What If I Delay Retirement?
Working a little longer is one of the most powerful levers in retirement planning — and often the most underestimated. A couple of extra years does three good things at once: more saving, fewer years of drawdown, and a shorter bridge to Medicare. This recipe shows you exactly how much those years buy.
New here? Build a baseline plan first with Getting Started. (This is the optimistic mirror of retiring early.)
The quick version
- Push each person’s retirement date later (keep contributions going).
- Save it as a named strategy — "Retire 2 years later."
- Run Comparison against your baseline — see how much your success rate improves per extra year.
Step by step
1. Build the delayed version. On the Household tab, move each person’s retirement date later. Make sure contributions continue through the new date so the extra saving is captured.
2. Save it as a named strategy (the Strategies button) — "Retire 2 years later." Save a one-year and a two-year version too, if you want the whole trade-off curve.
3. Run Comparison. On the Compare tab, Compare against baseline is on by default, so your baseline anchors the chart; add your delay strategies alongside (up to four) to see the trade-off in one view — the jump from the first extra year is often bigger than you’d expect. Load Baseline (⤺) returns you to your plan.
What to look at
- Success Rate — usually rises, often sharply. Delaying compresses the drawdown and stretches the saving, and the effect compounds.
- Worst-case (P10) outcomes — extra years are especially good at lifting the unlucky scenarios, because you lean on the portfolio for less time.
- Your Social Security benefit — more working years can raise your actual benefit (the opposite of the early-retirement caveat), and delaying the claim itself adds more. See Social Security.
- A shorter health-insurance bridge — fewer years of paying your own premiums before Medicare. See Health insurance bridge.
Finding the sweet spot
Delaying has diminishing returns — at some point each extra year adds little. Run a few (one year, two years, three years) and look for where the success-rate gains flatten out. That’s the point where "one more year" stops being worth it, and you can retire with confidence instead of working out of fear.