Corporate employee 5 years from retirement, pension + 401k, Social Security optimization, healthcare bridge planning.
R-01 is the five-year runway: the late-fifties corporate employee where the testing surface stops being accumulation and becomes decumulation choreography — pension elections, Social Security claiming, and the pre-65 healthcare bridge all colliding in a single decision window.
R-01 captures a planning window that almost no other archetype touches with the same density. Inside roughly five years, a corporate employee in their late fifties to early sixties has to lock in a defined-benefit pension election (joint-and-survivor vs single life vs lump sum), choose a Social Security claiming strategy (62, FRA, or delayed to 70 with the spousal-benefit interaction), bridge employer health coverage to Medicare eligibility at 65, and decide whether to run a Roth conversion ladder while marginal brackets are still under control before RMDs begin. The 401(k) is sizable but not always the largest qualified-plan asset: a frozen or active cash-balance pension and an NQDC deferral schedule frequently sit alongside it, each with its own distribution mechanics. Sequence-of-returns risk is no longer abstract — a 20% drawdown in the first two retirement years is materially different from the same drawdown ten years in.
Cash flow is still W-2 dominant — median combined income sits at $151,637 in the corpus, with $1.02M in investable assets and $636k of liquid net worth at the median. But the household is no longer accumulating in any meaningful sense; they're staging assets. Mortgage paydown sits next to 401(k) catch-up contributions ($7,500 over the regular limit at 50+), HSA catch-up at 55, and frequently a deferred-compensation lump sum scheduled to land in year-of-retirement. Every R-01 household in the corpus carries both a retirement and a legacy/estate goal, and roughly two-thirds carry an active debt-payoff goal — usually the mortgage they'd like extinguished before the income drops.
What separates R-01 from adjacent archetypes is the combination of imminent decumulation, intact corporate-benefit complexity, and a still-employed status. P-05 households are catching up because they're behind; R-01 households generally aren't behind — they're choreographing. RE-03 retirees already have the pension flowing and the decisions made. R-02 self-employed pre-retirees face a similar timeline but without pension or employer health coverage, and with a business-sale event substituting for a pension election. The R-01 corpus deliberately concentrates the corporate-pension-plus-401(k)-plus-NQDC pattern that drives the highest-stakes pre-retirement product surfaces.
Aggregated across the 35 R-01 households in the shipped v3 corpus corpus. Numbers describe the corpus, not population claims.
Michael and Betty sit at the corpus income median, with net worth slightly below it — a household where the retirement-goal target ($2.9M) is clearly out of reach on the current glide path while the debt-payoff and legacy goals are on track. They are the canonical R-01 stress case: a five-year horizon, sufficient liquid assets to fund the pre-Medicare bridge, but a savings-rate-vs-target gap that forces an explicit conversation about working two more years, lowering the income-replacement target, or accepting a Monte Carlo failure rate above 20%.
Every R-01 household ships with — at minimum — these JSON fields populated. The full schema is documented in the data set you purchase.
Three buyer profiles draw most heavily on R-01. Wealth-platform retirement-income modules use it to validate the joint pension-election / Social Security claiming optimizer — the only place in the catalog where both the DB-pension decision and the 62-vs-FRA-vs-70 decision are simultaneously open. Compliance teams use R-01 to populate Reg BI rollover suitability scenarios where 401(k) balances exceed $1M and the destination IRA fee comparison is material. Tax-software and planning-software teams use it for Roth-conversion-ladder calculators that need to model the multi-year bracket-management problem against a real NQDC distribution schedule, ACA subsidy cliffs during the pre-65 bridge, and the IRMAA brackets that activate at age 63 lookback for Medicare premium tiers.
R-01 is calibrated as a still-employed corporate W-2 household with intact employer benefits and a defined-benefit element. Households where the pension is absent and a business sale substitutes for it belong in R-02; households where the pension is a public-sector DB plan with WEP/GPO Social Security offsets belong in R-03. Households that have already retired and are inside the first decumulation years sit in RE-01 (mass-affluent, active lifestyle) or RE-03 (pension-rich, low-complexity). Behind-on-savings catch-up cases at the same age live in P-05, not R-01 — the R-01 corpus is choreographing, not catching up. Recently widowed pre-retirees and those navigating QDRO-driven asset splits are not included; H-04 and S-01 cover those.
Income and asset bands during v3 synthesis were anchored to upper-mass-affluent percentiles of the Survey of Consumer Finances for the 55–65 cohort, with the DB-pension prevalence informed by EBRI participation data for large private-sector employers. Social Security claiming-age distribution loosely tracks SSA published claim-age data; the corpus over-represents delayed claiming relative to the population because the testing scenarios that matter to buyers concentrate there. State distribution concentrates in CA, NY, and WA because the high-balance 401(k) + NQDC stack — the product testing surface buyers care about — is geographically clustered. Per CLAUDE.md §9 the corpus is frozen and not regenerable; calibration claims here are descriptive rather than reproducible.
Self-employed pre-retiree. No pension election, no employer health bridge, and a business-sale event substitutes for the lump-sum-vs-annuity decision. Use R-02 when the planning question is QSBS, installment-sale structuring, or SEP-IRA / Solo 401(k) terminal contributions.
Public-sector pre-retiree with a 403(b)/457 and a generous DB pension. Social Security is partially offset by WEP/GPO; mass-market wealth tier rather than mass-affluent. Use R-03 when the test scenario hinges on WEP, GPO, or DROP program election.
Same age, but behind on savings rather than choreographing decumulation. P-05 households are still primarily in accumulation mode with catch-up contributions as the dominant lever; R-01 households are designing the withdrawal sequence.
The natural next stage — already retired, the elections are made, and the household is inside Medicare and inside the active withdrawal phase. Use RE-01 when the test scenario is in-retirement withdrawal-sequencing rather than retirement-date planning.
R-01 is the Corporate Pre-Retiree, roughly five years from retirement: a late-fifties to early-sixties household with a still-active corporate W-2, an intact defined-benefit or cash-balance pension election pending, a sizable 401(k) plus often NQDC deferrals, and a Social Security claim that has not yet been filed. The diagnostic feature is the simultaneous pending status of all four major retirement decisions.
P-05 households are behind on retirement savings and are using catch-up contributions, deferred-compensation deferrals, and lifestyle adjustments to close the gap. R-01 households are not principally behind — they are choreographing decumulation decisions across pension, Social Security, healthcare, and Roth-conversion windows. The financial signature differs accordingly: R-01 median investable assets are $1.02M; P-05 is materially lower.
Pre-65 healthcare-bridge planning is a defining feature of the archetype, but the corpus surfaces it through household structure (retirement-target dates, ages, dependent status) rather than as an explicit insurance line item. Builders modeling COBRA, ACA marketplace subsidies with Roth-conversion income, or retiree-medical should treat the household profile as input and run the bridge cost as a derived scenario.
R-01 is tagged for six bundles — B02, B03, B06, B14, B18, and B19 — covering tax planning, retirement income, healthcare and Medicare, employee-benefits decisions, decumulation, and Social Security optimization. See the sidebar for the specific data sets that ship R-01 households.
No. The shipped 1,451-household v3 corpus, R-01 included, is frozen and not regenerable from current code (drift was confirmed on 2026-05-09). Future sampler improvements will land in v4 with per-archetype golden fixtures in CI; v3 is purchase-and-keep static data.
The corpus encodes total investable assets and liquid net worth rather than enumerating each NQDC plan as a distinct line. Builders who need explicit 409A distribution schedules will need to overlay them on the R-01 household structure; the underlying income and asset levels are sized to make that overlay realistic.
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