Planning to your life expectancy is planning for a coin flip — half of people live longer than it. This puts the two curves side by side: how long you're likely to live, and how long the money lasts, and works out the chance they cross in the wrong order.
How likely you are to still be here, against how likely the money is to still be there.
Not the generic 4% — the rate that gives you the odds you want, given your own longevity outlook.
Cash held outside the portfolio so a bad market never forces a sale.
To make the portfolio last to each age, at your current spending.
This is the calculator that answers the actual question most people have, which is simply: am I going to be all right?
If you're told your life expectancy is 87, that means roughly half of people like you live longer than 87. Planning your money to last until then is planning with a coin flip in the middle of it.
This calculator does something more useful: it puts two curves side by side. One is the chance you're still alive at each age. The other is the chance your money is still there. Then it combines them into a single figure — the probability you outlive your savings. That's the number that matters, and it's a different thing from "will my money last 30 years".
Diane has $900,000, spends $65,000 a year, and has $28,000 of pension income — so her portfolio funds $37,000, a shade over 4%.
Her median life expectancy is 89. But there's a one-in-four chance she reaches 95, and a one-in-ten chance she sees 100. If she plans to 89, she's accepting a genuine chance of being 94 and short.
The combined figure comes out around 19% — roughly one in five. That's not a crisis, but it's higher than most people would knowingly accept, and the years at risk are her late eighties and nineties, when going back to work isn't an option. Cutting spending by about $4,000 a year, or covering more of it with guaranteed income, brings it back to around one in ten.
The "4% rule" comes from research on a 30-year horizon and a particular market history. It says nothing about how long you are likely to live, what your fees are, or how much guaranteed income you have.
The rate shown on this page is worked out for your own situation, set so that the chance of outliving your money stays at about one in ten. Notice how steeply the bars climb in that chart — half a percentage point of withdrawal rate moves the failure odds far more than most people expect. That sensitivity cuts both ways, which is why small spending adjustments are such an effective lever.
A portfolio can't hedge longevity, because it doesn't know when to stop. Guaranteed lifetime income can — a pension, a deferred pension, or an annuity keeps paying however long you live, which is exactly the risk you're worried about.
You don't need to cover everything. Covering your essential spending with income that arrives regardless changes the character of the whole plan: markets then affect your holidays rather than your survival. The pension deferral calculator is often the cheapest way to buy more of it.
General information only — not financial advice. The survival curve is a Gompertz approximation calibrated to the outlook you select, not a personal medical estimate; real mortality depends on far more than a dropdown. Portfolio outcomes come from a lognormal return model with independent years. The combined probability multiplies two uncertain models together, so treat it as a rough magnitude — "roughly one in five" rather than "18.4%".