Will my portfolio survive a bad sequence of returns?
The Portfolio Stress Test Calculator.

A Survived verdict means your money lasted through the test. A low burn rate can carry a risky allocation across the finish line, even after a stomach-wrenching drawdown. Read two numbers before you relax.

Your burn rate. Divide the yearly withdrawal you entered by your starting portfolio. Above 7%, your spending is putting heavy stress on your money before the market gets a vote. Below 7%, look harder at your allocation. A lower burn rate gives a bad allocation more room to survive.

Your lowest value. This shows how deep the hole got before the turn. A 20% to 30% drawdown is where I have watched real clients hit their breaking point, puke, sell at the bottom and vow never to return. Most missed the recovery. Surviving a 30% drawdown on paper does not mean you could hold the line in real life.

Inflation hides the real damage. Inflation can make the hole much deeper than the dollar balance shows. In the 1973 run that survives in the example below, the dollar value fell only 4%, but its purchasing power was down 28% by 1981. Surviving on paper and being resilient in real life are two very different results.

Each year your portfolio earns what stocks, bonds, gold and cash actually returned in that calendar year, rebalanced back to your allocation. Then your withdrawal comes out, grown by that year's actual inflation if you left indexing on. That repeats, in order, from your start year until the money hits zero or the test length runs out. Nothing is averaged and no return is assumed. One limit to hold onto: the tool sees only December 31 values, so a hole that bottomed in March reads shallower on your chart than it felt at the time.

Most planning tools answer real life with a Monte Carlo simulation: thousands of shuffled possible paths and a probability, something like an 87% chance of success. That is a valid method, and most of the big-firm calculators in my retirement calculator comparison work that way. I built this one differently because I wanted you to live through specific moments, black and white. Doing what you're doing today, would you have survived 1973? 2008? It's like time traveling. An 87% tells you nothing about the 13%, and the 13% is the decade that ends a retirement.

Bonds here means 10-year US Treasury bonds and cash means 3-month Treasury bills, the plainest version of each. Before 1971 the government set the price of gold, so read the gold column in the early decades with that in mind.

Most people I've met hold stocks and bonds and believe the bonds are their protection. Some years that is true. When inflation is elevated and sticky, or elevated and rising, stocks and bonds start moving together, and your diversifiers become your amplifiers.

Three crises, the same stocks-and-bonds belief, three different verdicts, straight from the tool's own data:

In 2008 your bonds did exactly what the brochure promised. In 2022 they fell right beside your stocks. In 1973 and 1974 they made a little money while inflation took 22% off what every dollar could buy, and the asset that carried the decade was the one almost nobody owned. No single asset is the answer every time. That is why you run more than one decade.

History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes, and each of these decades exposes a unique weakness you need to be able to deal with. Here is the same retiree through all four: $1,000,000, $4,000 a month growing with inflation, 60% stocks, 30% bonds, 10% cash, a 30-year test.

Two rows say Survived. Read the 2000 row again. A run that lasts only because the data runs out, with a fifth of its buying power left, is a fail wearing a pass. And the 2008 run, the gentle one, ended its first year down 20.6%. That is a December 31 reading. The S&P 500 fell 56.8% from its October 2007 peak to its March 2009 bottom, and a 60/40 portfolio bottomed about 30% down in February 2009, past the line where clients say uncle.

Even with gold pegged by the government back then, 1929 is still a rehearsal worth running. That kind of relentless pressure is unlikely today, I think, with the Fed and the backstops that now exist. Walk your portfolio through it anyway, year by year, because nobody withstands that without an exit strategy. You have to know where the lifeboat is when you're getting on the cruise ship.

As I write this in 2026, I see a little of the 1970s in play, a little of dot-com, and a little of the railroad mania from the late 1800s. Everything rhymes, but it's not the same. That is my read, and it is why you run all four.

Run 1. Start year 1973. $1,000,000, $4,000 a month growing with inflation, 60% stocks, 30% bonds, 10% cash. The portfolio loses 6.8% in the first year and 14.2% in the second, and by the end of 1974 it is down to $706,800 with the withdrawals rising every year. It never truly recovers, because every withdrawal comes out of a smaller pile while prices push the withdrawals higher. The money runs out in 2000, twenty-eight years in, with two years of retirement unfunded.

