Keeping Your Plan Current

Your first simulation answers "am I on track?" today. But retirement planning isn’t a one-time verdict — it’s a plan you live with. Balances move, markets shift, tax law changes, and life rarely follows the straight line a single run assumes. The households that get the most out of RetireRange are the ones who come back and keep their plan current, because that’s when the tool stops being a calculator and becomes a living plan you steer by.

This page is the habit: a short check-in you run a few times a year to keep your plan honest — and to catch a problem while you still have time to fix it.

New here? Start with Getting Started and build your first plan. Come back here once you have one.

Why it’s worth coming back

A plan built on last year’s balances and last year’s assumptions slowly drifts out of date. A market run-up can quietly leave you over-saving; a downturn or a bigger-than-expected expense can erode a margin you thought you had. You won’t see either unless you look. The point of a check-in isn’t busywork — it’s to turn surprises into decisions you make on purpose, with years of runway instead of none.

And the decisions that matter most in retirement — when to claim Social Security, how much to convert to Roth, how much you can safely spend — all shift as your numbers do. What was optimal at 58 may not be at 62. Re-checking them is where the real money is.

There’s a second reason to come back: we keep the engine current, so your plan gets more accurate over time even when your own numbers don’t change. RetireRange maintains the reference data the simulation runs on — federal and state tax brackets and the standard deduction, IRMAA tiers, RMD tables and ages, Social Security parameters, contribution limits, the mortality tables, another year of market history for the historical backtest (currently 1928–2025), and changes in the law (like the SECURE Act’s RMD-age updates), which roll out without a software release. We also revisit the default return and inflation assumptions as the long-run data evolves. So re-running an unchanged plan a year later can shift on its own — because the tax, longevity, and market math underneath it has been brought up to date.

Your check-in checklist

Run through these a few times a year (see the cadence below). Most take minutes.

1. Update your balances. Reconcile your accounts and update your baseline with today’s numbers, move the Plan start date on the Household tab to the date those balances are from, then re-run. This is the single most important step — everything else is measured against a current starting line. → Scenarios
2. Review your inputs. Did anything change? A new or closed account, a different contribution amount, a shifted retirement date, refreshed Social Security estimates, or a new healthcare-cost expectation. Fix what’s stale.
3. Re-run your baseline and see where it landed. With today’s numbers in, run your current plan (the baseline) and read your success rate, your P10 (bad-luck) outcome, and your legacy — noticing which way each moved since your last check-in. This is your plan’s new starting line. → Understanding your results
4. Re-test your saved strategies against the new baseline. This is where saved strategies and scenarios earn their keep: because a strategy carries no balances of its own, it re-runs against your freshly updated baseline automatically — no rebuilding. On the Compare tab (with Compare against baseline on), put last year’s candidates back up against your current plan. Last year’s winner isn’t automatically this year’s — new balances, and the updated tax/longevity math, can change the answer. → Scenarios
5. Re-optimize the big decisions. As brackets and balances move, re-run the Optimizer on the levers that matter most for you — Social Security timing, Roth conversion amounts, withdrawal rate, account allocation.
6. Stress-test again. A good year is exactly when it’s easy to get complacent. Drop your plan onto the bad-sequence overlay on the Results tab — it shows how you’d have tracked through 1929, 1966, 2000, and 2008 — replay it against real history on the Historical backtest, and revisit what if returns disappoint?.
7. Act on it — outside the calculator. This is the step people skip. If the numbers point somewhere, do the thing: rebalance, change a contribution, adjust your spending, schedule a conversion, or bring what you learned to your advisor. The model informs the decision; only you can make it.
8. Save the keepers. Re-save the scenarios worth tracking, and re-run any that RetireRange has flagged stale after your baseline update, so every saved plan still reflects reality. → Scenarios
9. Save a dated snapshot of your baseline. Save your re-run baseline as a scenario with the date in its name, such as "Annual review 2026-10". A scenario keeps its results exactly as they were when you saved it. Next year, open it to see what your success rate and P10 outcome were then. Don’t re-run these snapshots when they’re flagged stale, because re-running would replace the old results you saved them to keep.

