How your projection is calculated

Why three scenarios

Every run produces three parallel projections from the same inputs — Average, Conservative, and Aggressive — by nudging the market-condition assumptions up or down each year. The point isn't to predict the future; it's to show you a plausible range instead of one number that feels falsely precise.

The Conservative scenario pairs higher inflation with weaker investment and real-estate returns — a stagflation-like environment. Rental income growth moves with inflation, not against it, since landlords tend to raise rents to keep pace with rising costs (with a real-world lag of roughly 6–9 months that this model doesn't simulate directly). The Aggressive scenario mirrors this in reverse: lower inflation alongside stronger investment and real-estate returns, and slower rental income growth as a result.

How each year is built

The projection walks forward one year at a time. Each person's age advances; once someone passes their own life expectancy they're marked as having passed, and the household becomes a single-survivor household from that point on — the projection continues for whoever's left rather than stopping.

Income (yours and your spouse's, tracked independently), rental income, and Social Security are added up into total income for the year. Living expenses, insurance premiums, mortgage/loan payments, medical costs, taxes, and any one-time expense or income scheduled for that specific year are added up into total expenses. The difference is either a savings year (income exceeds expenses) or a drawdown year (savings absorb the gap).

When either spouse becomes a survivor, household living expenses drop by 25% as a one-time adjustment (not repeated every year after), and medical premiums drop by 50%, reflecting one person's costs instead of two.

Investment growth and savings

All of your savings — regardless of which account it sits in — grows at the same single investment-return rate for that scenario; RetireWell doesn't model different asset allocations per account. A portion of that growth is treated as capital gains (taxed at the preferential rate you set under "QD/LTCG %"), and the rest is treated as tax-deferred growth.

If you and your spouse both have savings, RetireWell also tracks each of your shares of the combined pool, based on your actual account balances, purely so the results can show you a per-person breakdown that reconciles exactly to the combined figures you see everywhere else.

Loans, mortgages, and property

Loans of every type (mortgage, auto, student, personal, other) pay down in a straight line to zero by the year you say the loan ends — a simplification of a real amortization curve, but close enough for long-range planning.

A mortgage linked to your primary residence counts toward your monthly expenses and its real interest rate feeds directly into your mortgage-interest tax deduction. A mortgage linked to a rental property is excluded from your household expenses — your rental-income percentage already assumes expenses like that come out before the income reaches you, so counting the mortgage payment again would double-count it. An unlinked loan counts toward expenses like any other debt but isn't eligible for a mortgage-interest deduction.

Real property tax you enter replaces RetireWell's own estimate, and grows each year by the lesser of 2% or that year's inflation rate — California's real Prop 13 rule, applied automatically for any property you've entered a real figure for.

Medicare and Social Security

Medical premiums switch from your pre-retirement or pre-Medicare figure to your Medicare figure the year each person turns 65, along with a one-time bump to account for higher deductible exposure at that transition.

Social Security has its own detailed calculation — see the Social Security guide for how your benefit, your spousal top-up, and any survivor adjustment are estimated.

Net worth and what you see on screen

Total assets are your savings (including separately tracked traditional, Roth, and HSA retirement buckets), plus real estate value. Total debts are your remaining loan/mortgage balances plus any other debts you listed. Net worth is assets minus debts, and every headline figure is floored at zero for display — the underlying math can go negative internally (which is exactly the warning sign the savings-depletion banner is built to catch), but nothing shows as a negative dollar amount on screen.