Early Retirement Feasibility
Whether your target date works, what it costs if it does not, and a concrete plan for closing the gap. Including the years before Medicare, which most plans underprice.
The short answer
An early retirement feasibility analysis tests whether your target date survives thirty years of spending, taxes, and market risk. It prices the years before Medicare, checks how you reach money before 59½ without penalty, and says what closing the gap would take.
The question arrives as a yes or no. Can I retire at 57?
The useful answer is rarely either. It is a number: what the date costs, what would have to change, and which version of the plan survives a bad first decade.
What gets tested
The span
Retiring at 57 means the portfolio funds a retirement that may run past 90. That is a third longer than a plan starting at 65, and it front-loads the withdrawals into the years most exposed to sequence of returns risk.
Access
Money in a 401(k) or IRA generally carries a penalty before 59½. Two routes around it exist: the rule of 55, which allows penalty-free 401(k) withdrawals if you separate from that employer in the year you turn 55 or later, and a 72(t) SEPP, which permits penalty-free IRA distributions at any age under substantially equal periodic payments. Both have conditions worth understanding before relying on either.
Health insurance
The gap between your last day and Medicare at 65 is the cost most plans underprice. Employer coverage ends, and COBRA does not stretch eight years. Marketplace premiums depend on the household’s modified adjusted gross income, which puts insurance in direct competition with any conversion strategy running in the same years.
The Social Security bridge
Delaying to 70 for the higher claiming benefit means thirteen years funded from the portfolio.
Spending, tested twice
Once at your stated number, once at the number people actually spend in the first years, which tends to be higher.
Who this is for
People with a specific date in mind and the means to make it plausible. The work is most valuable two to five years ahead of the date, while the inputs can still move.
The retire-at-57 guide walks through a worked version of this analysis.
What comes back
A date that works, or your target date with the gap quantified. Gaps usually close through some combination of a later date, a lower first-decade spend, a different funding order for the early years, or more income moved onto a floor. Seeing the trade is the point.
The analysis is honest about the cases where the answer is no. A date that only works if markets cooperate for ten straight years is not a plan.
Questions about early retirement feasibility
Talk it through
A date is easier to change two years out than two months out. In the first conversation, Robert tells you whether yours is worth a full feasibility test, before you commit to it.
Educational only, and not individualized advice. Penalty exceptions have conditions, and the right answer depends on your own numbers.
Every engagement produces the same three things: a written retirement income plan, a multi-decade tax projection, and a coordinated Social Security and Roth conversion sequence. For both of you.
Schedule Your ConsultationEight pieces of one plan, not eight engagements. See how they fit together or the five phases that deliver them.
The other seven: Retirement Income Planning, Tax-Efficient Withdrawal Strategy, Roth Conversion Analysis, Executive Retirement Planning, Social Security Optimization, Ongoing Retirement Tax Planning, Legacy Planning Coordination.
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