The intention of the cash portion in retirement is to avoid Sequence of Returns Risk (SORR).

Correct. But it does not accomplish that.

if you want to start your retirement with no cash buffer because you think the bucket strategy is nonsense, go right ahead. It's your money.

In fact, I did. I retired in 2007, right in the face of a big bear market.

"From my personal experience (having used The Bucket Strategy for the past 4+ years of my retirement in both a bull and bear market environment) it’s a sound strategy for the retiree who wants an easy-to-manage system"

Okay, this is dumb. A 4 year test is too short to be meaningful.

From your link, Karsten had it right: "A diversified portfolio with rebalancing: withdraw from positions that fell less."
He is not the only or the first qualified person who has said this.

Here's the problem in a nutshell:
1) Refilling the cash bucket after you draw from it.
2) In a multi-year bear market, what happens after you've withdrawn the entire cash bucket? Your portfolio is FAR down, much farther down than it was in the first year you tapped the cash bucket. But now you HAVE to sell from your portfolio. Instead of having sold 10% down you now have to sell at 25% down.

There are plenty of proposed answers about refilling the cash bucket. They are all handwaving rules. When you run the rules with real historical data, none of them work. None.

When you tack on all these withdraw and refill rules, it is NOT simple and easy. What *is* simple and easy -- and easy to understand -- is doing the portfolio withdrawal and rebalance. If stocks went down, you sell bonds. You don't do the dreaded "sell stocks when they are down."

Anyway..... a while back I did a simulation using actual data, data is from 1960 to 2015. You can change the parameters for starting year, asset allocation, number of years of withdrawals in cash bucket, and 5 different refill methods.

Feel free to download it and run different numbers to see how it all ACTUALLY worked.

dropbox.com - SPY Withdraw by CashBucket rules

I never bothered to update it to include the data after 2015. The results were so conclusive that it seemed unnecessary. Maybe I'll do that someday.

This discussion belongs in the Retirement Investing Board, not here.

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when combined with the ease of understanding and implementation,

It is to laugh. It doesn't pass the "explain it to your mother" test.
Rebalance & withdraw is easy to explain and understand.
Rules for when and how much to withdraw from the cash bucket, and when and how to refill the cash bucket are not.

Go ahead, write the rules down in a spreadsheet and see how complex it is.