In all of your examples, you’re ignoring dividends and fixed income returns on bonds that were purchased before ZIRP. If you bought a 10-year Note in 2000, you would have earned ~6.5%. Someone who was retiring in 2000 should have had a healthy bond portfolio with a fairly large mix of long-term and short-term Treasuries in addition to municipal bonds and some GSEs, etc. If they were overweight bonds in 2000 — which they should have been if they were retiring — they should easily have earned 5-7% over the past 12 years.
In hindsight treasuries where a good deal from 1995-2000. The 30 year was 6-8%. Today, not so much, 2.5%. Inflation will be harsh at the end of the 30 year term. And comparitively, the Dow is up somewhere between 10% and 250% depending on when in 1990-2000 you would have bought.
