Financial Independence / Retire Early adherent, retired in 40s–50s, 4% rule, Roth conversion ladder, ACA planning.
RE-02 is the household that retired in its 40s or early 50s — a 40-year planning horizon, a multi-year ACA-subsidy-driven income management problem, and a Roth conversion ladder built before the first SEPP distribution can begin.
RE-02 represents the Financial Independence / Retire Early household: the FIRE achiever who exited the workforce in their late 30s, 40s, or early 50s and is now running a multi-decade portfolio against the 4% rule (or a more conservative variable-withdrawal variant). The planning surface is genuinely different from any other retirement archetype because the time horizon is roughly twice as long. Three regulatory mechanics define the archetype. The first is the ACA marketplace and the income-management problem: most FIRE households deliberately target a MAGI inside the subsidy band to qualify for premium tax credits, which creates a hard interaction with portfolio income realization. The second is the Roth conversion ladder under IRC §408A — converting traditional IRA balances annually so that each tranche becomes accessible penalty-free five years later, bridging the gap to age 59½ before §72(t) SEPP distributions become unnecessary. The third is the absence of any pension and, in most records, the absence of meaningful Social Security accruals beyond the 35-year averaging window, which materially shifts the asset-only sustainability question.
The financial signature reflects accumulated rather than inherited wealth. Median combined income of $124,408 is largely portfolio-generated — capital gains, qualified dividends, and Roth conversion ladder rungs — against $963k median net worth and $516k median investable assets. Homeownership at 72% is higher than the income alone would suggest because FIRE-typical paid-off-home strategies are over-represented in the corpus. The median adult age of 44 is unique to this archetype — no other retirement profile is calibrated below age 60. Every RE-02 household carries a legacy/estate and an emergency-fund goal, and notably, 68% carry one or more dependents — early-retiring parents are a distinctive subset.
What separates RE-02 from neighbors is the multi-decade horizon, the absence of all defined-benefit and employer-benefit structures, and the explicit ACA income-management discipline. RE-01 households retired at conventional ages and aged into Medicare; RE-03 households are pension-dependent at mass-market wealth tiers; R-02 households are still working through a business sale that may eventually fund a similar profile. The 25-household corpus is deliberately tight — FIRE achievers are an organic-search-heavy archetype where buyers want a recognizable reference for a profile that's hard to construct from public data alone.
Aggregated across the 25 RE-02 households in the shipped v3 corpus corpus. Numbers describe the corpus, not population claims.
Jeffrey is the FIRE-with-dependents case: a single parent at 54, retired with $1.07M net worth and $582k in liquid assets, $124k of realized income that is well inside the standard ACA subsidy band, and almost no debt outside revolving balances. Both legacy and emergency-fund goals are on track. The diagnostic pattern is the single-parent-with-dependent overlay on the FIRE profile — Roth conversion sizing must respect both the ACA cliff and the kiddie-tax interactions on any taxable account income attributed to the dependent.
Every RE-02 household ships with — at minimum — these JSON fields populated. The full schema is documented in the data set you purchase.
Three buyer profiles use RE-02 most heavily. DIY retirement-planning tools use the corpus to validate long-horizon Monte Carlo engines against realistic FIRE-typical asset mixes and the ACA income-management constraint. Tax-software teams use RE-02 for Roth conversion ladder modeling with §72(t) SEPP fallback branches and ACA premium tax credit reconciliation under realized capital gains. Healthcare-marketplace partners and brokers serving the early-retired population use it to test exchange-plan selection UX with subsidy-cliff visualization, the 400% FPL cliff (where it applies), and the Medicaid-eligibility boundary at the low-MAGI end of the spectrum.
RE-02 is calibrated as a self-funded FIRE household — no pension, no business-sale liquidity event still pending, no inherited windfall. Households that achieved early retirement through a windfall sit in P-06 or E-01 depending on source; households where the early-retirement event is a business exit sit in R-02 (if still in the exit window) or RE-01 (if already exited and conventional age). FIRE-aspirational households still in the accumulation phase are not represented here — closer to A-06 or F-01 with high savings rates. Coast-FIRE households (continuing part-time work indefinitely) are partially represented; the corpus skews toward full-FIRE rather than barista-FIRE. Cross-border FIRE retirees (geo-arbitraging abroad) are excluded.
Income, asset, and savings-rate priors during v3 synthesis were informed by Bogleheads, ChooseFI, and r/financialindependence community survey data alongside Federal Reserve SCF tabulations for the upper-decile saver cohort in the 35–55 age band. The corpus deliberately concentrates two-earner pre-FIRE-savings households and post-FIRE single-parent and married variants because the buyer-relevant testing scenarios cluster there. State distribution favors CA, NY, and NJ as pre-FIRE high-income origins; post-FIRE geographic-arbitrage moves are implicit but not explicitly tracked. Per CLAUDE.md §9 the corpus is frozen and not regenerable; calibration claims here are descriptive rather than reproducible, and the FIRE-community survey priors are directional rather than statistically anchored.
Conventional-age active early retiree (60–70). Already in or entering Medicare, shorter horizon, different healthcare-bridge structure entirely. Use RE-01 when the test surface is Medicare/IRMAA and conventional-age withdrawal sequencing.
Pension-rich retiree at mass-market wealth tier. Most expenses covered by pension; limited investable assets to sequence and no FIRE-style ACA management problem. Use RE-03 for pension-funded fixed-income retirement scenarios.
Tech employee with equity, still accumulating. The FIRE-aspirational precursor — high savings rate, equity comp, ACA-aware tax planning, but not yet retired. Use A-06 for pre-FIRE accumulation testing.
Self-employed pre-retiree exiting via business sale. Same no-pension profile but the wealth event is a transaction and the household is still in the exit window rather than post-exit.
RE-02 is the FIRE Achiever: a household that achieved Financial Independence and Retired Early, typically in their late 30s to early 50s. The defining features are the multi-decade planning horizon, the absence of pension and employer-benefit structures, the ACA marketplace as the primary healthcare path until 65, and a Roth conversion ladder bridging the pre-59½ liquidity gap.
RE-01 retired at conventional ages and is either in or entering Medicare during the corpus window. RE-02 retired roughly two decades earlier with a 40-year planning horizon, ACA subsidy management instead of Medicare/IRMAA, and a Roth conversion ladder rather than a pre-RMD conversion runway. The median adult age in RE-02 is 44; in RE-01 it is 66.
Partially. The corpus skews toward full-FIRE (no ongoing work) over coast-FIRE (continuing part-time work indefinitely). Builders testing coast-FIRE scenarios specifically should expect to overlay part-time income on the household structure; the underlying balance sheet and goal levels are sized to make that overlay realistic.
The corpus encodes household balance sheets and goal structures but does not pre-compute a §72(t) Substantially Equal Periodic Payment schedule. Builders modeling pre-59½ withdrawals via SEPP or the Rule of 55 should treat RE-02 as the household profile and apply the SEPP calculation as a derived scenario.
RE-02 is tagged for six bundles — B02, B03, B04, B14, B18, and B22 — covering tax planning, retirement income, accumulation-strategy comparison, employee-benefits, decumulation, and behavioral-finance scenarios. See the sidebar for the specific data sets that ship RE-02 households.
No. The v3 corpus is frozen and not regenerable from current code (drift was confirmed on 2026-05-09). The 25 RE-02 households are a fixed reference dataset; future sampler improvements ship in v4 with per-archetype golden fixtures in CI.
Download households matching this archetype as part of a Wealth Data Set.
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