Retiree navigating RMDs, Medicare Part D, long-term care considerations, QCDs, estate simplification.
RL-01 is the late-retirement profile where Required Minimum Distributions are active, QCDs become the dominant tax-mitigation lever, and estate-simplification work — beneficiary updates, account consolidation, LTC funding — pushes ahead of growth optimization.
RL-01 captures the late-retirement household inside the Required Minimum Distribution window — age 73 or 75 depending on birth year under the SECURE Act 2.0 amendment to §401(a)(9), with the 50% historical excise tax now reduced to 25% (and 10% if corrected within the correction window). Three regulatory mechanics define the planning surface. First, the RMD calculation itself: each year's distribution is the prior 12/31 balance divided by the Uniform Lifetime Table divisor (or the Joint Life Table when the spouse is more than 10 years younger and the sole beneficiary), aggregated across IRAs but not 401(k)s, with separate calculations for inherited accounts. Second, qualified charitable distributions under IRC §408(d)(8): up to $105,000 per individual annually (indexed) can be transferred directly from IRA to a qualifying public charity, counting toward the RMD without ever appearing in AGI — a meaningfully different result than itemizing a comparable cash gift. Third, Medicare Part D and the IRMAA premium-tier sensitivity to the two-year MAGI lookback means RMDs themselves often push retirees into higher Medicare premium brackets.
The financial signature is distinctive. Median combined income of $62,024 reflects a mix of Social Security, pension (where present), and the RMDs themselves; median net worth of $1.29M with $838k in median investable assets is materially higher than RE-03 because the household has spent a full additional decade in market exposure. Homeownership at 77% is the highest of the retirement archetypes — long-tenure ownership, often paid off. Notably, 23 of 30 households carry a mortgage line in liability composition, suggesting a HELOC or reverse-mortgage tail rather than a primary purchase mortgage. Every household carries legacy/estate and emergency-fund goals; the retirement-savings goal is closed by definition.
What separates RL-01 from neighbors is the active RMD obligation combined with intact decision-making capacity. RL-02 households are widow/widowers on survivor benefits with materially lower assets and a higher cognitive-decline risk profile. RE-01 households are pre-RMD and still running the Roth-conversion runway that closes at RMD onset. The 30-household corpus deliberately concentrates the ages-72-to-82 window because that's where the highest-stakes RMD, QCD, beneficiary-update, and estate-simplification testing scenarios cluster, and where Medicare Part D plan-selection complexity peaks alongside the formulary-and-LIS-eligibility branches.
Aggregated across the 30 RL-01 households in the shipped v3 corpus corpus. Numbers describe the corpus, not population claims.
Michelle is the single-person RL-01 case at 74: gross income of $62k that is partly her RMD, $374k in liquid assets, and $157k of remaining mortgage carry on a long-owned home. Both legacy and emergency goals are on track. The diagnostic pattern is the QCD opportunity — at her income level a $20k–$30k QCD instead of a comparable taxable RMD draw materially reduces AGI, keeps her below the next IRMAA tier two years out, and satisfies both her annual giving and her §401(a)(9) obligation simultaneously.
Every RL-01 household ships with — at minimum — these JSON fields populated. The full schema is documented in the data set you purchase.
Three buyer profiles use RL-01 most heavily. Custodian and broker-dealer operations teams use the corpus to test RMD calculation engines, including aggregation rules across multiple IRAs, the once-per-year rollover restriction, the still-working exception for active 401(k) participants, and inherited-IRA RMD calculations under the post-SECURE Act 10-year-rule with annual-distribution requirements for non-eligible-designated-beneficiaries. Wealth-platform engineering teams testing QCD direct-transfer flows — the trustee-to-charity payment rails, the $105k indexed cap, and the AGI exclusion that does not flow through a typical 1099-R coded distribution — use RL-01 as the canonical fixture. Estate-planning software teams use it for beneficiary-designation audit workflows, revocable-trust funding modeling, and SECURE Act 10-year-rule projections layered on the household's inherited-IRA exposure as children's accounts inherit.
