Retire in the Wrong Decade and It Won’t Matter How Much You Saved
Two people can save the same amount, follow the same advice, and end up in completely different retirements.
Because they happened to retire into different years. That is the problem this article is about, and nobody gets to choose their years. So in 2004 we went looking for something that would hold up whichever years you were handed, and have been refining it with clients ever since.
Now the part the scoreboard does not show.
In all seven stretches, in every single year of them, none of your original money was ever exposed to a falling market. Not one dollar.
Beating the market is interesting. Beating it while your money was never actually in it is a different thing entirely. How that works is below. It took twenty-one years to get right, and it has several moving parts that only work because of each other. One of those parts you have very likely been pitched already — not just badly, but partially: sold on its own, as a finished product, by somebody who did not know the difference between a component and a plan.
Historical, hypothetical illustration. Assumptions, limitations, costs, risks and disclosures are set out in full on the linked record.
Historical, hypothetical illustration. Every figure below is drawn from the software we use to manage this strategy; the seven eras year by year, the contracts used, every charge and the full disclosures are on the full record.
If you are inside ten years of retiring, or newly retired, this article is written for you. Everything in the panel above comes out of the software we use to run client cases, and the rest of this page is how we got there — what the problem actually is, why the usual answers cannot fix it, and what we have been doing about it with clients for twenty-one years.
Start With the Problem the Panel Is Answering
Two people save the same amount. Same discipline, same advice, same funds. One retires in 1998. One retires in 2010.
Two people saved the same amount and followed the same advice. One retired in 1998, one in 2010. One of them ran out of money. The difference was which years landed at the start of their retirement — and nobody gets a vote on that.
The difference was not skill and it was not effort.
Here is why the timing matters so much more than it should. While you are still working, a falling market is buying you shares at a discount. Every contribution goes further. The arithmetic is on your side.
While you are working, a falling market buys you shares cheaply. In retirement you are selling to pay bills, and shares sold in a downturn never come back. The arithmetic reverses on a date you pick once and cannot undo.
Now you are selling to pay bills. Sell shares in a down market and those shares are gone. They do not come back when the market recovers, because you no longer own them.
Take two brothers with identical money, identical investments and an identical average return over twenty years. The only difference is the order: one gets his bad years at the start of retirement, the other at the end. The one who got them first can be out of money by eighty-two. His brother dies with a healthy account.
The industry has a name for it — sequence of returns risk. It has had the name for thirty years.
Why the Usual Answers Do Not Solve It
Ask how to protect against a bad sequence and you will hear three things: diversify, stay the course, move into bonds as you get older.
Your advisor is very likely doing exactly what he or she was trained to do, and doing it well. The problem is not the person.
Diversify, stay the course, move into bonds. All three describe how you should behave. None of them can contractually prevent a loss, because a portfolio cannot promise anything.
Diversification is a probability. Staying the course is a behaviour. Bonds are a loan whose price falls when rates rise — in 2022 the mainstream bond index fell 13.01% in the same year stocks fell 19.4%, and both halves broke at once.
Notice what all three have in common. Every one is a suggestion about how you should behave while the money does whatever the market tells it to.
So We Went Looking for Something Else
Write down what it would actually have to do. Pay you something in a year the index rises. Pay you nothing — not a loss, nothing — in a year the index falls. And do both in a contract, rather than as a strategy somebody promises to run well on your behalf.
That third requirement rules out a portfolio, because a portfolio cannot promise anything. What it describes is an insurance contract, and the one that does it is a fixed indexed annuity.
If you have met that term before, you have almost certainly met it as a pitch: buy this, hold it, done.
What would work is a contract that pays you when the index rises and pays you nothing rather than a loss when it falls, in writing. That is a fixed indexed annuity — and owning one is not a plan, any more than owning a hammer is a house.
Most of them are not good ones. An independent screen ranked 375 eligible crediting methods by what they actually returned over the ten years to March 2025. Four produced a double-digit return. The fifth managed 9.09%. The sixth dropped to 7.46%. By the fiftieth the figure was 5.34% — and 325 contracts finished below the fiftieth.
