A couple, both 45, want to retire now on Rs 1.5 lakh a month from a Rs 4 crore corpus. Test a 45-year horizon at a 4.5% initial withdrawal rate, then stress it with a 30% market fall in year one.

On average returns the plan only just lasts, running dry in year 45, and a 30% fall in year one breaks it: the money runs out around age 65. A 4.5% start leaves no margin over 45 years at a 4% real return. Neither a 15% spending cut nor ten years of part-time income repairs the early-crash case alone; together they do. The honest advice is to plan for both before stopping work, or to work a few more years.

Because the horizon is twice a normal retirement. A tank that leaks slowly lasts a weekend trip but not a month on the road. With 10% returns and 6% inflation the real return is about 3.8%, and a withdrawal that starts at 4.5% of the corpus and rises with prices consumes the whole Rs 4 crore in about 44 years even if nothing goes wrong. That base case already fails the brief by a year. Everything after that is about how little room there is.

It hits the corpus when it is largest relative to what is left to spend, and the withdrawals do not pause. After taking Rs 18 lakh and losing 30%, the Rs 4 crore is about Rs 2.67 crore, and the next withdrawal is already Rs 19.1 lakh. This is sequence riskThe risk that poor returns arrive early in a withdrawal phase, when losses compound with withdrawals and cannot be recovered by later good years.: the same average return delivers a different outcome depending on the order, and here it moves the end date from age 89 to about 65. The same fall in year thirty, on a large grown corpus, would barely register.

Test the levers one at a time, then together. Cutting spending 15% for good stretches the early-fall case to 25 years; earning Rs 12 lakh a year, in today's money, from part-time work for the first ten years stretches it to 34; doing both lasts the full 45 years with money left over. The work income matters more than the cut, because it arrives exactly when the corpus is smallest. Another route is simply to keep working: five more years of saving at 50 roughly doubles the corpus and holds even with the fall.

Close with the view you would give them. The plan works only if nothing goes wrong early, so it is not yet a plan to retire on. Before they stop, agree a written rule: if the portfolio falls more than 20% in the first five years, spending drops 15% and one of them takes paid work until it recovers. Hold two years of spending in cash and short debt so the first withdrawals never come from a fallen equity market. State the limits: 10% returns and 6% inflation are assumptions, and a real sequence can be worse than one bad year.