[gull]

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If you got your money in at the end of the 1920s, you were underwater for a long time. I can't seem to find a good s&p500 chart from the 70s, but I think that if you got your money in at the wrong time in 73-74, you were negative for many years. So nobody really asked about withdrawal timelines or talked about averaging or such, which seems like a basic first step to control risk. Definitely won't recommend to the OP to try to time the market.

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If you bought the S&P 500 at the beginning of 1929, right before the Great Depression, it would have taken six years to get positive (although then the market dipped again and it would have taken a 14-year period to get in the positive permanently - by the way, this is the longest decline in the S&P 500 in history).

If you bought at the beginning of 1973, it would have taken less than four years to get positive (and less than six years total to get permanently positive). If you bought at the beginning of 1974, it would have taken less than two years to get positive permanently.