Ready For Retirement
Ready For Retirement
Most Retirement Advice Fails Singles (Here’s What to Do Instead)
Most retirement advice quietly assumes you have a partner: two incomes, two Social Security checks, someone to split expenses with, someone to catch the slack if something goes wrong. But for singles, the margins are tighter and the freedom can be much greater. Planning alone means every decision carries more weight, but it also means you have full control over the life you want to build.
This video centers on Tina, a 62-year-old single woman with roughly $2.2 million across investment accounts, employer stock, a 401(k), and a Roth IRA. Her situation highlights something many single retirees face: the rules for married couples don’t apply. There’s no second Social Security benefit, no shared expenses, no fallback income — just her plan, her goals, her decisions. Once her “freedom number” becomes clear, the entire plan shifts. Reliable income fills part of the picture, but the rest depends on how her portfolio supports the exact life she wants to live. Simple choices — retiring sooner, traveling more, inviting friends on those trips, or designing a lifestyle that actually reflects what matters — completely change her projections and expand what’s possible.
The heart of this conversation isn’t about budgets or perfect withdrawal rates. It’s about giving singles permission to build lives that match their values, not someone else’s template. When the numbers align with the life you want, confidence follows naturally.
If this perspective helps you rethink how retirement looks when it’s just you, tap like and share what resonated. Your retirement doesn’t need to look like anyone else’s, it just needs to support the version of life that feels right to you.
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The strategies, case studies, and examples discussed may not be suitable for everyone. They are hypothetical and for illustrative and educational purposes only. They do not reflect actual client results and are not guarantees of future performance. All investments involve risk, including the potential loss of principal.
Comments reflect the views of individual users and do not necessarily represent the views of Root Financial. They are not verified, may not be accurate, and should not be considered testimonials or endorsements
Participation in the Retirement Planning Academy or Early Retirement Academy does not create an advisory relationship with Root Financial. These programs are educational in nature and are not a substitute for personalized financial advice. Advisory services are offered only under a written agreement with Root Financial.
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Most retirement advice quietly assumes you have a spouse, two sources of income, two social security checks, someone to split expenses with. But what if it's just you? For singles, the rules are different. The margin for error is much smaller, but the potential freedom is much larger. So today I'm gonna walk you through three steps to build a retirement plan that gives you confidence. Not because you have a backup plan, but because you are the plan. And to do this most effectively, I'm gonna tell you right now what those three steps are, but then I'm gonna show you how those apply to a sample case study so you can understand the nuance here and how each of these steps ties into each other, and most importantly, how these steps are gonna be different for a single individual than for someone that's married. But step number one is design your freedom number. Step number two is map your reliable income sources, and step number three is build a portfolio with purpose. Let's jump into a case study here to show you what this looks like. So let's jump into Tina's sample case study so we can actually illustrate these concepts in practice. So here's Tina, she is 62 years old today. She has some money in the bank. You can see she has about$2.1,$2.2 million in investment accounts. By the way, if you have$2 million, if you have$200,000, if you have$20 million, these steps are gonna be the same. The framework is gonna be the same. So don't let these specific numbers get in the way of understanding the framework involved with looking at this. She has an investment account, and you can see right here, this investment account for her, this is all an individual stock position from her employer. So there's some planning points around there that we're gonna get to in a second. Tina also has a 401k and a Roth IRA, and then she owns her home outright. So I mentioned step number one was design your freedom number. We just looked at investment accounts, but that's not step number one. That's just giving you an overview of where Tina is today, in the same way you know where you are today. Your first step is know your freedom number. So what do I mean by that? Your freedom number says don't start with the spreadsheets, start with what do you want life to look like. What are you doing in retirement? Are you traveling? If so, is it domestic? Is it international? Are you participating in social clubs? Are you doing a lot of volunteering? Are you spending time with friends and family? What does retirement look like? Before jumping into the numbers, start thinking about what true freedom feels like. Once you know what that feels like, meaning the things you're doing, the people you're with, the things you're able to do, then we can work backwards into what that freedom number looks like. So for Tina, you can see right here, there's not a whole lot going on. A lot of people they get here and they just think, I'm gonna throw out a number. In Tina's example,$6,000 per month is what she wants to live on in retirement. If you look at the things that we could be thinking about though, how do we think about health care? How do we think about long-term care? Is she sending a child through college? Is there a new vehicle purchase? Is there vacations? Is there a wedding for a child or a grandchild? Is there property purchase, asset purchase, gifts, personal gifts, charitable gifts? All these are types of things that Tina could include in her freedom number that you can include in your freedom number to say, here's what I want my retirement to look like. That is step one. Specifically, if you are single, this is your version. This is what you want retirement to look like. If you're a married couple, both of you are having a say in this. And hopefully there's a lot of alignment there. But sometimes things look differently. If you are single, you can fully control exactly what you want this number to look like because you have full control over exactly what you want to do in your retirement years. So what we're trying to determine is what's the true cost of the life that you want, not just the cost of some calculator output. So for Tina, I'm keeping this very basic for right now.