FAQ

RetireRange is a browser-based Monte Carlo retirement planning simulator — the kind of model a financial planner might build for you, but yours to drive. You enter your household, your accounts, and your assumptions, and it plays your plan forward through thousands of randomized market futures. Instead of a single number, you get the full range of outcomes: your probability of success, and everything from a bad-luck to a good-luck result.

From there the real work begins. You can save named strategies and compare them head-to-head against the same market sequences, so any difference in outcome reflects the strategy rather than luck. You can hand the optimizer a decision — when to claim Social Security, how much to withdraw, when to convert to Roth — and let it search for the value that holds up best. And you can model the things simpler tools skip: Roth conversions, RMDs, the health-insurance gap before Medicare, and what happens financially when one spouse outlives the other. Everything runs in your web browser, with no bank connections and nothing to install.

Anyone thinking seriously about retirement — whether it’s decades away or already underway. People nearing retirement get the most out of the features built around real decisions (Social Security timing, the Medicare gap, Roth conversions), but you don’t have to be close to retirement to use it: a careful saver in their 30s can test how much to put away, and a current retiree can stress-test a plan already underway.

The basics of your household: birth dates, target retirement dates, your Social Security benefit estimates (the figures on your Social Security Administration (SSA) statement, available free at ssa.gov), your investment accounts and balances, and roughly what you expect to spend. You can start with estimates and refine as you go.

About 15 minutes for a first run if you have your account balances and SSA statement to hand. You don’t need everything to be exact — start with estimates, see the shape of the answer, then sharpen the numbers that turn out to matter.

No. RetireRange never links to your financial accounts. You enter the numbers you choose to enter — nothing is pulled automatically.

Because the order your investment returns arrive in matters as much as their average. A market downturn early in retirement does damage that the same downturn later wouldn’t. Running thousands of randomized sequences captures that risk — a single projection can’t. It’s the same approach professional planners use to model retirement risk.

The share of those simulated futures in which your plan lasted through the end without running out of money. A 90% success rate means your plan survived in 9 out of 10 simulated futures. It’s a measure of resilience, not a guarantee.

Yes — this is the heart of RetireRange. Save named strategies (say, "claim at 67" vs. "claim at 70") and the engine runs them against the same market sequences. Any difference in outcome reflects the strategy, not luck.

You hand it a decision — a claiming age, a withdrawal rate, even when to move states — and it automatically searches the range of options to find the value that maximizes your success rate, instead of you testing them one at a time.

Yes — Social Security timing and survivor benefits, Roth conversion schedules, Required Minimum Distributions, a pre-Medicare health-insurance bridge plus Medicare premiums, and what happens financially when one spouse outlives the other.

Test it directly. Your Social Security estimates are inputs you control, so to model a leaner future, just lower them and re-run. Two common stress tests: set your benefits to $0 to see whether the plan stands entirely on its own, or trim them to about 75–80% of your SSA statement — the range the program’s own trustees project could still be payable from ongoing payroll taxes if the trust fund reserves run down in the mid-2030s and nothing changes.

If your plan still clears your success-rate bar with reduced or zero Social Security, you’re robust to that risk. If it doesn’t, you’ve measured exactly how much you’re leaning on it — and you can plan around it: save more, work a little longer, spend a bit less, or delay your own claim to lock in a larger, inflation-protected benefit. Either way you’re deciding with numbers instead of worry.

Yes — all 50 states plus DC, including states with no income tax. You can also model a planned move to another state and see the tax effect.

Yes. Alongside the simulated futures, the historical backtest replays your exact strategy through every start year from 1928 to 2025 — so you can see how it would have fared retiring into 1966 or 2000, not just into a randomized market.

It won’t predict the future, and it deliberately leaves some things out — capital-gains rates, the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT), the Net Investment Income Tax (NIIT), estate tax, and long-term-care insurance among them. The limitations are documented openly rather than buried, so you can judge how much weight any result deserves.

No. RetireRange is an educational planning tool. It models possibilities based on the assumptions you provide; it doesn’t tell you what to do, and it isn’t a substitute for personalized advice from a qualified professional.

It’s a model, and modeling is a judgment call — not a prediction. The results are only as good as the assumptions you feed it, and no simulation can know the future. That’s the whole point of showing a range and a probability rather than a single confident number. And it’s upfront about its own simplifications and limitations — they’re documented openly, not buried, so you can weigh how much any result is worth.

That’s exactly the idea. RetireRange isn’t a replacement for an advisor — it’s the prep work that makes that conversation better. It even produces a methodology document you can hand your planner so they can see precisely how the model works.

Yes. There are no bank connections, and we don’t sell your data. The one time anything leaves is if you choose to generate an AI summary, which sends an anonymized snapshot of that scenario — never your name or identifying details. See the privacy page for full detail.

Only if you let them. Your optimizer results are private to your account. The one way another person can open them is if you share the "View full results" link from the completion email — and that link expires 30 days after it’s sent and can be revoked at any time with the Disable link button on the results page. Your own access from inside the planner (Optimizer tab → job history) is separate and keeps working either way.

An optional one-click feature that turns your results into a plain-language read — where your plan looks strong, where the risks are, and what to explore next — written by Anthropic’s Claude. It’s built for understanding, not advice, and never makes recommendations.

$20/month, or $200/year (two months free). One plan, every feature included — no tiers or add-ons.

Whichever suits you; the product is identical either way. Monthly is $20 and maximum flexibility. Annual is $200 — two months free, working out to about $16.67/month. Both start with the same free 30-day trial, so you can decide after you’ve used it rather than before.

Yes — every plan starts with a free 30-day trial. Explore everything, with no charge until the trial ends. Cancel before then and you pay nothing.

That’s what the free trial is for — 30 days to explore, with no charge unless you continue. After that, cancel anytime and your access runs through the end of the period you’ve already paid for. We don’t trap anyone in a subscription they’re not happy with.

Yes. Cancel whenever you like; your access continues through the end of the billing period you’ve already paid for.

Yes. Every subscriber gets a personal referral link on their account page. When a friend subscribes through it, you and your friend each earn account credit toward your subscriptions. Full rules are on the referral page.

You and your friend each get a credit worth half of their first payment — $10 each if they start monthly, $100 each if they go annual. There’s no limit on how many people you can refer, and credits don’t expire while your subscription stays active. Each credit posts as soon as your friend’s first payment goes through, at the end of their free trial.

There’s no cap on how much you can earn — only on how fast it’s applied: at most half of any single renewal ($10 off a monthly bill, $100 off an annual one). That’s deliberate. Rather than one free month and then back to full price, your credits stretch out — refer five monthly friends and you get about five months at half price; ten, about ten months.