The Sequence of Returns

Most retirement models now call for people to hold pretty significant amount of equity well into retirement. If you start drawing down in a down market, there's just less in the way of assets left on that account to grow going forward. With that amount of equitye still in your portfolio, it's just very tough for those those portfolios to recover. So this is a kind of a timing issue, and one of the problems with a system that is so reliant on individual saving and investing.