If you have a disaster, you just draw slightly more than 4% for that year. Ideally you have good and/or lean years, as well, but if you don't you might have to

If you have a disaster, you just draw slightly more than 4% for that year. Ideally you have good and/or lean years, as well, but if you don't you might have to way to modestly supplement your income. Also, it's very unusual for a married couple with kids to have a million dollars in retirement savings and no owned home. There's a lot going for owning a home, but in this toy model there's two main factors: 1) Your "housing cost" (mortgage payments) are fixed in nominal dollars, unlike rent, and unlike the 4% draw, which are both fixed in real dollars (and in places with artificially limited housing supply, rent may unfortunately grow much faster than inflation). So effectively, it shrinks over time. Plus you may finish paying off the mortgage at some point. 2) Tax efficiency. Your house can be viewed as an "income producing asset": it produces the value of the rent you'd pay to someone else to stay in it. But you don't pay any tax on that value. Finally, this model disregards Social Security, which isn't insubstantial. If you're Top 5%, you'd probably be drawing pretty close to the max. So you could redline your withdrawals a little bit beyond 4%, knowing that at 67 or so you could juice your income with the SS payouts.