The Keep is the portfolio value you need today—before withdrawing this year's living expenses—to fund the years ahead and still reach your long-term goal.
The Keep Calculator™ is an on-line, non-downloadable software calculator for retirement planning — providing temporary use of on-line non-downloadable software for providing online retirement calculators for individual consumers.
Spending down in retirement feels like falling behind. But if you're above the Keep, it's exactly what a funded plan looks like from the inside.
One of the hardest adjustments in retirement is watching a balance that spent decades going up start going down. Forty years of saving built a number. Now that number is smaller than it was last year, and that feels like losing.
But a declining balance is often not a problem. In many cases, it's exactly what a well-funded retirement plan looks like.
Imagine you retire with enough saved to fund every year of your plan and still land on your intended goal. If you spend what you planned and markets deliver your assumed return, your balance falls each year — not in a chaotic way, but predictably, as you consume the present value of future years.
The Keep falls alongside it. Each year, there's one fewer year to fund. The minimum portfolio value required to stay on track goes down. If your balance stays above the Keep as both decline, the plan is working.
Spending down without seeing the impact is the problem. Spending down on plan — knowing you're above the Keep — is not.
Most retirement tools are built to protect against running out of money. That's appropriate — longevity risk is real, and running out of money is the bad outcome worth worrying about.
But the tools built to prevent that outcome sometimes create the opposite problem: retirees who spend far less than their plan allows, living more constrained in their healthiest years than they needed to, and leaving far more behind than they intended.
Research consistently shows that retirees tend to underspend. A study by the Employee Benefit Research Institute found that most retirees spend at rates well below their means. The caution is understandable — uncertainty is uncomfortable — but it has a real cost: experiences not had, help not given, choices not made during years when they were still available.
Not all declines are equal. The Keep distinguishes between two different situations.
If your balance falls below the Keep, the current scenario isn't fully funded under your assumptions. That's information — a bend in the plan. The response is to look at the levers: living costs, Social Security timing, landing goal, longevity age. Adjust and rebaseline.
If your balance hits zero before your longevity age, that's a different situation — a break. The plan can no longer cover living costs. That's the outcome worth preventing, and it's not the same as simply declining or falling short of a legacy goal.
The distinction matters because conflating them creates unnecessary anxiety about a naturally declining balance in a funded plan, and might also obscure a real gap that deserves attention.
The Keep Calculator includes a year-by-year balance walk that shows how your balance and your Keep move alongside each other. In a healthy funded scenario, you'll see the balance declining and the Keep declining in parallel — the balance staying above the Keep all the way to the landing row.
If the balance crosses below the Keep at some point in the walk, that's where the funded/unfunded line is crossed. If it hits zero, that's the depletion point.
Reading the walk isn't about memorizing a table. It's about seeing the shape of your plan — where the margin is tight, where there's room, and when guaranteed income arriving will change the picture.
See how your balance and your Keep move together over time.
Run your numbers in the Keep Calculator →This article is educational and is not individualized financial, tax, or investment advice.