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A plan built on last year’s balances and last year’s assumptions slowly drifts out of date.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, 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

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. It’s especially worth doing shortly before a meeting with your financial advisor — you’ll walk in with fresh numbers and a written list of the questions and concerns the review surfaced (see below).
• 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.

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.)
• "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.