Check-in on a different device? If you update your baseline on one computer while the planner is still open in another tab or on another device, that other copy is now out of date. When you switch back to it, a red "This tab is out of date" banner appears across the top. Click Reload now before you read its figures or change anything, because edits made there are not saved. → Scenarios

How often?

You don’t need to live in the tool. A light touch on a regular rhythm is plenty:

• Quarterly — the two-minute version. Update your balances and re-run. Just enough to see if anything has drifted.
• Once a year — the full review. Walk the whole checklist above. A natural time is right after you’ve gathered year-end statements, or as you plan the coming year’s Roth conversions.
• Before you meet with your financial advisor. Run the full checklist a week or two ahead, so you walk in with fresh numbers and a written list of the questions the review surfaced (see below). If you meet once a year, schedule your annual review just before that meeting and let one session do both jobs.
• After any big change — a targeted run. A job change, an inheritance, a market crash, a large purchase, a change in health — model the new reality while you still have options.

Let RetireRange remind you

You don’t have to remember the rhythm yourself. When a check-in is due, a banner appears at the top of the planner: "Time for a quick refresh," with a count of how many items are still to review.

• Open checklist lists what to look at. Six items are the same for everyone: your withdrawal rate or amount, Social Security claim ages, asset allocation, monthly contributions, return and inflation assumptions, and plan-end age. Below those is one line per account, asking you to confirm its balance and contribution rules. Tick each item as you finish it. Ticking only records the review; it doesn’t change your plan. Accounts you’ve ticked show a ✓ Reviewed date on the Accounts tab for the rest of the cycle. An account you add counts as already reviewed for the current cycle.
• Remind me in a week hides the banner for seven days.
• Remind me next quarter (or month, or year, depending on your setting) hides it until the next check-in is due. The × does the same.
• Once every item is ticked, the banner goes away until the next cycle starts.

Setting the schedule. At the bottom of the open checklist, choose monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, or annual, and the day of the month. The default is quarterly on the 15th. Cycles follow the calendar: quarterly reminders come in January, April, July, and October; semi-annual in January and July; annual in January. You choose the day, not the month. If your annual review is tied to an advisor meeting in another month, a quarterly reminder is the closest fit. Changes apply from the next cycle. If the day you pick doesn’t exist in a month, such as the 31st in April, the reminder comes on that month’s last day.

The banner doesn’t appear during your first 60 days using RetireRange, so you won’t be asked to review a plan you’ve only just built. The reminder appears only inside the planner; RetireRange doesn’t email it.

Bring it to your advisor

RetireRange is at its best as the prep work for a conversation with a professional — it turns "I’m a little worried about retirement" into specific, numbers-backed questions. After your annual review, jot down what it surfaced. A starting script:

• "My success rate is ___, and it moved ___ since last year — am I over-saving, or too exposed?" (A very high rate can mean you could safely spend more. Last year’s figure is in the dated snapshot from step 9.)
• "My bad-luck (P10) outcome is ___ — is that margin enough, or should I shore it up?"
• "Should I do Roth conversions this year, and roughly how much — given my brackets and future RMDs?"
• "When should each of us claim Social Security?"
• "Is my withdrawal rate and account allocation still right for where I am now?"
• "What am I missing that the tool doesn’t model?" — long-term care, the tax on specific holdings, estate planning, and the personal side of any big decision (see Limitations for what to raise).

Bring the numbers, bring the questions, and let your advisor weigh in on the judgment calls the model can’t make.

The loop that makes it work

1. Update your baseline to today.
2. Change one thing and run again.
3. Compare — and keep the winners.
4. Act on what you learn, in the real world.

That cycle — come back, re-check, adjust — is the whole point of a planning tool you keep rather than a calculator you use once. For what the numbers mean, see Understanding your results; for how saving and comparing fit together, see Scenarios.