Elderly widow or widower on fixed income, Social Security survivor benefit, Medicare, limited assets, family support.
RL-02 is the post-widowhood, single-tax-filer, fixed-income late-retirement profile — Social Security survivor benefit, simplified balance sheet, and cognitive-decline risk as an active planning variable rather than a hypothetical.
RL-02 captures the household that has transitioned through widowhood and is now living as a single late-life retiree on a survivor Social Security benefit and a simplified balance sheet. Three structural realities define the planning surface. First, the filing-status transition: in the year of death the household generally files MFJ for the last time; thereafter the survivor files as a Qualifying Surviving Spouse for up to two years (if a dependent child qualifies) and then as Single, which compresses every tax bracket and increases the Medicare IRMAA sensitivity meaningfully. Second, the Social Security survivor benefit: the surviving spouse generally receives the higher of their own retirement benefit or the deceased spouse's benefit, but not both, and the GPO interaction (where the survivor receives a non-covered government pension) can offset it. Third, cognitive decline is no longer a hypothetical — the median household age of 81 places the corpus firmly inside the population where Mild Cognitive Impairment prevalence exceeds 20% and where financial-exploitation risk is a Reg BI and senior-protection compliance concern.
The financial signature reflects mass-market wealth tier with reduced asset base post-widowhood. Median income of $77,903 — single-filer at this income level lands in the 22% marginal bracket — against $600k median net worth and $295k median investable assets. Homeownership at 50% is materially lower than RL-01's 77%, reflecting both downsizing post-widowhood and the survivor's economic reality. No households carry dependents (all `num_dependents = 0`), consistent with the median age of 81. Liabilities are thin and transactional: credit cards and modest auto loans, with mortgage presence in only 15 of 30 households. Every household carries legacy/estate and emergency-fund goals; the underlying balance sheet supports modest legacy provision but is materially smaller than what dual-spouse late-retiree households carry.
What separates RL-02 from neighbors is the combination of single-filing status, survivor-benefit income structure, age-related cognitive-decline risk profile, and the family-support dependency that often accompanies it — adult children helping with finances, granted POAs, or in some cases co-signed on accounts. RL-01 households are still actively planning and largely cognitively intact; RE-03 households haven't experienced the widowhood transition. H-04 widowed households at HNW tiers have a completely different planning surface — significant trust-and-estate complexity rather than survivor-benefit and Medicare planning. The 30-household corpus deliberately calibrates the mass-market widowhood transition where the most common compliance and senior-protection testing scenarios cluster.
Aggregated across the 30 RL-02 households in the shipped v3 corpus corpus. Numbers describe the corpus, not population claims.
Brian, 83 and widowed, sits in the lower-asset half of the RL-02 distribution: income at the corpus median ($76k, almost certainly Social-Security-plus-modest-pension dominated), but only $105k in liquid assets against $118k of total liabilities including a remaining mortgage carry. Both goals show on track because the legacy target ($350k) and emergency target ($15k) are calibrated to the asset base. The diagnostic pattern is the squeeze case — the household can fund current expenses indefinitely but has minimal capacity to absorb a long-term-care event without spend-down, which is exactly the senior-protection and Medicaid-planning scenario the archetype is built to exercise.
Every RL-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 RL-02 most heavily. Compliance and senior-protection teams at broker-dealers and RIAs use the corpus to test FINRA Rule 2165 temporary-hold workflows, FINRA Rule 4512 trusted-contact designation prompts, and Reg BI senior-investor suitability documentation against realistic single-filer late-retiree balance sheets. Medicare and Medicaid planning software teams use RL-02 for Low-Income Subsidy eligibility scoring on Part D, Medicare Savings Program qualification, and the Medicaid spend-down math that applies at the lower-asset end of the corpus distribution where a long-term-care event would exhaust assets within two to four years. Estate-settlement and probate-software teams use RL-02 as the canonical single-survivor source-of-death state for projecting beneficiary distributions, TOD-titled-account transitions, and the simplified-probate workflows common at this asset level.
RL-02 is calibrated as mass-market widowhood — the most common late-life transition profile in absolute terms. Widowed HNW spouses with $1M+ portfolios and trust-and-estate complexity belong in H-04, not RL-02. Households where the surviving spouse is significantly younger and still working belong in S-01 or S-04 depending on the surrounding context. Households with active dementia, formal guardianship, or active long-term-care residency are not fully represented — those edge cases intersect with HC-02 (disability claimant) and S-04 (caregiver for aging parent) on the family side. Cross-border widowhood and totalization-agreement survivor benefits are excluded. The corpus also excludes recently-widowed households still in the Qualifying Surviving Spouse two-year window; RL-02 is calibrated to the post-QSS single-filer steady state.
Income and asset bands during v3 synthesis were anchored to mass-market percentiles of the Survey of Consumer Finances for single-female-headed households aged 75–88 (the dominant demographic of US widowhood by both count and life-expectancy mechanics, though the corpus includes both widows and widowers). Homeownership rate of 50% was informed by Census Bureau housing data for the cohort. State distribution is intentionally diffuse — CA, NY, and VA appear but together account for only 27% of the corpus, reflecting the dispersed geography of US widowhood relative to other archetypes. Per CLAUDE.md §9 the corpus is frozen and not regenerable; calibration claims here are descriptive rather than reproducible.
Active late retiree, still cognitively intact and often still married. Materially higher investable assets, RMD and QCD as primary planning surface. Use RL-01 when the test surface is active distribution planning rather than survivor-benefit and senior-protection compliance.
Widowed spouse at HNW wealth tier ($1M+ portfolio, often $3M–$10M). Trust-and-estate complexity, advisor relationships, and tax-mitigation planning dominate — a completely different planning surface from mass-market widowhood.
Caregiver for aging parent — the family-side companion archetype. Use S-04 when the buyer-relevant scenario is the adult child managing an RL-02-like parent's finances, including POA-based account access and elder-financial-abuse prevention.
Pension-rich early retiree before the widowhood transition. Same mass-market income-stability profile but pre-survivorship, MFJ filing, and intact joint-and-survivor pension election.
RL-02 is the Elderly Widow/Widower: a single late-life retiree, typically ages 75–88, living on a Social Security survivor benefit and a simplified balance sheet. The defining features are single-filer status, fixed-income reliance, family-support dependency, and elevated cognitive-decline risk.
H-04 is widowhood at HNW wealth tier ($1M–$10M+) where trust-and-estate complexity, advisor relationships, and tax-mitigation planning dominate. RL-02 is mass-market widowhood where survivor-benefit calculation, Medicare planning, Medicaid spend-down risk, and senior-protection compliance dominate. The two archetypes share the widowhood transition but cover fundamentally different planning surfaces.
Implicitly. The median age of 81 places the corpus inside the population where Mild Cognitive Impairment prevalence is elevated, but the household records do not pre-encode a cognitive-status flag. Builders testing senior-protection workflows should treat the household profile as the input and overlay capacity-related scenarios as needed.
RL-02 reflects the post-transition steady state: the household has settled into single-filer status, the surviving spouse is on the survivor benefit, and the year-of-death tax filing has occurred. Builders modeling the transition itself (year-of-death MFJ, Qualifying Surviving Spouse two-year window) should treat RL-02 as the destination state and project backward.
RL-02 is tagged for six bundles — B01, B03, B06, B12, B18, and B27 — covering core household data, retirement income, healthcare and Medicare, long-term-care, decumulation, and estate planning. See the sidebar for the specific data sets that ship RL-02 households.
No. The v3 corpus is frozen and not regenerable from current code (drift was confirmed on 2026-05-09). The 30 RL-02 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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