Retirement Guide

The target pot follows the spending it must cover, so the only useful starting point is a realistic annual budget in retirement: housing, healthcare, food, transport and the discretionary layer you actually want.

Withdrawal-rate rules of thumb are a sanity check, not a plan. They assume a portfolio mix, a time horizon and a tolerance for cutting spending in bad years — change any of those and the safe rate changes with it.

For most employees the order is: capture the full employer match, clear high-interest debt, then fill tax-advantaged space — an HSA if eligible, then IRA or 401(k) depending on plan quality and current versus expected future tax rate.

Roth contributions cost tax now and pay out tax-free; traditional contributions do the reverse. When your current marginal rate is high, traditional usually wins; when it is unusually low, Roth usually does.

Contribution limits for 401(k) plans and IRAs, plus catch-up amounts, are set annually by the IRS through inflation adjustments. We never freeze those values in copy — the calculators read the limit for the tax year being modelled.

An account is a wrapper, not an investment. Inside it, the two decisions that matter most are the stock-bond split and the fee you pay to hold it. A percentage point of annual cost compounds against you exactly as returns compound for you.

Glide paths matter near the end: sequence-of-returns risk means a bad market in the first years of withdrawals hurts far more than the same market twenty years earlier.

Claiming early permanently reduces the monthly benefit; delaying past full retirement age increases it up to age 70. The break-even age is the point where the delayed, larger benefit overtakes the total collected by claiming early.

Longevity, marital status and whether you are still working all shift the decision, so model it rather than following a default.

Tax-deferred accounts eventually force distributions: required minimum distributions begin at the statutory age and are taxed as ordinary income. Roth accounts have no lifetime RMD for the original owner.

The years between retiring and starting RMDs are often the widest planning window there is — a period of low taxable income where partial Roth conversions can be modelled.

Retiring before Medicare eligibility means bridging coverage privately, and marketplace premiums vary sharply by county. Our county profiles carry marketplace and cost data so the bridge years can be priced rather than guessed.

Early retirement changes the maths in two ways: a longer drawdown horizon, and a gap before tax-advantaged accounts and Social Security are accessible without penalty. Both are modellable, and both are ignored by generic projections.