Dtail
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
Uh, not if you think FIREcalc is accurate (which I do).
The 4% rule succeeds in all but the worst 6 starting periods in history.
I believe a 6.5% WR is approximately the average safe withdrawal rate, so if you use a 6.5% WR you're about as likely to succeed as you are to fail.
If you go to FIREcalc and put in a 6.5% withdrawal rate on the first page (using $65,000 as the spending level and $1M as the portfolio level) and leave the rest default, FIREcalc will tell you that you have a 45% success rate:
"Here is how your portfolio would have fared in each of the 120 cycles. The lowest and highest portfolio balance at the end of your retirement was $-4,044,946 to $3,415,537, with an average at the end of $-169,561. (Note: this is looking at all the possible periods; values are in terms of the dollars as of the beginning of the retirement period for each cycle.)
For our purposes, failure means the portfolio was depleted before the end of the 30 years. FIRECalc found that 66 cycles failed, for a success rate of 45.0%."
(emphasis added)
Ah ha, okay the average safe withdrawal rate.