$1,400,000
Starting investable assets at age 52.
RETIREMENT SCENARIO STUDY
Retire at 55 or wait until 57?We changed only the retirement date.
The household, spending, portfolio, Social Security, allocation, and life expectancy stayed the same. We moved retirement two years later and reran the plan across the same 685 historical sequences.
CONTROLLED COMPARISON
Everything below stayed constant except retirement age.
$84,000/year
Same annual retirement spending in both scenarios.
$36,000/year
Annual contributions continue until the selected retirement age.
$36,000/year
Same benefit beginning at age 67.
55 VS. 57
Two years changed three important parts of the plan.
620/685 histories lasted
90.5% of tested historical paths reached age 95; 65 ran short.
Modeled portfolio at retirement: $1,718,768
Initial portfolio withdrawal: 4.9%
685/685 histories lasted
100.0% of tested historical paths reached age 95; none ran short in the tested set.
Modeled portfolio at retirement: $1,971,157
Initial portfolio withdrawal: 4.3%
+$252,389
Two more years of saving and compounding increased modeled assets at retirement by roughly $252,389 in this example.
-0.63 percentage points
The first-year portfolio withdrawal rate fell from 4.9% to 4.3%.
WHY TWO YEARS MATTERED
The later date helped on both sides of the equation.
Waiting until 57 did more than add two years of contributions. It also gave the existing portfolio two additional years before withdrawals began and shortened the period the portfolio needed to fund before age 95.
In the age-55 scenario, the plan began with an initial portfolio withdrawal rate of 4.9% and failed in 65 of the 685 historical paths tested. At 57, the modeled retirement portfolio was about $252,389 larger and the initial withdrawal rate dropped to 4.3%. Across this particular historical test set, all 685 sequences then lasted through the modeled horizon.
That does not mean age 57 is “safe” or that age 55 is “unsafe.” It means the two-year change created enough additional margin to survive every historical sequence in this specific model.
WHAT THIS DOES — AND DOESN’T — PROVE
Use historical testing to expose sensitivity, not to manufacture certainty.
How retirement timing changes margin
Holding the rest of the plan constant makes the effect of retirement age visible.
Where weak historical paths appear
The age-55 plan failed in 65 tested sequences, which is useful evidence about sensitivity to market order and timing.
A future success probability
The 685 windows overlap and history will not repeat exactly. 90.5% historical survival is not a 90.5% forecast.
A universal retirement age
This is one fictional household. Different spending, assets, taxes, allocation, pensions, Social Security, or longevity assumptions can change the result.
DATA & REPRODUCIBILITY
The numbers come from the same deterministic engine Ask Linc uses for retirement planning.
The historical dataset spans July 1926 through June 2026. This example uses 685 overlapping 43-year retirement windows, with start months from July 1926 through July 1983. The snapshot was generated on 2026-09-19; its dataset fingerprint is fa034188badc02bcdbe79d6041bdd7695abe574c66eb19f483565f44da71329f.
See the broader study, what changed the outcome across all three scenarios →, run your own inputs through the Ask Linc retirement calculator, or browse all Ask Linc research.
START WITH THE DECISION
What would two more years change for your plan?
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