The SafeMax 4% Theory

Bill Bengen graduated from MIT in Boston, with a degree in aeronautics and astronautics so is comfortable with numbers and extrapolating arithmetical conclusions. In 1994 he published his research into the safe percentage that American retirees would have been able to draw from their pensions, by examining returns of the US stock and bond markets over the prior seventy five years.

This is his original study, published in The Journal of Financial Planning in the US, October 1994.