Traditional retirement calculators lie to you
Most retirement calculators — including those from DBS, OCBC, Standard Chartered, and major banks — assume your investments will grow at a fixed rate every year. They show you one smooth line going up. That's not how markets work.
In reality, markets crash, recover, stagnate, and surge unpredictably. A retiree who faces a bear market in their first two years of retirement has a fundamentally different outcome than one who gets the same average return but in a different order. This is called sequence of returns risk — and traditional calculators completely ignore it.
Traditional calculators promise one smooth line. Reality is the wide cone of uncertainty Monte Carlo reveals.
Monte Carlo simulation runs your plan through thousands of possible market scenarios and tells you the probability of your money lasting. Instead of "you'll be fine," you get "you have a 73% chance of not running out of money." That's a number you can actually make decisions with.
