A client who is told their plan has an 83% probability of success still does not know what they can spend, what failure would look like in dollars, or what they would need to change and when. The percentage hides magnitude and hides timing. This page shows what the report puts in its place.
The top of page 1
Under the guardrail rule the engine also reports what it actually delivered across all 10,000 paths — in this run, average real spending of $25,878 in the worst decile, $42,777 at the median and $64,579 in the best decile, against the $40,000 plan. The success rate is still there; it is no longer the headline, and it is labelled as what it measures — here, that rule’s own survival, not the flat-spending case.
Where the guardrail levels come from
They are Guyton-Klinger guardrails, set at ±20% of the initial withdrawal rate, and they are closed-form arithmetic rather than a simulation output. That means they are exact, and a client can check them:
| Quantity | Calculation | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Initial withdrawal rate | $40,000 ÷ $1,000,000 | 4.00% |
| Trim guardrail (portfolio) | $1,000,000 ÷ 1.20 | $833,333 |
| Spending after a trim | $40,000 × 0.90 | $36,000 |
| Raise guardrail (portfolio) | $1,000,000 ÷ 0.80 | $1,250,000 |
| Spending after a raise | $40,000 × 1.10 | $44,000 |
The report also states the rule's own limitation on its face: Guyton-Klinger suppresses the spending cut inside the final 15 years of a plan, so where that applies the trim guardrail is marked as not applicable rather than printed as a level that cannot fire.
Why this beats leading with the percentage
Run four withdrawal rules across the same 10,000 paths — 35 years, 60/40, common random numbers so each faces an identical set of futures — and the percentage turns out to be pricing a behavioural commitment, not forecasting skill:
| Static 4% real | Guardrails, starting at 5% | |
|---|---|---|
| Plan survival | 83.0% | 98.9% |
| Lifetime spending | Baseline | 15% more |
| Typical worst-case real spending cut | None — income never moves | 27% |
| Median real ending balance | $1.16M | 40% smaller |
The guardrail plan starts at a higher rate, spends more, and fails less — because it is allowed to react. The full method and per-rule results are published in the underlying study: guardrails vs. the fixed 4% rule, quantified.
What else the report carries
- A year-by-year, tax-aware withdrawal plan — account by account, with Roth conversions, IRMAA tiers and the ACA cliff priced in across all 51 U.S. tax jurisdictions.
- Named-crisis stress tests: the same plan run into a worst-case first decade, in dollars, beside the base case.
- An assumptions box and limitations paragraph on the client-visible pages.
- For guardrail and VPW plans, a spending-over-time chart on page 2: the 10th to 90th percentile band and median of the spending actually delivered in each year of retirement, by age, against the planned amount — so the client sees when a cut or raise tends to land, not just whether the money lasts.
- A methodology page on every exported report — engine, sampling regime, return sources, inflation model, the withdrawal rule that ran, and limitations — for the planning file. The four-page methodology supplement below documents the six-forecast comparison study.
The sample report is generated by the product itself from the plan shown above — not a mock-up. The forecast-comparison sample is the separate six-forecast deliverable, and the methodology supplement documents both.