How it works

A run of bad years early in retirement can sink a plan even when the long-run average return is perfectly healthy, because you’re selling investments to live on while they’re down and locking in the losses. The same set of returns in a different order can be the difference between comfort and ruin. RetireSafe draws a fresh return for every year of every one of the 10,000 futures, from a distribution with fat tails, so it captures the unlucky orderings that a single average would smooth away.

The single biggest unknown in any retirement plan. Budget to age 85 and live to 95, and you’ve got a decade to fund that you never accounted for. RetireSafe never picks a single age. It draws a lifespan for each future from actuarial tables matched to your country, sex, and health, so your plan is tested against living a little, and a lot, longer than average.

Steady 2% inflation is mild. But a few years of 7–10% quietly destroys purchasing power, and it hits some costs, healthcare especially, harder than others. RetireSafe can model inflation the way it actually behaves: flipping between calm and high regimes that persist for years, as in the 1970s and the post-2021 spike. It also links investment returns to inflation, since the two move together.

The expense most plans leave out, and the one most likely to blow a hole in them: a stretch of long-term care can run tens of thousands of euros a year. RetireSafe gives each person an age-rising chance of needing care, a realistic spread of how long an episode lasts, and the option to model lower-cost family care. It is honest in both directions: needing care also raises mortality while the episode lasts, so care costs aren’t billed over an unrealistically long life.

A forced early exit in your late 50s or 60s lands on your highest-earning, highest-saving years, and going back to work often means a permanently lower wage. When you opt in, RetireSafe applies an age-rising risk of job loss before retirement, splits it into temporary and permanent, and carries the lasting wage penalty that follows a temporary spell. It’s off by default; turning it on asks for your after-tax income, so an unemployed year costs exactly the coverage that income provided.

For couples, the first death reshapes the finances: expenses fall, but not by half; some pensions shrink to their survivor terms; and the surviving partner’s own life expectancy drops. RetireSafe ties partners’ lifespans together (people who share a life tend to die closer together), steps each expense down by a realistic amount, and adjusts pensions accordingly.

Spend too much early and you risk running dry; spend too little and you under-live a retirement you spent decades saving for. RetireSafe supports several withdrawal strategies, from the classic 4% rule to flexible ones that adjust as markets move, and always protects a survival floor of essential, housing, and care costs before anything else.

Most calculators either ignore tax or apply one flat rate to everything, which quietly misprices the decision that matters most: which pot you draw from first. RetireSafe works out your tax year by year, in the country you live in, from that country’s own brackets, allowances and account rules. It knows that a withdrawal can drag part of a state pension into tax, and that where your money sits often changes the bill more than any rate does. Each country’s figures carry the source they came from and the date they were read.

A plan that runs out of money while its owner is sitting in a paid-off house has not really failed, and counting it as a failure overstates the risk for most homeowners. If a year arrives where nothing else can fund the survival floor, RetireSafe sells the home at a discount, settles any mortgage and pays rent from then on. The plan fails only if the floor is still unfundable afterwards. On by default for homeowners, and you can switch it off.

Every plan is exposed to a different mix of the risks above. The sensitivity analysis varies each of your inputs within plausible bands and measures which ones move your odds the most, so you know whether your plan lives or dies on market returns, on how long you live, or on something you can actually control.

Knowing the risk is half the answer; the other half is what to do about it. Counterfactuals test concrete changes (saving a bit more each month, retiring a year later, adjusting your investment mix) against the same set of futures, and show you exactly how much each one moves your success probability.