Why RetireRange
The core difference: controlled luck
Compare strategies on a level playing field.
Run "claim Social Security at 67" against "claim at 70," or "convert to Roth now" against "wait," and RetireRange runs both against the exact same thousands of market sequences. The difference you see is the strategy — luck is held constant. You can’t control market returns, but you can control your strategy and see which strategies work in which conditions.
Most tools run each scenario against its own random draws, so when two results differ you can’t tell whether the strategy was better or the dice were kinder. RetireRange was built specifically to remove that doubt. It’s the difference between an opinion and an experiment.
What you can do here that a free calculator can’t
- Let the optimizer find the answer. Don’t guess-and-check claiming ages or withdrawal rates — hand the decision to the optimizer and it searches the whole range, including where and when to move states for tax savings.
- Model the surviving spouse. See what happens financially when one partner outlives the other — the filing-status shift, the Social Security change, the tax impact. Most households never model the single biggest financial event of late retirement.
- Bridge the gap to Medicare. Set the health-insurance cost for the years between retirement and 65 — the coverage gap almost no tool accounts for.
- Plan Roth conversions and RMDs across decades. Weigh the tax cost of converting now against the RMD burden later, with the multi-year tax picture laid out.
- Stress-test against real history. Replay your plan against every market sequence from 1928 to 2025 — including 1929, 1966, and 2000 — as a reality check on the simulated ranges.
- Get it in plain English. A one-click summary, written by Anthropic’s Claude, tells you where your plan is strong, where the risks are, and what to explore next — for understanding, never as advice.
- Keep a model that’s actually yours. Every input is in your hands. Change anything, re-run, and watch your odds move — as often as you like, for as long as you subscribe.
How it compares
vs. a free online calculator
Free calculators give you one number from a handful of inputs. They can’t show you a range, can’t compare strategies, can’t optimize a decision, and can’t model survivor scenarios or the Medicare gap. They answer "roughly, am I okay?" RetireRange answers "what happens if I do this?"
vs. a financial advisor
An advisor brings judgment a tool can’t — and RetireRange isn’t trying to replace that. But a one-time plan from an advisor is a snapshot you can’t drive yourself. RetireRange is the model you live in year-round, for a tiny fraction of an advisor’s fee, and it makes the time you do spend with an advisor far more productive. (We even produce a methodology document you can hand them.)
vs. other paid planning tools
There are capable tools in this category, and they make different bets. Theirs is usually breadth — a broad financial dashboard covering a lot of ground. Ours is depth in one specific direction: strategy comparison under controlled luck, plus an optimizer that searches the decision space for you. If you want to rigorously look at "which retirement strategy is actually better," this is built for exactly that.
What you get for $20 a month
- The depth is the product. The optimizer, the shared-seed comparison engine, and the historical backtest aren’t add-ons — they’re the reason RetireRange exists, and they’re genuinely hard to build well.
- One plan, everything in it. No tiers, no paywalled features, no "upgrade to unlock the good stuff."
- Try it free, leave anytime. A 30-day free trial and cancel-anytime billing — you’re only charged if you continue past the trial.
- Against the stakes, it’s small. The decisions this models routinely swing a retirement by tens of thousands of dollars.
What RetireRange is not
It’s just as important to understand what it isn’t:
- Not a predictor. It’s a model. Modeling is a judgment call, not a forecast — it shows you probabilities and ranges, never certainties.
- Not financial advice, and not a replacement for an advisor — it’s the prep work that makes that relationship better.
- Not a budgeting or net-worth dashboard. It’s a retirement strategy engine, focused on the drawdown decisions that matter most as retirement nears.