Run 2. Same money, same spending, same 60% in stocks. The only change: move 20 points from bonds into gold, so the allocation is 60% stocks, 10% bonds, 20% gold, 10% cash. The verdict flips to Survived all 30 years. The Lowest value card sits 4.3% under the start, and the portfolio ends the 30 years worth slightly more in today's dollars than it began. In today's dollars it was still 28% under water by 1981. You would have needed the stomach.

Gold did the job in that decade. The same 20% sleeve dragged through the 1980s and 1990s, and in the 2000 run it still lost more than half its buying power by 2022. Gold is one answer to one decade. A portfolio that was correct for the 1970s is not the correct portfolio in the 1990s, and it's not the correct portfolio today. You have to adjust your sail for which way the wind is blowing.

Now do it with yours. Change one thing and run it again. Add gold to your 1973 run and watch the verdict move. Move cash around in 1929. Lower the withdrawal and rerun. One scenario is one decade, and the learning starts on your second run, because you stop reading about diversification and start watching which asset actually did the job in each environment.

Picking tops and bottoms, trading ahead of every 10% dip, buying a hot stock here and selling it there: that is market timing, almost nobody does it well, and I do not do it. The handful of firms that genuinely can are not selling you their system.

But it's not always a good time to wear shorts. Seasons are real. I am talking about the handful of times in an investing lifetime when a hurricane is just over the horizon and you need to batten down the hatches. Arrive at one of those unprepared and it's going to set you back a decade of savings. Across 1973 and 1974 the S&P 500 fell 36.5%, and after inflation the real loss was 48%. A retiree withdrawing through that hole has no paycheck left to refill it.

A stress test is a rehearsal, not a forecast. Surviving 1973 on this page proves nothing about the next decade. What if this time goes down sixty percent instead of fifty-six percent? What the test gives you is a plan made before the pressure arrives.

Reading the weather as it changes is a different job, and it is the one I spent my career on. In 2008 I was managing about $100 million. I saw things I did not like as far back as 2006, and in the spring of 2008 my model told me to protect my clients' portfolios. We sat in a lot of cash that year. Those portfolios finished 2008 down 2.18% after fees, in a year the S&P 500 fell 36.6%. The hard part was staying out. Every violent rally in 2008 and early 2009 looked like the bottom, and none of them were. Trust the research you did, let the system do its job, and it brings you back in when the time is right.

If you do this yourself, you have two paths. Sit down, reverse-engineer a lot of financial history, and build the process on your own. Or get help. The average adviser structures your portfolio just like everybody else's portfolio, without taking into account the environment we're sitting in right now. Either way, somebody gets paid for portfolio protection, in your time or your money.

Inside Gold+, the Refined FI Risk Monitor checks multiple market-risk inputs daily and combines them into one of three instructions: Stay the Course, Reduce Risk, or Add Risk. Most days require no change.

When the guidance changes, you get an email and text alert. One tells you when to reduce risk. Another tells you when the storm clouds are dissipating and it is time to reallocate for growth. You know where the lifeboat is before you board, and you have a rule for getting back in.

The Risk Monitor will not identify every market top, prevent every loss, or trade your accounts. It can reduce risk before a decline that never arrives, which may mean missing some upside.

If your run fell more than 25%, Gold+ is where the exit strategy for your portfolio lives.

1. Run your real numbers through 1973, then 2000, 2008 and 1929. Leave inflation indexing on.
2. Read two numbers on each run: your burn rate and your lowest value. If your burn rate is above 7%, you have too much stress on your portfolio. If your portfolio fell more than 25%, you are unlikely to stick with your plan.
3. If your test fails, change one thing and rerun until it holds. Notice which asset made the difference. That asset is telling you what job your portfolio has unfilled during that environment.
4. Write down your exit strategy in two sentences: what would make you reduce risk, and what would bring you back. If you cannot finish both, start with how to know when to reduce risk.