The decision spine
Six decisions. One standard.
Retirement is not one question — it is six, and they interlock. Each hub below holds what our research has established so far, the cases that tested it, the tools that run it, and an honest list of what we have not answered yet. These pages grow with every case.
Decision 01
When to claim Social Security
This is the most permanent money decision most people ever make, and the one most often rushed. Claim at 62 and the reduction is locked in for life. Wait until 70 and so is the raise. The right answer turns on your health, whether you are still working, the gap between two earners, and a survivor question most calculators quietly skip.
Decision 02
Can I retire?
The honest answer is never a score out of a hundred. It is a verdict with conditions: what you actually spend, which claiming strategy you use, what happens if the first five years go badly, and which assumptions are quietly doing the work. The same plan can be a confident yes and a fragile maybe at once, depending on which of those you change.
Decision 03
What can we spend?
Spending is the control panel of a retirement plan: the one big variable you actually steer, year to year. In our first case, an $8,000-a-year difference in lifestyle spending, about $667 a month, moved the outcome by roughly fourteen years of portfolio longevity. Not the balance. Not the market. The monthly number.
Decision 04
Healthcare before and after 65
Healthcare is two different problems wearing one name. Before 65 there are the bridge years, priced by the individual market and easy to underestimate. After 65 there is Medicare, which is cheaper but has more moving parts than the single premium most people have heard of. Tucked inside it is one enrollment trap that catches people who delay Social Security.
Decision 05
The house and the mortgage
Two different questions hide inside “what about the house.” Whether to pay off a mortgage early, and whether to count home equity as retirement money at all. They get tangled together, and they deserve separate answers. We have taken a firm position on the second. The first is a genuine trade with no universal winner.
Decision 06
When one spouse dies
This is the analysis almost nobody runs, because it is painful to picture and because most tools cannot do it. One Social Security check stops. The tax brackets shrink to single. Spending does not fall by half. We have not finished building this model, and we are telling you that plainly while we build it in public. What we can give you now is the mechanism, clearly.