Strategy Tab

The Strategy tab controls how money comes out of your accounts in retirement. It’s the most configurable part of RetireRange — and where most of the interesting decisions live.

How much to withdraw

Pick a withdrawal method:

Classic — a set amount (a % of your portfolio at retirement, or a fixed dollar figure), adjusted only for inflation each year. Predictable; this is the "4% rule" approach, from Bengen’s original 1994 study.
Dynamic — a fixed percentage of whatever the portfolio is worth each month. Income rises and falls with the market.
Guardrails — steady spending that automatically trims in bad markets and rises in good ones, keeping your withdrawal rate within set bounds.

And a target type: a percentage of portfolio, a fixed monthly dollar amount, or a percentage-plus-dollar blend. (The dropdown also lists After-Tax Monthly $ (legacy — same as Fixed Monthly $) — an older option kept so saved plans still load. It now behaves identically to Fixed Monthly $: the engine pays your actual tax from the portfolio under every target, so there’s no separate gross-up.)

Using Guardrails? Keep your target inside the band. Your withdrawal target should sit within the guardrail range you set. If the target’s implied rate lands above the upper guardrail (or below the lower one), the guardrail overrides it every month — so moving the target does nothing to your results until it re-enters the band. The Strategy tab flags this inline with the actual numbers (e.g. "Your withdrawal target (12%) is above your upper guardrail (5%) — results reflect the guardrail, not the target"), in both % and $ target modes. It’s a helpful heads-up that your target is inert, not an error.

Your target is total household spending — not a portfolio-only draw

This is the single most important thing to understand about the withdrawal target, because it differs from how the "4% rule" is usually described.

Your target is what the household spends each month. Guaranteed income sources — Social Security, pensions, and annuities — count toward it, reducing what comes out of your accounts dollar for dollar. Your portfolio makes up the difference.

Example. Your target is $8,000/month and Social Security pays $3,000. RetireRange withdraws $5,000 from your accounts — not $8,000. Before you claim, it withdraws the full $8,000.

This applies to every method and target type — Classic, Dynamic, and Guardrails; percent, dollar, net-of-tax dollar, and percent-plus-dollar. There is no setting that changes it.

Why it matters — two consequences people are often surprised by:

It isn’t Bengen’s 4% — in two ways. First, the classic 4% rule treats the portfolio draw as 4% with Social Security on top; RetireRange treats the target as your total spending, with Social Security inside it. Second, Bengen’s 4% also has to cover medical costs, whereas RetireRange models medical separately and on top of your target (see Medical spending below). So your target is your lifestyle spending — guaranteed income counted in, healthcare left out. The rule of thumb: put each cost in exactly one place, never both. (For the pure Bengen convention, set your target to spending excluding guaranteed income and turn Net-of-Medical on.)
Delaying Social Security costs you portfolio dollars up front. During the delay years there’s no SS to offset the target, so your accounts carry the entire load — a larger draw, at the point in retirement when sequence risk bites hardest. The bigger benefit arrives later. That’s a genuine trade-off, and it’s why claiming later isn’t automatically better — see Social Security.

One interaction worth knowing: because guaranteed income shrinks your voluntary withdrawals, it leaves a larger Required Minimum Distribution (RMD) shortfall to be force-drawn from your Traditional accounts (spread evenly across the year), with anything above your spending redeposited to a taxable account. Social Security doesn’t satisfy an RMD — only withdrawals from the account do. See RMDs.

Which accounts to draw from

Set an allocation across account types, in one of two modes:

Proportional — weight each type (must total 100%); when one runs dry, withdrawals cascade to the next-best type automatically.
Ordered — a strict priority list (e.g., taxable first, then Traditional, then Roth).

How you sequence withdrawals affects your lifetime taxes and how long the money lasts — the allocation optimizer can search this for you.

Medical spending

Medical costs run on their own track: paid from VEBA → HSA → general pool, and added on top of your living expenses by default. Turn on Net-of-Medical if you’d rather hold total spending constant and let medical come out of it. Medicare premiums, the pre-Medicare bridge, and Medigap all flow in here too — see Health insurance bridge.

