#retirement-planning

The 2025 AALTCI Price Index shows LTC premiums roughly triple from age 55 to 70 for the same benefit. We compared buying young against just investing the premium instead.

Lost wages are the visible part. We ran the SSA's own bend-point formula on a 2-year caregiving leave and found the lost employer match and a permanently lower Social Security check often outweigh the missed paychecks.

We ran the 2024 Genworth/CareScout Cost of Care Survey numbers side by side across all four common care types. The gap between the cheapest and most expensive option is over $56,000 a year.

We ran $200K taxable, $600K traditional, and $150K Roth against a $60,000/year spending need over 25 years — the conventional draw-down order (taxable first, Roth last) saved real tax dollars versus drawing proportionally from all three.

We ran an $800,000 traditional IRA through the IRS Uniform Lifetime Table at age 73 — the required minimum distribution comes to roughly $30,000, taxed as ordinary income, whether or not you need the money that year.

We ran a $250,000 lump-sum offer against a $24,000/year pension (2% COLA) for a 65-year-old expecting to live to 85 — the breakeven discount rate lands just above 9%, well above conservative retirement-portfolio assumptions.

The same monthly amount, the same return, just a 10-year head start. We ran the compound-growth math to show exactly what 'time in the market' is actually worth in dollar terms.

A withdrawal rate above 4.5% gets flagged as risky; above 5% is meaningful sequence-of-returns risk in a poor market entry year. We checked what the stress-test against a pessimistic returns scenario actually reveals.

SSA's own reduction and delayed-credit formulas turn the same Primary Insurance Amount into a 0.70x check at 62 or a 1.24x check at 70. Compounded over a 20-30 year retirement, that's a six-figure lifetime swing.

Most FIRE calculators give you a single portfolio target. The real question for most people isn't how big the number needs to be — it's which version of financial freedom they're actually optimizing for.