Try To Go Broke

Try to go broke

Put in your numbers, then push them as hard as you like. The page shows where your savings end up and how extreme things have to get before the money runs out. Everything is in today's dollars, so inflation is already taken out.

It opens with an example from the article: Alina, age 50, $2M saved, spending $50k a year. Your numbers are saved only in this browser.

The other way to fail: leaving it unspent

Your savings, year by year

Three futures with the same spending and income, plus the spend-it-all path that lands on $0. The dashed line assumes investments never beat inflation again for the rest of your life.

Move across the chart to read each year.

Each box changes one thing and leaves the rest of your numbers alone. It is the smallest push that empties the account by the end of your plan.

What this model refuses to let you do

The projection assumes you watch the balance fall for decades and never react. In real life you would have every one of these available, and none is counted above.

  • Spend a little less in a bad year. The model spends the full amount every year, even in a crash.
  • Earn anything at all beyond the income you entered: part-time work, a rented room, a side project.
  • Use the value of your home by downsizing, renting part of it, or borrowing against it.
  • Receive an inheritance, share costs with a partner, or move somewhere cheaper.
  • Notice. A falling balance takes years to become a problem, and you would see it coming a long way off.

Landing on exactly $0 leaves no margin for a bad market, so treat the spend-it-all figure as a ceiling that shows the size of the gap, and keep some buffer below it. A down payment and costlier stretches of life go in as rough figures under Big costs. A rough number is fine here: the point is to see how much room there is, and a few thousand dollars either way will not change the answer. For a one-time hit, use the crash slider. Tax is one flat rate on withdrawals, which is a rough stand-in for the real rules. Returns are applied smoothly each year, so use the crash slider to test a bad start. This is a simple calculator for building intuition and is not financial advice. Based on the article Why You'll Probably Never Run Out Of Money.