If you are retired and need to live off distributions from your portfolio, this is a particularly challenging time. The rule of thumb advice to just “wait out bad markets” doesn’t work that well when you need money every month from your portfolio. As John Maynard Keynes is credited with saying, “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.” Yes, markets will recover, but will they recover before you run out of money? Let’s look at some prior recovery cycles to get a sense of how long this particular crisis could last.