Late starter for retirement savings, maxing catch-up contributions, downsizing home, children leaving, focused on retirement.
P-05 is the late-starter household compressing 30 years of retirement saving into a 10-year window — empty-nest cash flow newly available, catch-up contributions maxed, Roth conversions in the planning window. It's the canonical fixture for any product that models the closing decade before retirement under explicit shortfall.
P-05 exists because the household between 48 and 58 with mass-affluent net worth and an explicit retirement shortfall has a planning surface that doesn't show up in either earlier-career accumulation or HNW pre-retirement archetypes. §414(v) catch-up contributions ($7,500 over the elective deferral for those 50+, and the SECURE 2.0 enhanced catch-up of $11,250 at ages 60–63 starting in 2025) are at maximum; IRA catch-up of $1,000 applies; HSA catch-up of $1,000 applies; the household has a 5–10 year window to execute Roth conversions before required-minimum-distribution thresholds and Medicare IRMAA brackets compress the planning space. Social Security claiming optimization is live — the difference between claiming at 62 vs 67 vs 70, and the spousal-benefit interaction, drives a material portion of retirement income. Empty-nest transition is happening (median dependent count is materially lower than P-01/P-03, and 14 of 25 households still carry dependents — the others have aged through), which frees cash flow that newly redirects into retirement and home-equity acceleration.
Cash-flow shape is high-savings-rate compression. Median combined income is $173,213 — much lower than P-01/P-03 because P-05 is explicitly the mass-affluent late-starter, not the peak-earner — but the savings rate is structurally high because mortgage is well into amortization and dependents are aging out. Median net worth is $1.01M with $426k liquid; 72% of the corpus owns a primary residence and home equity is meaningful enough that downsizing is a credible retirement lever. Concentration in CA, NY, and MA reflects where the income-to-cost-of-living squeeze produces the late-starter pattern.
What makes P-05 distinct from neighbors is the *explicit shortfall* and the *constrained planning window*. P-01/P-02/P-03 have the same age range but at higher wealth tiers where catch-up contributions are routine rather than diagnostic. R-01 is one stage later — the corporate pre-retiree five years out — where the surface is healthcare-bridge and Social Security claiming rather than catch-up acceleration. R-02 is the self-employed version of pre-retirement with business sale as the retirement event. P-05 is specifically the *playing catch-up* household — saving rate matters more than asset selection, and time arbitrage matters more than tax arbitrage.
Aggregated across the 25 P-05 households in the shipped v3 corpus corpus. Numbers describe the corpus, not population claims.
Rebecca is a single late-fifties professional with $173k income and $1.33M net worth — past peak-saving age and inside the narrow window where catch-up contributions and Roth conversions still matter. The diagnostic shape is high liquid ratio ($738k of $1.33M is liquid) and minimal debt ($4,695) but a retirement target of $2.84M that she's behind on. This is the household where the 'is downsizing on the table' decision actually moves the projection, not just trims rounding. Test your retirement-readiness logic against this profile to confirm it surfaces the Roth-conversion window rather than just rendering a generic shortfall.
Every P-05 household ships with — at minimum — these JSON fields populated. The full schema is documented in the data set you purchase.
P-05 is most heavily used by three buyer profiles. Retirement-planning platforms validate Roth-conversion-laddering tools, Social Security claiming-age optimizers, and Monte Carlo projections against households with explicit shortfall — exactly the place over-optimistic planning tools break. Recordkeepers and 401(k) plan-administration vendors use P-05 to exercise catch-up-contribution UI flows, enhanced catch-up eligibility (SECURE 2.0 ages 60–63), and the in-plan Roth conversion mechanics that become relevant in this window. Robo-advisors with target-date glide-path logic use P-05 to test glide-path overrides for late-starter clients where the default age-based equity allocation is inappropriate for the explicit catch-up profile.
P-05 is calibrated to mass-affluent households with an explicit retirement shortfall in the 48–58 age band. Pre-retirees with adequate assets and a smooth glide path are R-01 (corporate) or R-02 (self-employed). High-net-worth households in the same age band where catch-up is a rounding line item rather than a strategic lever belong in H-01 or H-02 — the planning surface there is estate and tax optimization, not shortfall closure. Public-sector pre-retirees with defined-benefit pensions are R-03, where WEP/GPO and pension-COLA mechanics dominate. Households with an inherited windfall arriving inside this age window are P-06 or E-01. Divorce-in-progress pre-retirees who are rebuilding from a split balance sheet are S-01 — the planning surface overlaps but QDRO mechanics and alimony dominate.
P-05 income and net-worth bands during v3 synthesis were anchored to EBRI Retirement Confidence Survey and Vanguard 'How America Saves' late-career-cohort data, cross-referenced to upper-middle-income SCF bands. The explicit retirement-shortfall framing — every P-05 household carries retirement as the top goal, and the corpus is intentionally weighted toward off-track outcomes — reflects the archetype's diagnostic purpose. Catch-up contribution and Roth-conversion eligibility are modeled at the household level (qualified-plan balances, IRA presence) rather than tracked as per-year contribution decisions. Per CLAUDE.md §9 the v3 corpus is frozen and per-domain priors aren't independently auditable; treat calibration claims as descriptive of synthesis intent rather than reproducible.
Corporate pre-retiree with adequate assets and 5-year horizon. Use R-01 when the planning surface is healthcare-bridge, pension, and Social Security claiming — not catch-up acceleration.
Self-employed pre-retiree where the business sale is the retirement event. QSBS, installment-sale, and SEP-IRA mechanics replace catch-up contributions as the dominant lever.
Affluent investor at higher wealth tier with no shortfall. Use H-01 when the household is in the same age band but already at $1M–$3M investable and the planning surface is tax-loss harvesting and estate.
FIRE achiever — the opposite trajectory. RE-02 is the early-saver pulling forward retirement at the same age range that P-05 is pushing it back.
P-05 — Pre-Retirement Catch-Up is the mass-affluent household ages 48–58 with an explicit retirement-savings shortfall, compressing 30 years of saving into a 10-year window using §414(v) catch-up contributions, Roth conversions, empty-nest cash-flow redirection, and home-equity levers like downsizing.
R-01 households are 5 years from retirement with adequate assets and a smooth glide path — the surface is healthcare-bridge, pension, and Social Security claiming optimization. P-05 households are the same age but with an explicit shortfall, where catch-up contributions and aggressive saving (rather than withdrawal planning) are the active lever.
Combined gross income median is $173,213 with a 25–75 range of roughly $156k to $185k — much lower than peak-earner archetypes because P-05 is explicitly mass-affluent late-starters. Median net worth is $1.01M with $426k median liquid.
Because the diagnostic value of the archetype is precisely that — testing how a product handles an explicit shortfall in the closing decade before retirement. A late-starter corpus that mostly hits retirement targets wouldn't surface the recovery and acceleration logic that buyers need to validate.
P-05 is tagged for six bundles — B02, B03, B06, B14, B16, and B19 — covering tax planning, social security planning, retirement contribution strategies, employee benefits, equity compensation, and education planning. See the right-hand sidebar for the data sets that ship P-05 households.
No. The shipped v3 corpus is frozen and not regenerable from current code (drift was confirmed on 2026-05-09 per CLAUDE.md §9). Sampler improvements land in a future v4 release with per-archetype golden fixtures in CI.
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