India, July 4 -- Retirees are in a limbo. Rising inflation in the US, owing to the gloom and doom around oil markets and the skepticism around the A.I. bubble, has made retiring early a hassle.

"You don't do one thing," told William Bernstein, a money manager and author of The Four Pillars of Investing: Lessons for Building a Winning Portfolio, to business magazine Barron's in May. "You do several things."

Earlier in May, Barron's reported that the creator of the 4% withdrawal rule for retirement calculated the worst year to begin a 30-year retirement. The year from William Bengen, a retired financial advisor, wasn't 1929: when stocks crashed by 89%, leading to a period of Great Recession-recently documented by New York Times' star busi...