Surviving Spouse and Mortality Modeling

Planning for a couple means facing a hard reality: one of you will likely outlive the other, and the survivor’s finances can look very different. Income drops, taxes often rise, and Social Security gets reconfigured. RetireRange can model this directly so the survivor isn’t left exposed.

Want the step-by-step recipe? See what if my spouse dies first?. This page explains how the modeling works.

Choosing a mortality mode

Each person has a mortality setting on the Household tab:

• None (default) — no death is modeled; the household lives through the entire plan. Use this when you want to focus purely on investment and withdrawal strategy.
• Deterministic — death fires at the exact age you set, in every simulation. Best for a clean "what happens to the survivor if my spouse dies at 80?" study — and the right choice when comparing two strategies, so both face the same death timing.
• Stochastic — each simulation independently draws a death age from the SSA 2021 Period Life Table, capturing the genuine uncertainty of longevity: in some futures a person lives to 95, in others they die at 73. That table is unisex — a 50/50 male/female blend — and RetireRange applies it to everyone regardless of sex, so it doesn’t reflect that women tend to outlive men on average. If you have a specific longevity in mind, use Deterministic instead.

What happens when a spouse dies

At the death event — which fires in the month the person reaches their death age, not at a year-end boundary — RetireRange automatically:

1. Queues the switch from Married Filing Jointly to Single for the following January — the survivor stays MFJ through the entire year of death (as the IRS requires), then moves to Single, whose narrower brackets often mean more tax on the same income (see Taxes).
2. Transfers account ownership to the survivor (Traditional rolls over; Roth transfers tax-free).
3. Reconfigures Social Security — the survivor keeps the larger of the two benefits; the smaller one stops.
4. Recalculates RMDs on the survivor’s age and the inherited balances.
5. Continues the plan as a single-person household to the plan end age.

When the last person dies, the plan ends that month — the ending balance and legacy are measured there, not carried to the plan-end age.

The decision this should drive

Because the survivor keeps the larger benefit, this scenario is the strongest argument for how the higher earner claims Social Security: delaying toward 70 locks in a bigger check that supports the survivor for years. Test "higher earner claims early vs. late" with a death event modeled — see Social Security and collecting Social Security early.

A few things to keep in mind

• For strategy comparisons, use Deterministic mortality. With Stochastic, two strategies can see different death ages even on the same market seed, which muddies the comparison. Deterministic holds the death event constant so the strategy is the only variable.
• The survivor benefit uses the SSA age-graded factor — 71.5% at age 60 rising to 100% at the survivor’s full retirement age (the survivor keeps the larger of the two benefits). (Also, the inherited-Roth 5-year rule isn’t enforced, which can slightly overstate the value of a very new inherited Roth.)
• Filing status holds Married Filing Jointly through the year of death. By tax law a surviving spouse is treated as married for the entire year of death, so RetireRange keeps them MFJ for that whole calendar year and switches to Single the following January. (Qualifying Surviving Spouse rates — available for up to two more years if there’s a dependent child — aren’t separately modeled; those brackets equal MFJ anyway, so the main effect, the eventual move to Single, is captured.) The Social Security, ownership, and RMD changes all take effect at the death month.

For how to read the survivor scenario’s numbers, see Understanding your results. Unfamiliar terms are in the Glossary.