Can I retire at 55 with $250,000 as a single person?

At 55, a single person with $250,000 is in the most-studied retirement bracket in the US — and the conventional wisdom is mostly right: a 60/40 portfolio, a 4% withdrawal, and Social Security at FRA gets most households across. The interesting question is which of those three levers you'd most want to flex if your specific spending number doesn't fit.

The four levers, in priority order

Spending. With $250,000, the 4% rule gives you $833/mo of inflation-adjusted withdrawal — before Social Security adds on top. That works in low-cost-of-living areas, with paid-off housing, with Medicare A/B/D and a Medigap plan kept simple. In coastal-metro spending environments, $250,000 is more of a foundation than a complete plan; the conventional advice is to keep working a few years longer or move toward the 60th-percentile state for retirement cost.

Asset allocation. The typical retiree in this bracket lands somewhere between 50/50 and 70/30 stocks/bonds. A 100% bond portfolio sounds safe but loses to inflation over 30 years; a 100% stock portfolio has higher expected return but a deeper drawdown that you may not behaviorally tolerate at 75. A glide path that gets more conservative each year (an extra 1% to bonds annually after 60) is the textbook compromise.

Social Security. A single person at 55 is in the bracket where the claim-age decision moves the lifetime NPV most — roughly $80,000–$140,000 between 62 and 70 depending on PIA. Without a spousal benefit safety net, the longevity-insurance value of delaying to 70 is at its highest; below-average health is the strongest argument the other direction.

Common pitfall: single retirees consistently underestimate healthcare cost variance. Long-term care alone has a median lifetime cost around $172,000 (Genworth, 2025) and roughly 1-in-3 single retirees will need it for over a year. Yearfold's calculator doesn't model LTC explicitly — set aside ~$200K-$400K outside the simulated portfolio if you're self-funding that risk.

Why a single number isn’t an answer

A bank calculator might tell you “Yes, you can retire — your $250,000 will last.” A Monte Carlo simulation tells you the share of plausible futures in which it lasts, the share in which it doesn’t, and what specifically goes wrong in the failure cases. The 10–25% of paths that don’t work are the part you’d actually want to defend against — by trimming spending, raising allocation, delaying Social Security, or working a couple of years longer.

Yearfold runs all 10,000 paths against your specific inputs and shows you the percentile band, plus three concrete fixes that move the success probability the most per unit of effort. Read the full methodology for the data-source and assumption details.