Retiree with generous defined benefit pension covering most expenses, modest investable assets, limited financial complexity.
RE-03 is the retirement profile where a defined-benefit pension plus Social Security covers most expenses, the portfolio is a supplement rather than the primary income engine, and most withdrawal-strategy software produces irrelevant outputs.
RE-03 captures a profile that doesn't fit cleanly into either FIRE-style portfolio decumulation or the corporate retiree's complex withdrawal-sequencing problem: the already-retired household whose monthly pension and Social Security checks meaningfully exceed core expenses, leaving the investable portfolio as a supplemental buffer rather than the primary income engine. These are former public-sector employees, long-tenure corporate workers from industries that still maintain pensions in pay status (utilities, telecom, manufacturing legacy, federal CSRS), and uniformed-services retirees who have already transitioned through MV-02 into civilian retirement. Two structural realities define the planning surface. First, the actuarial value of the pension is enormous relative to the explicit balance sheet — a $40k/year COLA-protected pension is roughly the equivalent of $800k–$1M in additional investable assets at age 65, but it doesn't appear on the household's balance sheet. Second, sequence-of-returns risk is genuinely low because portfolio withdrawals are discretionary; a 30% market drawdown reduces optional spending but doesn't impair the core-expense base.
The financial signature reflects mass-market wealth tier with high income stability. Median combined income of $94,322 is dominated by pension and Social Security, against $629k median net worth and $326k median investable assets. Homeownership at 76% is the second-highest of the retirement archetypes, reflecting paid-off-or-near-paid-off homes typical of long-tenure single-employer careers. Liabilities are notably thin — only 2 of 25 households carry student-loan debt — and the credit-card and auto-loan presence is transactional rather than structural. Every household carries a legacy/estate and emergency-fund goal; notably no households carry a retirement-savings goal because retirement is already funded by the pension and SSA stream.
What distinguishes RE-03 from neighbors is the inversion of the usual retirement planning problem. R-01 households are choreographing future elections; RE-01 households are running an active portfolio-withdrawal strategy; RE-02 households are managing a 40-year portfolio against ACA cliffs. RE-03 households have already won the income-replacement question, and the planning surface that remains is tax-efficient legacy structuring, IRMAA management of any partial Roth conversions, long-term-care insurance decisions, and beneficiary updates on the pension's joint-and-survivor election. The 25-household corpus deliberately keeps the wealth and income profile mass-market so the archetype isn't confused with the higher-balance H-01/H-02 retirees.
Aggregated across the 25 RE-03 households in the shipped v3 corpus corpus. Numbers describe the corpus, not population claims.
Richard and Patricia, both retired and inside Medicare, sit near the top of the RE-03 net-worth distribution. Combined income at the corpus median ($94k) is almost certainly pension-plus-Social-Security dominated, against $490k in liquid assets and only $2,116 of liabilities. Both legacy and emergency goals are on track. The diagnostic pattern is the inverted withdrawal problem — the household could draw 4% annually and still die richer than they retired; the planning question is whether to convert to Roth for the heirs (and pay an IRMAA bump) or leave the tax-deferred balance for SECURE Act 10-year stretches to the beneficiaries.
Every RE-03 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-03 most heavily. Long-term-care insurance vendors and hybrid-LTC-life-insurance carriers test against this corpus because RE-03 households are the most likely to genuinely consider LTC products — they have a stable income floor to fund premiums and a meaningful but not enormous estate to protect. Estate-planning software teams use RE-03 for legacy-IRA optimization scenarios: SECURE Act 10-year-rule projections on inherited traditional balances, qualified-charitable-distribution flows once the household crosses age 70½, and beneficiary-designation update workflows. Pension-administration and benefits-vendor compliance teams use it to test joint-and-survivor election downstream effects when the pensioner predeceases the spouse and the surviving spouse moves into RL-02 territory — the corpus is the canonical pre-transition state for that downstream modeling.
RE-03 is calibrated as mass-market wealth tier with a single dominant DB pension. Higher-wealth pensioned retirees (where the portfolio is also $1M+ and meaningful) are closer to H-01 or RE-01 depending on portfolio activity. Annuity-dependent retirees who purchased an annuity rather than receiving a DB pension belong in RI-01; dividend-income-dependent retirees with no pension belong in RI-02. The corpus excludes pension-rich households where WEP/GPO is the planning issue — those are still in R-03 if pre-retirement or in a partially-overlapping subset of RE-01. Widowed pensioners receiving a survivor benefit but otherwise on the same balance sheet are RL-02. Retirees inside the RMD years where QCDs and required distributions dominate planning are RL-01, not RE-03.
Income bands during v3 synthesis were anchored to upper-middle bands of mass-market retirees in the Survey of Consumer Finances, with the pension-share-of-income loosely informed by EBRI and the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey on retirement income sources for the 62–72 cohort. The corpus deliberately concentrates the federal CSRS, state-pension-system, and legacy-corporate-DB pattern where the pension is materially larger than typical private-sector defined-contribution retirements would generate. State distribution favors CA, FL, and NJ — a mix of high-pension-prevalence state systems and retirement-destination patterns. Per CLAUDE.md §9 the corpus is frozen and not regenerable; calibration claims here are descriptive rather than reproducible.
Mass-affluent active early retiree with the portfolio as primary income engine and an active withdrawal-sequencing problem. RE-03 households have the pension as primary engine and a much smaller portfolio. Use RE-01 when the test surface is portfolio withdrawal optimization.
FIRE achiever with no pension, no Social Security yet (in most cases), and a 40-year horizon. Functionally opposite profile from RE-03 — same retired status, entirely different income structure.
Public-sector pre-retiree, the natural precursor for many RE-03 households. R-03 is pre-retirement-date with WEP/GPO still being calculated; RE-03 is post-retirement with the pension in pay status and elections settled.
Annuity-dependent retiree where the income floor comes from purchased annuities rather than a DB pension. Similar income-stability profile but different regulatory surface (SPIA contract terms vs ERISA-governed pension).
RE-03 is the Pension-Rich Retiree: an already-retired household where a defined-benefit pension plus Social Security covers most or all core expenses, leaving the investable portfolio as a supplemental and legacy asset rather than the primary income engine. Mass-market wealth tier, typically ages 62–72, with high income stability.
RE-01 is mass-affluent with a much larger portfolio ($1M+ investable assets) where the portfolio is the primary income engine and withdrawal sequencing is the dominant planning problem. RE-03 is mass-market with a smaller portfolio ($326k median investable assets) where the pension dominates and the planning surface shifts to legacy, LTC, and IRMAA management.
Yes. The corpus age range and pay-status pension imply all RE-03 households are Medicare-enrolled. IRMAA is the binding constraint for any tactical Roth conversion or capital-gains realization because the two-year MAGI lookback creates a hard premium-tier sensitivity.
Because retirement income is already funded by the pension and Social Security. The retirement-savings goal that appears in R-01, R-02, and R-03 is implicitly satisfied here, so the corpus surfaces only legacy/estate and emergency-fund goals.
RE-03 is tagged for six bundles — B03, B06, B14, B18, B25, and B27 — covering retirement income, healthcare, employee benefits, decumulation, public-sector planning, and estate. See the sidebar for the specific data sets that ship RE-03 households.
No. The v3 corpus is frozen and not regenerable from current code (drift was confirmed on 2026-05-09). The 25 RE-03 households are a fixed reference dataset; future sampler improvements land in v4.
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