Money, Bills & BenefitsDone with Claude Sep 9, 2026
Run Monte Carlo simulations on a retirement portfolio
Poster used Claude to rebuild their retirement portfolio and test sequence-of-returns risk by inserting past bear markets into growth paths.
- What They Did
- The poster says they rebuilt their retirement portfolio in Claude and had it model a 60:40 allocation over 15 to 20 years, using a 6% baseline path while randomly inserting two or three historical bear markets, then layering in one-time home-improvement costs. In comments, they add that they first mapped a month-by-month budget to stabilize recurring expenses and drawdowns, and that Claude split fixed-income and stock components; the human role was framing the assumptions and considering whether to validate it with a Fidelity advisor.
- How It Went
- The poster says the exercise supported their thesis that projected expenses and income would likely cover 20-plus years. The thread’s main limitation was trust: multiple commenters warned not to rely on Claude’s raw outputs without validating the model or having it produce code or spreadsheet formulas first.
- Worth Knowing
- One commenter pointed to dedicated retirement-planning tools at about $120 per year, but the poster’s own setup included no stated cost or runtime.
Try it yourself with Claude
Build a Monte Carlo simulation of my retirement portfolio: [asset allocation], starting balance [amount], annual withdrawals [amount], over [number] years. Include a sequence-of-returns test that inserts historical bear markets like [2000-2002, 2008] early in the retirement path, and report the success rate and the worst-case balances. Finish with a chart and a plain-English summary of the main risks, saved as files in this folder.
Do this with a skill.
These SkillShop playbooks do this exact job.