If joint household has $660k at the age of 62, can they envision a fairly safe retirement?

That seems to be main focus of scholar Bengen's 4.5% Safe Withdrawal Rate research. It covers edge case scenario for retiree who happen to retire couple of years before worst possible crashes (or inflation) such as one in 1969-1979 or one in 2000-2010 decade. 

If one is lucky enough to escape such scenario, they wouldn't need such $660K kind of retirement portfolio to survive 30 years. They could manage with half million portfolio itself and start with 6% initial withdrawal to meet 30K annual expense.

BTW, scholar Bengen's original 1994 research was based on starting with 4% withdrawal and then adjusting every year with inflation. Later he revised it to 4.5% based on assumption that (a) one invests into Total Stock (which includes small caps too) as compared to original study's S&P 500 and (b) that one's withdrawals are reasonable to the point that most of it is taxed minimally.

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