You are not taxed on what you withdraw
The question fits in a sentence: how much can I live on without eating into the capital? The French answer runs into a misunderstanding that costs in both directions: people expect to pay the headline rate, which applies to only part of the withdrawal.
An independent who puts money aside eventually asks the question in its simplest form: how much can my capital pay me each year without melting. The common rule of thumb gives a withdrawal rate of around 4 %. It comes from American studies, and it ignores what, in France, actually decides the amount that lands in the account.
The misunderstanding is this. Withdrawing 24 000 € from a securities account does not trigger 31.4 % tax on 24 000 €. The levy falls only on the gain the withdrawal contains: if half the capital is money paid in and half accumulated gain, only half the withdrawal is taxable. The effective rate on the first withdrawal is therefore far below the headline one, and it climbs over the years, as the capital becomes mostly gain.
Set the capital, the withdrawal rate and the return. The curve is what remains year after year; the figures below are what you actually receive, once tax has taken the gain share alone.
“Games are won by players who focus on the playing field, not by those whose eyes are glued to the scoreboard.”
Flipping the button changes the levy: 31.4 % on a securities account against 24.7 % on life insurance beyond eight years. The gap comes from a 2026 detail: social levies on investment income moved from 17.2 % to 18.6 %, and life insurance did not follow. Over thirty years of withdrawals, those few points are not a nuance.
The embedded model is reduced, and writing that beats letting it be assumed. The rates are exact. The paid-in share is set at two thirds of today’s capital, which is a convention and not your situation. The annual life-insurance allowance, the 150 000 € cap, the erosion of purchasing power and the order in which returns arrive are all absent, and it is precisely that order which decides whether a capital holds: a bad first decade is not made up later.
The curve is therefore a straight line where reality is not. It is there to show a mechanism, not to set an amount. This is a scoping tool, not investment advice.