Scenario Recipes
Most of the questions people actually lie awake with aren’t about the model — they’re about their life. Can I retire two years earlier? What if the market is ugly right when I stop working? What happens to my spouse if I die first?
Each recipe here takes one of those questions and walks you through answering it: what to change, what to run, and — the part that matters most — what to look at when the numbers come back.
They’re short by design. Ten minutes each, most of them.
Looking for a question that isn’t a scenario recipe — optimizing a decision, or comparing two plans head-to-head? See How to answer your retirement questions, the full map across every tool.
The pattern behind every one
Once you’ve done one, you’ve done them all. Every recipe is the same few moves:
- Start from a baseline you keep current. Your plan, saved once and kept up to date — the consistent starting line everything is measured against (see Scenarios and the baseline). You don’t re-save it for each recipe.
- Change exactly one thing. One variable, so you can attribute the difference to it. Two changes at once and you’ve learned nothing about either.
- Save that change as a named strategy — a name you’ll recognise later ("Retire at 62", not "test 3"). A strategy captures the recipe, not your balances, so it always runs against your current baseline.
- Run Comparison on the Compare tab. Leave Compare against baseline on (it is by default) and your baseline is drawn automatically alongside your variation — both against the same market sequences, so any difference you see is the change itself, not luck.
- Snap back when you’re done with the Load Baseline button (⤺) in the toolbar — it restores your plan exactly as it stands.
Step 4 is the one people skip, and it’s the one that makes the answer trustworthy.
One exception: a few recipes change your assumptions (like returns disappointing) or your account balances — things that live in the baseline, not in a withdrawal recipe. For those you’ll save a full scenario instead of a named strategy; each recipe tells you which.
Where to start
New to this? Start with Am I safe to retire? — it’s the question underneath most of the others, and it teaches you how to read a success rate before you start changing things.
When to retire, and how you stop
| Recipe | The question |
|---|---|
| Retire early | Can I stop sooner than planned — and what does it cost? |
| Delay retirement | How much do two more working years actually buy? |
| Work part-time | Does easing out beat stopping outright? |
| Already collecting a pension | I retired once with a pension — how do I model retiring again? |
What you spend
| Recipe | The question |
|---|---|
| Spend more | How much more can I spend before the plan strains? |
| A big one-time expense | Can I absorb a new roof, a wedding, a gift to the kids? |
| Downsize my home | What does freeing up home equity do to the plan? |
Social Security and your spouse
| Recipe | The question |
|---|---|
| Claim Social Security early | What does taking it at 62 really cost over a lifetime? |
| Spouse dies first | Is the survivor going to be all right? |
Stress tests — the things you don’t control
| Recipe | The question |
|---|---|
| Returns disappoint | What if the market underperforms for years? |
| Live to 100 | Does the money outlast me if I outlast the averages? |
| Healthcare costs more | What if medical spending runs above plan? |
| Go on disability | If I have to stop working early, does the plan still hold? |
Taxes and accounts
| Recipe | The question |
|---|---|
| Stop 401(k) contributions | What do these last few years of saving really add? |
| Move in retirement | What would relocating do to your taxes and costs? |
| HSA as a stealth IRA | Should I let the HSA grow instead of spending it? |
When something else fits better
These recipes are for testing one specific change against your real plan. Two neighbours do different jobs:
- What-If Quick Calculator — a rough, instant answer with no full run. Good for "roughly, what if I retire two years earlier?" while you’re still thinking out loud. It’s a single deterministic estimate, not a range.
- The Optimizer — when you don’t want to test one value but to search many. "Which claiming age is best?" rather than "what happens at 67?"
A reasonable order: a recipe to build intuition, the Optimizer to find the best answer, Compare to confirm it.