What If I Work Part-Time in Early Retirement?

A few years of part-time income early in retirement can do outsized good — every dollar you earn is a dollar you don’t withdraw from the portfolio during its most vulnerable years. This recipe shows you how to model that effect.

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First, how to model part-time income

RetireRange doesn’t have a direct "part-time earnings" input, but the effect of part-time work is simple to capture: it reduces how much you need to draw from your portfolio during those years. So you model it as a lower withdrawal target for the part-time period, then back to full spending afterward.

The cleanest way is with spending phases: make an early phase with a reduced withdrawal target (your full lifestyle minus what part-time work covers), then a later phase at your full target once you stop working.

Step by step

1. Add a part-time phase. On the Strategy tab, set up spending phases so your withdrawal target is lower during the part-time years (by roughly your expected net part-time earnings), returning to full afterward.

2. Save it as a named strategy (the Strategies button) — "Part-time to 67."

3. Run Comparison on the Compare tab; with Compare against baseline on (the default), your fully-retired baseline is drawn automatically beside the part-time version. Load Baseline (⤺) returns you to your plan.

What to look at

• Success Rate — drawing less in the early years directly counters sequence-of-returns risk, so even modest part-time income often lifts it noticeably.
• P10 (worst-case) outcomes — this is where reduced early withdrawals help most, by protecting the portfolio when a downturn would hurt the most.
• The early-years trajectory — see how much gentler the drawdown is while you’re still earning.

A few notes

• This approximates part-time income as reduced withdrawals. It doesn’t separately model payroll taxes on that income, or the chance it raises your own future Social Security benefit (a small bonus this approach leaves out).
• If your part-time years also include continued contributions to a retirement account, you can model that on the Accounts tab too.
• Phased, later-retirement income shares a lot with simply delaying retirement — worth comparing both.