Every plan is a choice against the plan you didn’t pick.
Retire this year or next, draw more or less, wait for a bigger stack. Set both plans side by side and read what the difference actually buys.
Editing
Set Plan A to your base case — the plan you actually hold or intend — then make Plan B the variation you’re weighing: retire a year later, draw a different income, arrive with a bigger stack. Both run under the same shared assumptions, with the Power Law as the growth engine.
Plan A
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Plan B
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Both plans—
The crash always hits both plans, so the comparison stays about the choice, not the luck. It lands in the first year of each plan’s own retirement, using the Retirement Stress Test’s crash definition — — — not a second one. The question it answers: does your option’s advantage grow or shrink when the market turns hostile?
Growth path, inflation and horizon are shared
They cannot be set per column — if one plan could carry a friendlier world, every row below would be a model comparison rather than a plan comparison. The flagship holds the bands, the 60/40 foil and the gap-persists variant this page leaves out.
Both plans, one axis
What each plan is worth, year by year
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The difference
Row by row
Where the two plans differ
A · Plan A
B · Plan B
Δ
Every figure is a projection under the Power Law growth model — a description of bitcoin’s historical trend, not a promise about its future. The model and its limits sit one click away, and its implied growth rate declines with time, which is why the same one-year difference does not buy the same thing at every retirement date.
The arithmetic
Verify the math
Reproduce any row: Starting BTC − BTC sold = BTC left; price × BTC left = stack value; income ÷ price = BTC sold. Same projection that draws everything above, one table per plan.
Stress-test the winner →Carries Plan A. Crash depth, timing and recovery, varied properly — the question this page cannot answer.Size one plan first →Carries Plan A into the threshold view, if you want to know how far a single plan is from crossing before you weigh two.
The other side of this
A comparison is only as honest as the world both plans share. Everything above assumes returns arrive in trend order — smoothly, on schedule, every year — and real markets do not deliver an average annually. The bear toggle puts one crash in both plans, which answers whether an advantage survives a hostile market; it does not tell you whether the plan itself survives, because it varies nothing. That is the Retirement Stress Test’s job, and it is the next question after this one.
The deeper caution is the model. Under the Power Law the trend growth rate declines with time, so the value of retiring one year later is not a constant — it is worth more at some dates than others, and a difference that looks decisive at one retirement year can shrink to noise at another. Move both plans out a decade and read the table again before you treat any margin here as settled.
Common questions
What does Compare Retirement Plans do?
It runs two complete retirement plans side by side and states the difference between them in plain sentences. Each plan carries its own stack at retirement, retirement year and annual withdrawal; both are projected under the same growth model, the same inflation assumption and the same horizon, so every difference in the outcome traces back to a choice you made.
Why can’t I give each plan a different growth assumption?
Because it would quietly break the comparison. If one column could carry a friendlier world than the other, every verdict row would become a model-vs-model claim rather than a plan-vs-plan one, and a plan could “win” because it was handed better luck rather than because it was a better choice. Assumptions are shared on purpose. The one environment control on the page — the bear-market toggle — applies to both plans identically for the same reason.
What does the bear-market toggle do?
It drops the Retirement Stress Test’s crash into both plans at once, at each plan’s own retirement year, using that page’s own crash definition rather than a second one. The question it answers is decision-relevant and specific to comparing: does the advantage you are weighing grow or shrink when the market turns hostile? It is not a substitute for the Stress Test itself, which varies crash depth, timing and recovery.
How is this different from the comparison panel on the retirement calculator?
That panel takes one plan and applies canned relative nudges to it — variants derived from a base. This page has no base and no variant: both columns are independently configured plans, and either can be anything you like. Use the panel to feel the terrain around a plan you have; use this page when you are choosing between two plans you are actually weighing.
Can I share a comparison?
Yes. Both plans and the bear toggle are written into the address bar as you edit, so copying the URL carries the exact comparison you are looking at. The reset link strips every parameter and returns both columns to their defaults.
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