When it comes to anything as inherently complicated as retirement planning, its hard to underestimate the appeal of a strategy that offers simple answers. Save precisely $1 million. Or exactly 10 times your annual salary. Those goals may not be easy to hit, but they are at least easy to wrap your head around. Then, on the other side of that coin is the question of how much of your hard-saved nest egg you can afford to spend each year once you do retire. You don’t want to be too cautious, and live like a pauper when you could afford some luxury, nor to burn through it too rapidly, and wind up broke and struggling to get by on just your Social Security.

Into the haze around this question dropped noted financial advisor William Bengen, who in 1994 did a comprehensive study of decades of market data. His conclusion was that even in periods that included the worst stock market performances of the century, a 4% withdrawal rate would still allow retirees to stay solvent for at least 33 years. The 4% Rule was born. Unfortunately, like so many other things from the 1990s -- AOL, jeans shorts, baggy pants, and an awful lot of sitcoms -- this guideline has aged badly. To explain why, Motley Fool Answers hosts Alison Southwick and Robert Brokamp have a special guest -- personal finance writer Maurie Backman. In this segment of the "retirement myths”-focused episode, she reveals just what has changed in the world of investing that makes Bengen’s rule more of a risk than it used to be.
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