Retire Plan Report

Section 1

Your plan on one page

Retire at 65 with $985K, spend $74K a year, and history gives a 90% success rate.

Your savings when you retire at 65

$985K

In 2026 dollars, if markets return what you assumed. That is about $1.57M in 2045 dollars. In history the median case had $1.13M.

What you can spend

$74K a year

After tax, in 2026 dollars, about $6K a month. It rises with prices every year.

Balance at the end of the plan

$1.23M

The median case's savings at the end of the plan, age 95, in 2026 dollars. Half the cases ended with more.

The hardest case

Ran out at 83

The plan started in 1956 ran out of money at age 83.

Section 2

Your plan and your assumptions

19 more years of work, then 30 years in retirement, to age 95.

One word about returns. A return after inflation is what your money grows by once rising prices are taken out. A 5.0% return after inflation, with 2.5% inflation, is about 7.6% a year on your statement. Only the expected path uses these returns. The historical analysis uses the real market returns of each year since 1871, and the future simulation draws from them.

Section 3

Your plan in pictures

Even the 10th percentile case retires with $557K, in 2026 dollars.

Section 4

Year by year, in future dollars

You put away $441K over 19 years of work, then take out $3.02M in retirement, in future dollars.

Section 5

What this report leaves out

12 things this plan does not count. Read them before you rely on the numbers.

Health care

No health insurance, doctor bills or drug costs, and no cover before Medicare at 65. No health savings account (HSA). Budget for these inside your spending.

Medicare premiums

Medicare Part B and D premiums, and the higher premiums (IRMAA) charged on higher incomes, are not taken out.

Long-term care

No nursing home, assisted living or care at home.

Your home

Housing is part of your spending. A mortgage that ends is not modeled, so spending stays the same after it is paid off. No home equity or downsizing.

Some taxes

No alternative minimum tax (AMT), no city or county income tax, standard deduction only (no itemizing), and some state rules are simplified. Every dividend in the taxable account is taxed as a qualified dividend, and its bond interest is taxed by your state too.

Moves you can make

No Roth conversions, no annuities, and no 457(b), 403(b) catch-up, 529 or inherited-account rules. An inherited IRA is treated as your own. 72(t) equal payments are counted only if you turned them on, and never stopped early.

One household, the whole way

A couple is modeled as both living to the end of the plan, filing jointly. No survivor years, no widow’s tax brackets, and each account is one household account.

Whole-year steps

Ages, raises, retirement and claiming Social Security happen a whole year at a time. Money moves in and out at least monthly within each year.

Social Security as given

The benefit is paid in full as shown. No cut to the program is assumed, and a gap in pay does not lower it.

Flat spending

Spending holds steady after inflation. No big one-off costs such as a car, a wedding or help for family, and no change in spending with age.

Fees

Fund fees and advice fees are not taken off returns. If you pay 1% a year, your returns are 1% lower than shown.

The past as a guide

History here is United States stocks and Treasury bonds since 1871. The future can be worse than any case in it.

Section 6

What if things change

Spending $73K a year would bring the success rate to 95%.

Under each number, in small type: the other results of the same runs. Savings at retirement follow the expected path; the balance at the end of the plan is the median case. A replayed market is one stretch of real history, so it runs on history alone. Money is in 2026 dollars.

Section 7

Your own what-if

What if: The lost decade replayed from 65, your retirement. The success rate goes from 90% to 71%.

You built this what-if in the What-if tab. The report runs it beside your plan through the same 107 cases of history and 1,000 random futures, under the same rules. Each case is paired with itself, the same year of history under both plans, so a difference between them is the change, not the market. Money is in 2026 dollars.

The what-if replays 2000–2009 at ages 65 to 74, with the stock and bond returns and the inflation of those years, in every case and every Monte Carlo run.

Side by side

Green and red mark the direction that is better for the number, not a verdict on the plan. Money is in 2026 dollars.

Section 8

Words used in this report

Every term the report uses, 25 in all, each one explained.

Case

Your plan started in one year of real market history. The case that started in 1966 lives through the markets and prices of 1966 onward.

Never ran out

A case where the money lasted to the end of the plan, paying your full spending every year.

Years paid in full

For a plan that draws a percentage: the share of retired years, across every case, that paid at least your target.

Random futures (Monte Carlo)

Made-up futures built by drawing years at random from history. A way to test orders of good and bad years that never happened.

Median

Half the cases did better than the median case and half did worse. The median is not an average of them.

Percentile

The 10th percentile is the case that did better than one in ten; the 90th did better than nine in ten.

Expected path

One smooth future where markets return exactly what you assumed every year. Useful for tables, but real markets are never this smooth.

Today’s dollars

Money measured by what it buys in the report’s dollar year. Also called real dollars.

Future dollars

The number you will actually see on a statement in that year. Also called nominal dollars. Higher than today’s dollars because prices rise.

Inflation

The yearly rise in prices. At 2.5% a year, prices roughly double in 28 years.

Return after inflation

How much your money grows once rising prices are taken out. Also called a real return.

401K

A retirement account through your job. Money goes in from your pay, often with a match from your employer.

IRA

An individual retirement account you open yourself.

Pre-tax (traditional)

Money that went in before income tax. You pay the tax when you take it out.

Roth

Money that went in after tax. It comes out tax-free once the rules are met.

Taxable account

An ordinary investment account. You pay tax on the gains when you sell.

Employer match

What your employer adds to your 401K when you put money in.

Required minimum distribution (RMD)

The least the IRS makes you take out of pre-tax accounts each year from age 73 or 75. Money you do not spend goes back into the taxable account.

Early withdrawal penalty

An extra 10% tax on money taken from a 401K or IRA before age 59 and a half.

Rule of 55

Leave your job in or after the year you turn 55 and you can take money from that job’s 401K without the 10% penalty.

Social Security

The federal retirement benefit. Claiming at 62 pays less each month; waiting to 70 pays more.

Payroll tax

Social Security and Medicare tax taken from pay while you work.

Capital gains

The growth on an investment you sell for more than you paid. Taxed at 0%, 15% or 20% depending on your income.

Withdrawal rate

The share of your savings you take out in a year.

Stocks and bonds

Stocks grow more over time and fall harder in bad years. Bonds grow less and fall less. The split is how much of your savings sits in each.

Section 9

How the numbers are checked

Nothing on these pages is typed in by hand.

Retire Plan works out every number from your inputs and from published data.

• Market history is Robert Shiller's monthly series, 1871 to 2025: United States stocks with dividends, 10-year Treasury bonds and inflation. Each year's dividend yield and 10-year Treasury yield also set that year's tax on the taxable account's dividends and interest. The script that builds it is published with the planner.
• Tax brackets, contribution limits and required minimum distributions follow the 2026 IRS figures, carried forward with inflation.
• The engine is tested against the planner it replaced, line by line, and against the well-known studies of the 4% rule: at 4%, 30 years and 75% stocks since 1926, about 98.6% of cases last.
• Sample households are worked out by hand and checked against it.

Every check and the sums done by hand are at retire-plan.app/accuracy/.