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The five expensive years
Can you retire at 62?
Sixty-two is the age most people first can retire, and the one where the money math is least forgiving. You can claim Social Security — at a permanent 30% cut. Medicare is still three years off, so you buy health cover yourself. And the portfolio carries the whole load until benefits begin. This page models that bridge for any nest-egg size, instead of waving the 4% rule at it.
Your numbers
Assumes retirement at 62, planning to 95, a mixed portfolio (workplace plan, taxable, Roth), and pre-65 health cover of $11,000/yr. The full account-by-account version is the bridge calculator.
Retiring at 62 on this plan
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Drawn before Social Security
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Social Security you'll get
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Lowest balance reached
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62 against the other exit ages
Same portfolio and spending, different retirement age. The bridge column is what you self-fund before Social Security — it shrinks fast for every year you keep working, which is the real financial argument for waiting past 62.
| Retire at | Years bridging to SS | Outcome to age 95 | Drawn before SS | Lowest balance |
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Why 62 is the awkward age
Sixty-two sits in a gap that no other retirement age has to cross in full. You are old enough to claim Social Security but young enough that claiming now costs you 30% of the benefit for the rest of your life. You are three years short of Medicare, so health insurance is yours to buy on the open market, at a price that for a couple in their early sixties routinely runs $18,000 to $24,000 a year. And if you want the larger Social Security check that comes from waiting, the portfolio has to carry not five years but eight, all the way to 70.
That is why the useful question is never "is $1.5 million enough to retire at 62." The balance barely moves the answer. Spending moves it. The model above shows the same $1.5M sailing through at $60,000 a year of spending and running into trouble at $80,000 — a difference of about $1,700 a month in lifestyle that decides whether the plan is comfortable or fragile.
The bridge, in one number
The single figure that reframes the decision is how much you draw from the portfolio before any Social Security arrives. Retire at 62, wait until your full retirement age of 67 to claim, and spend $60,000 a year: you self-fund roughly $375,000 over those five years. Delay claiming to 70 for the maximum benefit and the bridge stretches to eight years and well past half a million. That money is gone from the portfolio at exactly the moment it would otherwise be compounding hardest, which is the mechanism behind sequence-of-returns risk.
It also explains why working even one more year is worth more than it looks. Every year you delay retirement removes a year of bridge spending and adds a year of contributions and growth. On the table above, the bridge column typically falls by a third for each five years of later retirement — far more than the raw spending would suggest.
Claiming at 62 versus waiting
You can take Social Security the moment you turn 62, and a lot of people do, often to protect the portfolio from the bridge draw. The trade is permanent: claiming at 62 fixes your benefit at 70% of the full amount for life, while waiting to 70 lifts it to 124%. Between those is a guaranteed, inflation-adjusted return on patience of roughly 8% a year — a rate very few portfolios can promise. If your savings can absorb the bridge, delaying is usually the stronger move, and the calculator lets you see the claim-age choice against your own numbers rather than in the abstract.
The exception is a portfolio that cannot carry the bridge without risking depletion. There, claiming early is not leaving money on the table; it is buying survival insurance for the plan, and the reduced-but-certain check may be exactly right.
The two risks a constant-return estimate hides
Everything above assumes a steady return. Real markets do not cooperate, and two specific risks bite hardest at 62. The first is the health-insurance gap before Medicare at 65 — three years where a market you cannot control meets a premium you cannot avoid. The second is a weak sequence of early returns: drawing the bridge through a down market sells shares at low prices and locks in losses that a good decade later cannot fully undo. A plan that looks safe at a flat 5.5% can fail if its first five years come in negative, which is why the sequence-of-returns view is worth running before you commit.