$6,000 per month is what she thought. We're gonna add some stuff in to show you at the end of this how this changes the projections based upon designing a new freedom amount. But to start, here's her goals. This is step number one, understanding what it will cost. Step number two for you is map your reliable income. So, what do I mean by this? Well, in the same way Tina right here has an income, you probably have an income while you are working. You have a salary that's covering all of your goals. What you need to think about though is what happens when you're not working any longer? Well, you have your portfolio, of course, you have your savings, but before we get to that, we need to understand what do you have coming in from social security, from pension, from annuities, from rental income potentially. So, what are those sources of income that are coming into you on a monthly basis that are gonna be some portion of your overall paycheck that doesn't have anything to do with your actual portfolio? So here's what's different about this projection for singles. When you're married and the two of you have a social security benefit, you're not just trying to optimize social security for any one of those individuals or either of those individuals. You're trying to say what's gonna both maximize lifetime income, but also provide for a surviving spouse. And so sometimes the benefits or the decisions that you're making aren't just about maximizing income, it's about maximizing protection for a surviving spouse. If you're single, that is not part of the equation. If you are single, it's all about how can I maximize my lifetime income? How can I stretch this benefit furthest? Now, quick side note if you are single but you were previously married, keep in mind you are still eligible for a spousal benefit or a survivor benefit on your ex-spouse's social security income. So just because you're single doesn't necessarily mean that there's not also something that you can tie into or collect in your working years. You must have been married for 10 plus years, but just keep that in mind that even singles sometimes are able to collect spousal and survivor benefits. So the reason this is step two of map your reliable income is because what we did first is we mapped out your freedom number. That freedom number says, here's the money, here's what we need to spend so that you can live the life you want to live. What we're solving for next is how much of that freedom number is gonna be covered by Social Security, pension, annuity, any other reliable income source. Notice I'm not including portfolio withdrawals yet. The reason we do the second is because now you are gonna have a gap here between what you want to spend, in Tina's example, 6,000 per month, and what she has coming in from a reliable income source, which in this case you can see for social security is$3,300 per month. But that$3,300 per month is at age 67. You can see here she's actually planning to collect age 65, which means she'll get her benefit sooner, but there is a bit of reduction. But nonetheless, this is a reliable income source for Tina. This is part of that step too. Now, finally, step three is build a portfolio with purpose. Now I'm making a bit of a jump here from reliable income source to portfolio. I want to fill in the gap for you real quick. So step three is designed to tell you how much do you need to be able to retire with confidence as a single individual, but there's a gap here. There's a way to connect the dots between step number two and step number three, and that's exactly what I want to show you right now. So, what we're looking at now for Tina is her cash flows. This is gonna help us solve for step three, which is to build that portfolio with purpose. And what you can see is it's the difference between step one and two. Lots of numbers here, but essentially what we're looking at is number one, what are Tina's expenses? So I'm gonna fast forward here to her retirement year. Her first full year of retirement,$6,000 per month,$72,000 per year. In today's dollars, that's$72,000. But after a few years of inflation, that goes up to 81, 83, 85, and beyond. This first year is lower simply because she retires partway through the year and it's not capturing a full year. But what this is showing is her freedom number as we've defined it. What this is showing is what reliable income sources will Tina have. Well, for the next few years, she'll have her salary. Her salary will cover all of her needs, but that goes away when she's done working. What kicks in is social security. You can see that social security benefit right there. This is one source of income designed to help her, designed to help you meet your income needs throughout retirement. So as we go back here, what we're looking at is really the difference between this income source and the total outflows, the total expenses. These total outflows are showing how much does Tina want to spend and how much might she owe in taxes in that year. Here's that combined total amount. So when we see this, what this allows us to do is allows us to back into what amount will Tina need to take out of her