When can you retire?

"Can I retire?" is often reduced to a single question: Is my portfolio large enough? While this captures whether your savings have enough income potential, it does not tell you how much of your future lifestyle is already protected from market risk. This planner evaluates both your portfolio's income capacity and the amount of income that has already been secured, providing a more complete measure of retirement readiness.

Retirement readiness

In this planner, portfolio values are simulated across thousands of market scenarios designed to reflect historical patterns of investment returns. Retirement readiness is evaluated at every point in every simulated market scenario.

Retirement occurs at the first age where both readiness conditions are satisfied:

• Income Capacity ≥ your desired annual income (real dollars), and
• Security Ratio (SR) ≥ your Target Security Ratio (SR₀)

Income Capacity alone answers whether you have accumulated enough wealth. The Security Ratio answers how much of that future income is already protected from market risk. Together, they distinguish being wealthy enough to retire from being financially prepared to retire.

Retirement goals

You set a Retirement Goal, which is a combination of your desired retirement income (in annual real dollars), your Target Security Ratio, and your ideal retirement age. The solver runs your portfolio through a series of simulations, finds the earliest age at which retirement readiness is achieved, and produces a distribution of retirement ages.

Because retirement readiness depends on investment performance, different market scenarios produce different retirement ages. Strong returns allow earlier retirement, while prolonged weak markets may delay retirement until the readiness conditions are satisfied.

Metrics you will see

• Mean retirement age — average retirement age across all scenarios.
• Median estimated retirement age — the typical retirement age across all scenarios.
• Success rate — the percentage of scenarios in which the retirement readiness conditions are satisfied by your desired retirement age. This measures whether your retirement goals appear realistic given your savings, contributions, and risk preferences.

Scenarios that never satisfy the readiness conditions before the plan end age are treated as retiring at the plan end age for percentile calculations—a sign that your retirement goals may be difficult to achieve.

Social Security and readiness

When Social Security is enabled, the planner estimates future benefits under different claiming ages and determines the claiming age that best supports your retirement objectives. All claimed benefits count toward guaranteed income.

Because Social Security contributes to guaranteed lifetime income, enabling these benefits will often improve retirement readiness. In many cases, this allows earlier retirement or higher retirement income, since less personal wealth must be converted into guaranteed income to satisfy the readiness conditions.

Next: Social Security in the model if you use the SS toggle — or Reading your results to interpret the output.