RL-01 is calibrated as the still-cognitively-intact, still-married-or-recently-single late retiree with assets meaningfully above the pension-and-Social-Security base. Widowed retirees on survivor benefits with materially smaller portfolios belong in RL-02. Households where cognitive decline or active dementia is the dominant planning issue are partially represented in RL-02 and intersect with S-04 (caregiver for aging parent) on the family side. Households requiring active nursing-facility care or Medicaid spend-down are not in this corpus — those edge cases live in HC-02 or RL-02 depending on the asset profile. Annuity-dependent late retirees belong in RI-01; dividend-income-only late retirees belong in RI-02. The corpus excludes cross-border retirees and US households with significant foreign retirement income.
Income and asset bands during v3 synthesis were anchored to upper-middle bands of the Survey of Consumer Finances for the 72–82 cohort, with IRA balance distribution loosely informed by IRS SOI individual-account-data and EBRI cohort-level IRA balance research. The corpus over-represents homeownership and longstanding-account-balance profiles where RMD and QCD scenarios are most testable. State distribution favors CA, MD, and VA — a mix of high-cost-of-living retire-in-place patterns and federal-retiree concentration. Per CLAUDE.md §9 the corpus is frozen and not regenerable; calibration claims here are descriptive rather than reproducible, and the RMD-age threshold reflects SECURE Act 2.0 at time of v3 synthesis (age 73 for the bulk of the cohort).
Pre-RMD active early retiree. The Roth-conversion runway is open in RE-01 and closed in RL-01; the dominant tax lever shifts from conversions to QCDs at the RMD boundary.
Elderly widow/widower on survivor benefit. Lower asset profile, higher cognitive-decline-risk, family-support dependency. Use RL-02 when the test surface is post-widowhood fixed-income retirement rather than active RMD planning.
Pension-rich early retiree at mass-market wealth tier. Same income-stability profile but earlier in retirement, pre-RMD, with a smaller portfolio that's less RMD-sensitive.
Estate-planning grantor at higher wealth tier where the planning surface is GRATs, SLATs, gift-exemption utilization, and trust strategies. Use E-02 when the test surface is sophisticated estate-tax-mitigation rather than RMD and QCD mechanics.
RL-01 is the RMD-Stage Retiree: a late-retirement household, typically ages 72–82, where Required Minimum Distributions are active, QCDs are the dominant tax-mitigation lever, and estate-simplification work has moved ahead of growth optimization. Mass-affluent wealth tier with $838k median investable assets.
RL-01 reflects SECURE Act 2.0 as in effect during v3 synthesis: age 73 for those born 1951–1959 and age 75 for those born 1960 or later. The corpus age range (72–82) covers the active-RMD window for the bulk of the cohort.
The corpus encodes the decedent-side household structure rather than enumerating each beneficiary IRA. Builders modeling SECURE Act 10-year-rule scenarios for non-spouse non-EDB beneficiaries should use RL-01 as the source-of-death household and project forward to the beneficiaries; the underlying IRA balances are sized to make those projections realistic.
RL-01 is the actively-planning late retiree, often still married, with meaningful investable assets. RL-02 is the elderly widow/widower at a lower asset profile, on a survivor Social Security benefit, with cognitive-decline risk as an active planning concern. RL-01 covers RMD and QCD mechanics; RL-02 covers fixed-income survivorship and family-support dependency.
RL-01 is tagged for six bundles — B01, B02, B03, B06, B12, and B27 — covering core household data, tax planning, retirement income, healthcare and Medicare, long-term-care, and estate planning. See the sidebar for the specific data sets that ship RL-01 households.
No. The v3 corpus is frozen and not regenerable from current code (drift was confirmed on 2026-05-09). The 30 RL-01 households are a fixed reference dataset; future sampler improvements land in v4.
Download households matching this archetype as part of a Wealth Data Set.
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