Hundred SummersRetiring into a market crash: history's worst starts, replayed through your plan
What if 1929, 1966, 1973, 2000, 2008 or 2022 began the year you retire? Seven historical episodes run through your pot, your spending and the State Pension, each against the same plan with no crash at all. Your figures never leave your browser.
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Worked example
Computed when this page was built by the same engine that runs the calculator above, so the figures below and the live tool can never disagree. Change any input above to see your own.
| Inputs | |
|---|---|
| Retire at | 65 |
| Pot | £500,000 |
| Spending a year (today's money) | £25,000 |
| Growth assumption | 5.0% |
| Include State Pension | Yes |
| Plan to | 95 |
| Results | |
|---|---|
| No crash | Covered to 95, £322,440 left |
| The 1929 crash and the Depression | Runs short at 91 |
| The 1937 slump and the war years | Covered to 95, £288,669 left |
| The great inflation, 1966 to 1982 | Runs short at 90 |
| The 1973 oil shock | Covered to 95, £124,383 left |
| The dot-com crash and the lost decade | Covered to 95, £111,129 left |
| The 2008 financial crisis | Covered to 95, £537,367 left |
| The 2022 inflation shock | Covered to 95, £375,114 left |
The next question
Would my plan have survived every start year since 1928? →Would your retirement have survived 1929?
Or answer it with everything else: the full Hundred Summers plan connects your pay, pensions, savings, property, tax and spending year by year, and stress-tests them across 500 simulated market histories.
Read the guide
- Sequence-of-returns risk, shown with real market history →Two retirees earn the same average return and one runs out of money: why the order of returns dominates retirement outcomes, which historical cohorts it broke, and how to test a plan against it honestly.
Why the first years matter most
Two retirements with the same average return can end very differently. When markets fall early, the money you draw to live on is taken from a shrunken pot, and those units are not there for the recovery. Later falls matter less because the pot has already done much of its work. That is sequence-of-returns risk, and it is why each episode here starts in the year you retire, when a bad run does the most damage.
Inflation can be worse than a crash
The 1966 start is often the hardest, though no single year was a crash: prices rose for sixteen years, your spending rose with them, and returns barely kept up. Each episode replays both returns and inflation, so your spending, the State Pension and the tax bands all follow that era's prices. For every rolling start year since 1928, rather than these seven, use the historical backtest; for a single withdrawal rate, the safe withdrawal rate calculator.
Sources
- Aswath Damodaran, NYU Stern, Historical returns on stocks, bonds and bills (annual US returns since 1928).
- US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index.