part-time income reduces the draw on your portfolio — work through the Barista FIRE calculator, which lets you test how earnings, savings and withdrawals change your timeline.

Written by

Federico Romaldi

Co-Founder, Worthmap

Published: June 6, 2026

Federico is a co-founder of Worthmap, a wealth-intelligence platform built for serious investors. With a background in software engineering and a long-standing passion for value investing, he created Worthmap to bridge the gap between net-worth tracking and investment analysis.