Can I Retire Early?

Maybe you’re eyeing the door a few years sooner than the plan. This is one of the most powerful questions RetireRange can answer — because retiring early changes three things at once: you save for fewer years, you draw from your portfolio for more years, and you open a longer gap before Medicare. This recipe shows you how to test it honestly.

New here? Start with Getting Started to build your baseline plan first. This recipe assumes you already have one.

The quick version

1. Move each person’s retirement date earlier (and stop contributions sooner).
2. Save it as a named strategy — "Retire 2029."
3. Run Comparison against your baseline and watch your success rate.
4. If it dips too far, try the adjustments at the bottom of this page.

Step by step

1. Build the early-retirement version. On the Household tab, move each person’s retirement date earlier. Remember to stop contributions sooner too — if you stop working sooner, those monthly contributions stop sooner too.

2. Don’t forget two things early retirement changes:

• Your Social Security benefit may drop. The estimates on your SSA statement assume you keep working until you claim. Retire early and you have fewer earning years on record, so your actual benefit can be lower than the statement shows. Consider lowering your entered SSA estimates a little to reflect the missing years. (More on Social Security.)
• The health-insurance bridge gets longer. Every year you retire before 65 is another year you pay for your own coverage before Medicare. Make sure your health insurance bridge covers the full, longer gap.

3. Save it as a named strategy. Use the Strategies button — call it "Retire 2029." It captures the earlier dates, the contribution change, and your SS estimates, and re-runs against your current baseline.

4. Run Comparison. On the Compare tab, with Compare against baseline on (the default), your baseline and "Retire 2029" run head-to-head against the same market sequences — so the difference reflects the earlier date, not luck. Done exploring? Load Baseline (⤺) snaps you back to your plan.

What to look at

• Success Rate — the headline. How far does it fall when you retire earlier? A small dip may be well worth a few more years of freedom; a large one is a warning.
• Shortfall Rate — how often you’d have had to cut spending below target. For early retirement this matters as much as the success rate.
• P10 (worst-case) ending balance — early retirement leans harder on the early years, so check the unlucky cases, not just the median.
• The trajectory chart — does the portfolio dip dangerously in the first decade? Early retirees are especially exposed to a bad market right after they stop working (sequence-of-returns risk).

For what these numbers mean, see Understanding your results.

If the early date doesn’t quite work

Don’t stop at "no." Early retirement is rarely all-or-nothing — try these and re-compare:

• Delay Social Security even while retiring early, to lift your lifetime guaranteed income.
• Trim or phase your spending — model lower spending, or use spending phases for an active-then-slower pattern.
• Switch to a Guardrails withdrawal method so spending automatically flexes down in bad markets and protects the plan.
• Build a larger cash reserve or turn on downturn-aware withdrawals to blunt sequence risk — both are on the Strategy tab (Downturn-Aware Withdrawals and Cash Reserve Target are separate toggles); enable the cash reserve’s recovery refill to keep it stocked through good years (how it works).
• Try a partial step — a year or two earlier instead of five, or part-time income to bridge the gap.

When you want RetireRange to find the best combination for you, hand it to the Optimizer — for example, optimize your Social Security claiming age or withdrawal rate around the earlier retirement date.