New Delhi, Jan. 20 -- How much can you safely spend from your retirement corpus?

In 2022, I attempted to answer this question by building a retirement simulator based on Indian market data to calculate the safe withdrawal rate (SWR). In subsequent research, I extended these simulations across different asset classes and retirement lengths.

Given the complexity involved, simulations were a natural choice. However, they come with a drawback: they can feel like a black box. While a simulator produces an output, it does not always offer intuition about why a particular withdrawal rate works.

It also makes quick, practical calculations difficult. If a client asks, "What if I retire five years earlier?" or "What if I raise my equity allocati...