The 4% rule says you can withdraw 4% of your retirement portfolio in the first year, then adjust that amount for inflation each year, with a reasonable chance it lasts about 30 years. Which basically means that if your annual spending needs are $100,000 today, and you have a $2.5 million portfolio – that is enough to last you 30 years. So quite a few of you have asked me whether the 4% rule actually works if you plan to retire in Singapore. It’s a fair question, because almost everything ever written about safe withdrawal rates is American research, built on American market data, for American retirees. In Singapore, the situation could not be more different. So in this article, I wanted to answer 3 questions:

• Does the 4% rule actually work outside the US?
• What do Singapore’s structural advantages — CPF LIFE, zero capital gains tax, healthcare — actually add?
• What withdrawal rate should a Singapore investor actually plan around?

And I’ll say it upfront —...