Would your retirement have survived 1929?

Averages lie about retirement: what breaks a plan is not the average return but the order the returns arrive in. This page replays your pot and spending through every complete market window since 1928 — the 1929 crash, the 1937 relapse, the 1966–81 inflation grind, the 1973 oil shock, the 2000s lost decade — each one a full UK simulation with income tax and the State Pension. Watch each history unfold, year by year. Your figures never leave your browser.

Why 1966 scares planners more than 1929

The Great Crash is the famous catastrophe, but a retirement starting in 1929 usually survived: prices fell alongside markets, so withdrawals shrank too, and the recovery — when it came — was ferocious. The start that broke retirements was 1966: returns that looked merely mediocre, ground to dust by fifteen years of inflation that forced withdrawals up while portfolios stood still. It's the window that gave the 4% rule its number — the worst case the rule was reverse-engineered to survive — and the reason any honest test replays inflation, not just returns.

That is what this page does differently from a compound-interest chart: each replayed era carries its own inflation into your spending, your tax bands and your State Pension, through the same simulation the Hundred Summers app's stress test runs. One caveat stated plainly: ninety-six years of history give one draw from reality, not a probability — the app pairs this backtest with thousands of simulated futures for exactly that reason. Related: the sequence-of-returns guide, the personal SWR calculator and the 4% rule guide.