The biggest threat to your retirement number - USA TODAY

In coming up with a good estimate for a retirement number, it's crucial to understand how having a bad market in early retirement can have a huge impact on the viability of your entire long-term retirement strategy. By drawing a visible finish line for your retirement savings, a retirement number can be the foundation of your financial planning throughout your career. In coming up with a viable retirement number, the ideal situation is one in which you can weather the worst future conditions the financial markets can throw at you. Yet if you truly want a retirement number that maximizes the probability that your money will outlast you, you can't afford to ignore realistic future scenarios, no matter how improbable they might be. In doing research on the retirement-number... Even when overall average annual returns over the long run are similar, a retiree who suffers poor performance early in retirement has a much harder time preserving his assets than one who's fortunate enough to avoid bad markets until later on.... Source: www.usatoday.com