The Sustainability of (Global) Withdrawal Strategies

The most important financial issue retirees have to deal with is whether their strategy will be able to sustain all the withdrawals they expect to make in retirement, as well as a bequest they aim to leave. For this reason, it is critical to periodically monitor the evolution of a financial plan in order to detect early signs of trouble, which may lead a retiree to introduce dynamic adjustments to a strategy. To that purpose, this article features two tools, a sustainability test and the sustainable withdrawal, and shows how to apply them. It also discusses the empirical evidence on both tools based on a comprehensive sample of 22 countries over a 120-year period