Those were all the same ten years, all with the same floor. The only variable was which contract you happened to own — worth more than seven percentage points a year between the top of the list and the middle of it.
Of 375 crediting methods screened over ten years, four reached double digits and 325 finished below 5.34% a year. The floor is standard equipment; the crediting architecture is what separates them. Picking wrong costs you a decade you do not get back.
Nothing here is an argument for owning a fixed indexed annuity on its own. The argument is about what you do with it: how many you run and in what order, how long each is held before it is rebuilt, what it is rebuilt into, and — the part almost nobody uses — the roughly ten percent most of these contracts let you withdraw each year without charge. Take it every year on purpose and move it into a second growing account, and two balances compound instead of one. In a crash year, the money you moved came off a balance that did not fall.
Destination Trax™ is the sequence, not the product. Own the right contract, move its penalty-free withdrawal into a second growing contract every year, and rebuild both every three to five years — so each new bonus is paid on everything you have grown. The underlying strategy has been used with clients since 2004 and refined continuously since.
Twenty-one years of dialling in went into the sequencing, and it is the part that cannot be bought off a shelf.
What It Actually Changes
One thing worth being clear about. The sequence is not new and it is not theoretical: the underlying strategy has been used with clients since 2004 and refined continuously since, and the software that runs it has been managing live cases for fifteen years. What follows is something different — the same software pointed backwards, asking how the sequence would have held up in markets none of us lived through.
We ran the strategy against a straight S&P 500 position across seven completely different market eras — real year-by-year returns, real surrender charges, nothing averaged.
Across seven market eras since 1950 — real returns, real surrender charges — it finished ahead in five. But the record is not the point. Destination Trax™ returned between 5.40% and 7.09% a year; the market, between (−4.2%) and 9.6%. One of those you can plan a retirement around.
The market handed one investor a gain of 9.6% a year and another a loss of (−4.2%) a year. Same index, same discipline, same advice. Which one you would have been depends entirely on which era lined up with your working life.
And across all seven eras, in every single year, none of your principal was ever exposed to a falling index. Zero is not luck. It is what a 0% floor means, and it held in the two eras the strategy lost.
Where It Loses, and What It Costs
Two of the seven went the other way, and both were bull markets: 2010–2019, where the index compounded at 9.56% against our 7.06%, and the forty-year stretch that contains it. A cap cannot keep pace with a raging bull, and anyone who tells you otherwise is not being straight with you.
It loses to a bull market — 9.56% against our 7.06% in 2010–2019 — and costs an average of 1.46 points of compound return a year in surrender charges, recapture and fees. We lost that race. We lost it standing off the track.
Across the 1998–2022 illustration that is what took a gross 7.92% down to the 6.46% in the record. For scale, we charge the index 1.50% a year in every comparison we publish. The full ledger, to the dollar, is on the full record.
Ending values are one test. The one that matters more is what happens when a retiree is actually drawing income, so we ran that too: two retirees, $250,000 each, $12,500 a year for twenty years, the same twenty years of returns in opposite order.
The retiree who got the bad years first ran out of money in 2016. The one who got the same years in the opposite order finished with $155,515. Run through Destination Trax™, the same two sequences ended at $421,503 and $451,085 — about seven percent apart, instead of the difference between solvent and broke. The full working is on the full record.
Destination Trax™ is not designed to beat a raging bull market. It is designed to stop your retirement depending on whether you happen to get one.
You Cannot Choose Your Years. You Can Choose Whether Your Plan Depends on Them.
Bring the number you actually have. We will run it through the worst market of the last seventy-five years and the best — the wins and the losses on the same page.
Prefer to check the arithmetic first? The full record has all seven eras year by year, the contracts and caps used, every charge, and the complete disclosures.
Destination Trax™ content v51 · 24 August 2026 · figures generated from DX Illustrator v73, market data through 2025.