Powerful extras

Spending phases — model the go-go / slow-go / no-go pattern instead of flat spending (the default seed steps down 100% → 85% → 70%, with faster medical inflation late).
Roth conversions — schedule Traditional→Roth conversions. If a conversion rule has no matching account (say, no Roth account to convert into), the tab flags it in amber so a mistyped setup can’t silently do nothing. See Roth conversions.
Downturn-aware withdrawals — when the market falls (specifically, when the trailing 12-month stock return drops below a threshold you set), the model changes which accounts it sells: instead of your normal allocation, it draws cash first, then bonds (and VEBA), leaving stocks untouched so you’re not forced to sell equities while they’re down. It reverts to your normal order once stocks recover. The point is to blunt sequence-of-returns risk — a crash early in retirement does far more damage if you’re selling into it. It pairs naturally with a cash reserve (below): spend the cushion in the bad years. Test its effect with what if returns disappoint?; for the exact draining order and thresholds, see the methodology guide.
Cash reserve — keep a floor of cash, sized as a number of months of your gross monthly expenses (your full spending, before Social Security, pensions, and annuities are netted out), so a downturn doesn’t force you to sell stocks low. "12 months" therefore means roughly a year of real spending — not a year of your net portfolio draw — so households with large guaranteed income get a reserve that reflects actual spending, not the smaller residual. Optionally turn on recovery refill: in a strong market — when the trailing 12-month stock return clears your threshold (default +10%) — the model tops the reserve back up to its floor from equity gains, so you have dry powder for the next drop. Refill stays within each tax type: it rebalances stocks→cash inside Taxable, or inside Traditional, or inside Roth, but never moves money between them (that would be a real-world distribution or rollover with tax consequences). Pairs naturally with downturn-aware withdrawals above — spend the cushion in bad years, refill it in good ones. See Limitations for what the refill doesn’t model.
Lump-sum events — one-time expenses (a renovation, a gift) in a chosen year. Each row has a Draw From dropdown: leave it on My withdrawal allocation (the default) to fund the expense from your normal allocation, or pick a tax type — Taxable, Traditional, Roth — to source it from that type first. The engine draws pro-rata across every account of that type, cascades to the next type if it depletes, and falls back to your normal allocation for any remainder. Because the tax treatment follows the source (Traditional adds ordinary income; Roth or Taxable is mostly tax-free at the moment of withdrawal), choosing the source is a way to control the tax hit of a planned expense. Medical-only types (HSA, VEBA) are excluded. See big one-time expense.
RMDs are smoothed automatically — any forced RMD catch-up is spread evenly across the year (always on; not a toggle).
HSA "stealth IRA" — pay medical from VEBA (and out of pocket) first and let the HSA grow untouched until a chosen age, so it compounds tax-free. It’s one of the highest-leverage tax moves available if you have the cash flow to pay medical bills another way: the IRS lets you reimburse today’s medical receipts in any future year, so — as long as you keep the receipts — deferring HSA withdrawals costs you nothing, and the balance keeps growing tax-free. One caveat to weigh: a leftover HSA left to a non-spouse heir is fully taxable as ordinary income — in real life the whole balance is taxed in the year of death, with no step-up and none of the 10-year spreading an inherited IRA gets, so if anything it’s harsher than inheriting a Traditional account. Either way it’s not a tax-free bequest to the kids (a spouse inherits it tax-free; the account’s Beneficiary setting controls which applies). (RetireRange models this as a flat ordinary+state haircut on the ending balance — it captures the tax hit, not the year-of-death timing.) The payoff of stealth is the tax-free growth and tax-free medical reimbursements during your life, not a legacy tax break to the next generation. A/B test it: run with stealth on, then off, and compare the HSA ending balance and after-tax legacy (P50) on the Compare tab. The cost shows up there too — faster drawdown of your Traditional/Roth/taxable accounts during the deferral years, and possibly a bit more taxable income from the extra Traditional withdrawals. See Limitations for the inheritance assumption.

Once your strategy is set, head to the Results tab and run it.

Saving and returning. Save a recipe you like with the Strategies button (it becomes a named strategy you can compare). Two toolbar buttons manage your baseline: Save Baseline (⚓) sets your current plan as the baseline everything is measured against, and Load Baseline (⤺, right beside it) snaps the working state back to that saved baseline after you’ve been experimenting — the inverse of loading a scenario.