Balances today
Annual spending, today's dollars
Defaults are the retiree-adjusted BLS benchmark and the 65–74 healthcare mean. See where these come from.
Social Security
Claiming factor applied: 100% → $30,000/yr
Pre-59½ access route
This is a modelling switch, not an eligibility ruling. It only controls whether the 10% additional tax is charged on tax-deferred withdrawals before 59½.
Outcome
Survives to 92
Bridge length
12 years
Withdrawn before SS
$0
10% tax paid
$0
Health cover before 65, total
$0
First RMD year
Age 75
Balance by account, year by year
Warnings from this scenario
Year-by-year schedule
Cash is needed at the start of each year and taken before any return is credited; the return then applies to what is left. Withdrawals come out of taxable, then tax-deferred, then Roth.
| Age | Need | Taxable | Tax-deferred | Roth | Tax | 10% tax | Ending total |
|---|
The five doors into retirement money before 59½
The bridge problem is not really about how much you have. It is about which of it you can legally reach. These are the routes, with the condition that most often trips people up.
| Route | Age restriction | The condition people miss |
|---|---|---|
| Taxable brokerage | None | No age rule at all, but the proceeds are not all spendable cash — basis, lots and capital-gain treatment decide what survives tax. |
| Roth regular contributions | None | Only the contributions come out freely. Conversions and earnings follow different rules, and each conversion carries its own five-tax-year clock. |
| Separation from service the “Rule of 55” | Separate in or after the year you turn 55 | It attaches to the employer plan you left. Roll that 401(k) into an IRA and the exception does not travel with it. |
| 72(t) / SEPP | None, if the series is valid | The series must run for the longer of five years or until 59½. Modify it early and recapture tax plus interest can apply to everything already taken. |
| Governmental 457(b) | None after separation | The additional tax does not apply to the plan's own money, but distributions are still ordinary income — and money rolled in from a 401(k) or IRA can be treated differently. |
Sources: 26 U.S.C. §72(t) and its exceptions; IRS Notice 2022-6 for SEPP methods; IRS Publication 590-B for Roth ordering and inherited accounts. Plan-specific facts must be confirmed against your own plan document.
The ages that actually change the arithmetic
| Age | What changes |
|---|---|
| 55 | Separation-from-service exception becomes available for the plan of the employer you leave, if you leave in or after this calendar year. |
| 59½ | The 10% additional tax on early distributions generally stops. Ordinary income tax does not. |
| 62 | Earliest Social Security claiming age, at a permanently reduced benefit. |
| 65 | Medicare eligibility generally begins. The pre-65 health-cover line in this model ends here. |
| 66–67 | Full retirement age, depending on birth year. The unreduced benefit. |
| 70 | Delayed retirement credits stop accruing. There is no reason to wait past this. |
| 73 or 75 | Required minimum distributions begin — 73 for those born 1951–1959, 75 for those born in 1960 or later. |
Notice how they cluster. Between 59½ and 65 almost nothing helps you, and the most expensive single item — health cover before Medicare — runs the whole way. That stretch, not the very first years, is where an under-built bridge tends to break.
What this model does not do
It does not calculate a 72(t) payment. Selecting that route only tells the model that a compliant series exists. The amortization, annuitization and RMD-method amounts come from IRS Notice 2022-6, depend on a valuation date, a permitted interest rate and a mortality table, and should be produced and checked by a tax professional before any series begins.
The tax figure is one effective rate, not a tax return. It is applied to taxable and tax-deferred withdrawals only. It is not a Form 1040, and it does not model ACA premium tax credits, Medicare IRMAA surcharges or the provisional-income calculation that decides how much of your Social Security is taxable. Those interact, and in the bridge years they interact badly — a large Roth conversion can raise an ACA premium and an IRMAA surcharge two years later at the same time.
Returns are a constant, so there is no sequence risk. A fixed rate every year is the friendliest possible assumption. A weak first five years does far more damage than the same average return delivered evenly, and this model cannot show that. Treat a plan that only just survives here as one that fails in practice.
It does not know your basis. Roth contributions, conversion cohorts and taxable-account cost basis all change what a withdrawal actually costs. The model draws from account totals and does not silently infer that any part of a balance is tax-free.
How the engine was checked
The calculation here is a port of a reference implementation that ships with 26 complete scenarios, each with independently recomputed yearly balances, withdrawals, taxes, penalties and net cash. Every one of those scenarios is replayed against this code, and every yearly figure matches the reference. The only divergence anywhere is in one accumulated summary total, where floating-point summation order produces a difference of about six billionths of a dollar on a figure over eight million. The test runs as scripts/verify-bridge.mjs and a failure blocks release.
Frequently asked questions
What is a retirement bridge?
The stretch between the last paycheck and the start of guaranteed income. Leave at 55 and claim at 67 and it is twelve years long, funded entirely from savings, with no Medicare for the first ten.
Does the Rule of 55 work for an IRA?
No. It applies to the qualified employer plan you separate from in or after the year you turn 55. Rolling that plan into an IRA gives up the exception, which makes the standard advice to consolidate everything into an IRA on leaving a costly default for someone retiring in their fifties.
Should I claim Social Security early to shorten the bridge?
Change the claim age above and watch two things move in opposite directions: the bridge gets shorter, and the benefit is permanently smaller. Claiming at 62 against a full retirement age of 67 cuts the benefit by 30%. The model applies the standard reduction and delayed-credit factors so you can see both effects at once rather than one at a time.
Why does the withdrawal order matter?
Because the accounts are not interchangeable before 59½. Drawing taxable first preserves the tax-advantaged accounts and avoids the 10% additional tax, but it also leaves a larger tax-deferred balance to be forced out later as required minimum distributions. The default order here is a modelling convention, not a recommendation.