Saturday chai. Friend. Early retirement question.
Same returns. Same withdrawal. Same average. One sequence retires him at 50 with six crore at 80. The other sends him back to work at 69. The brochure CAGR cannot tell the two apart.
Year 19
Sequence A . bad first three years
Corpus exhausted. Rs 7L per year withdrawal stops at year 19. Eleven retirement years left, zero rupees to fund them.
VS
6.28cr
Sequence B . bad last three years
Same thirty returns, reordered. Same withdrawal. Year 30 ending balance. Multi-generational corpus left over.
Identical investment performance. Identical withdrawal need. Identical average. The only difference is which three years the drawdown lands in. Order moved more rupees than alpha ever did.