portfolio in order to supplement Social Security and be able to live on that$6,000 per month adjusted for inflation throughout retirement. Now, as we go through this, if you want to plug in your numbers to this exact software so you can see how it supplies to you, you can get access. Get access in the Retirement Planning Academy. Link is in the show notes below. But as we go through this, what I want you to see is before we design the portfolio, what we really need to understand is what do we need the portfolio to do for us? In Tina's case, here is what she needs the portfolio to do for her. What she needs her portfolio to do for her is to generate$49,000 of income or distributions in this year so that she can add that to her social security, be able to pay this tax payment, and have the equivalent of$81,000 left over for her to spend. You can see how this number changes over time as inflation increases over time. But the takeaway is this what does Tina need to do is she needs to say, can my portfolio support that? Can my portfolio support$50,000 per year? Now, if she only has$50,000 in her portfolio, probably not. You're gonna spend through that the first year of retirement. If she has$5 million in her portfolio, can she support that? Well, yeah, that's only a 1% withdrawal rate. So what she needs to understand is what does this represent as a percentage of her portfolio to give her sense of can she do this or not? So let's take a look at that next. What this page is showing, Tina, what this page can show you is what is the withdrawal rate of pulling these distributions from the portfolio based on the total portfolio value. You can see for Tina, this withdrawal rate is about one and a half percent and declining. It bumps a little bit right here, but that's just because required distributions kick in and she's gonna be forced to take more out of her portfolio. Not necessarily because she needs to take more from her portfolio, but even when that happens, she's still taking a very low withdrawal rate. So as we go back to Tina, what does this mean for her? Well, let's go back to step one of Tina. We talked about your freedom number. What does that look like? And she used$6,000 as a very conservative low number because she didn't really know what was possible. Sometimes it's hard to dream big if you don't know that you can support big, if you don't know if you can have a portfolio that will enable big. So what we can now do for Tina is we can go back here and say, Tina, you now have options. Now, as we mentioned, this is a little bit different than planning for a couple. Everything is on her. It's just her social security benefit, it's just her savings. She needs to make sure this lasts because there's no one to support, no other benefits to kick in, no one to share expenses with. So we need to be mindful of that, but we also need to be mindful of the fact that if Tina does not do anything, she's projected to have her portfolio continue growing into retirement such that she passes with$11 million. If I was to ask Tina, is that your goal to pass with$11 million? The answer is almost certainly no. My guess is she would much rather retire earlier, spend more, do more, do some combination of those along the way so that she can fully enjoy what she has worked for. So if we look at this, the first option I can show Tina is Tina, what if you stop working today? What if$6,000 truly was the number that you wanted to live on? Could you do that and stop working today? And what we can see here is the answer is yes. There's fewer dollars in her portfolio, but if we look at the odds of success, the Monte Carlo analysis, it's still an extremely high probability of success. So in looking at this, so the first question is do you want to retire early or not? Now I would say this very much depends upon how much Tina enjoys work. If you enjoy work, by all means keep doing it. But if it's no longer something that you enjoy, or if it's holding you back from doing what you want to do, now might be the time to exit. The next thing I wanted to show Tina and what you can look at for yourself is not what if she retired early? What if we put this back at 65? It's what if she spent more. So maybe that 6,000 per month covers everything for Tina, but what if she wants to travel and what if she wants that travel to cost an extra$20,000 per year? I'm just throwing in a number. Tina, can you make that happen? Well, we look at this, the answer is yes. There's fewer dollars left over at the end, but again, the goal is not to accumulate the most dollars so you can die with them. The goal is to say, how can you use those dollars to get the most out of life with your money? So we can still see absolutely yes, you can do this. Now, Tina, what if you don't want to just travel? What if you want to pay the way for some of your closest friends so they can travel with you and you can create those memories together? Well, when you look at that, you can still see there's still enough to do this. There's still enough so that you can make this happen and have a high probability of success. So the numbers, the possibilities are infinite. But the goal that I wanted to show or the framework that I wanted to show is when you start by understanding what's your dream number, what's your freedom number. Number two, understand what reliable income sources do you have coming in to support that. In this case, Social Security. Number three is saying what's that gap between reliable income sources and what you want to spend? That's what your portfolio needs to be able to support. You need to make sure that you have enough money in a portfolio such that the withdrawals from that portfolio can sustainably be the difference between your reliable income sources and what you actually want to spend. So the rules for singles are not always the same as the rules for married couples. But if you can follow these three steps, you can build a portfolio, you can retire with confidence, you can start doing a lot more of what you want to do.
