Will Your Plan Survive a Spouse’s Death?

Most retirement plans are built around an unspoken assumption: the two of you, together, all the way to the end. So is the strategy — when to claim Social Security, how much to convert, which account to tap first.

But a plan that works for two people doesn’t always work for one. When a spouse dies, four things change at once: the household keeps only the larger Social Security check, the tax return flips from married to single (narrower brackets, lower thresholds), the deceased spouse’s income stops, and spending falls — but not in half.

Timing decides how much it hurts. A death just before retirement can cost decades of a second income; a death late in retirement costs far less. The worst year isn’t obvious.

RetIQ has always let you model this — test a death at a chosen age, compare the three futures, restructure the plan for the survivor. The new Survivor Resilience sweep takes it a level higher: instead of one death at one age, it runs your plan with either spouse dying in every year from now to plan end and distills it to a single verdict.

That verdict is Strong (the survivor stays funded no matter when), Thin Margins (it works, but the cushion is thin), or At Risk (some death year depletes the portfolio). It also names the worst year and the cost of a death versus both of you living. It sits on the Dashboard, so you see it the moment you open the app.

A weak verdict isn’t a dead end. The Survivor Center labels each strategy Robust, Fragile, or Avoid across both futures, so you can pick moves that hold up either way — and build your spouse a ready-to-follow roadmap you can export.

It’s a model, not a guarantee. But you shouldn’t have to guess whether the plan you’re following quietly assumes something you can’t count on.