Imagine two retirees with nearly identical financial plans. Same $1 million portfolio, same

$6040 allocation, same 4% withdrawal rate adjusted for inflation, and the same 30-year retirement.

The only difference is that one of them retired at the end of 1973 and the other retired

at the end of 1975, just two years apart.

Now, fast forward 30 years.

The retiree who entered retirement with $1 million in 1973 finished with only $280,000.

The retiree who started at the end of 1975 finished with nearly $3.4 million. Again, same portfolio, same strategy,

same length of retirement, but two different start dates produced two very different outcomes.

That's the power and the risk of retirement timing. And I know it would be easy to dismiss that

example as an extreme case, a strange

accident of history, or a brutal market period that probably doesn't tell us much about the current

environment. But that's exactly what makes the research I'm sharing with you today so interesting.

A recent paper published by Yorgios Argeiras, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly, who is a quantitative

risk expert with a PhD in mathematics from the University of Illinois, looked at nearly a century

of market history, and asked a question that doesn't get nearly enough attention. How much can your

exact retirement date affect the outcome of your plan? Not whether you retire at 55, 60, or 65,

but whether you retire this year, next year, or two years from now. Because in retirement planning,

we spend a lot of time talking about savings rates, withdrawal strategies, asset allocation, taxes,

and spending. And while all of those things matter, the research suggests

that one of the biggest factors may be something much simpler, the market environment you happen

to retire into. In fact, when he looked across nearly a century of market history, what he found

was that the originally planned retirement date, the date the retiree picked, was rarely the best

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