Yay retirement repo! Let's start talking about our initial ideas/sketches for what this thing might be. I'll start with some of my rough sketches and a few other ideas I've been thinking about.
Excited to hear feedback and see everyone's ideas!
Sketches
Age sliders
The first of three variations on a theme.
This concept starts off with two visualizations that compare retirement income if you claim Social Security at two different ages. This visualization can either be generic or generated from your inputs of age, income, savings, expected claiming age, etc. Initially, the visualization on the left is for a later claiming age, and the one on the right is for an earlier claiming age. We might think about including things like survivor benefits in this comparison to get you thinking about some uncomfortable facts that you might otherwise ignore (i.e. you die before your spouse).
Following that is one or more stories (either fictional or from real people) that present the claiming decision from an outside perspective.
Last, there are alternative claiming scenarios/action steps you can take to claim later if you want to.
Category comparisons
The second of three variations on a theme.
This has a lot of elements from the concept above, but they're more granular (Social Security income is broken out from personal savings) and explicitly compared.
Also, this concept compares lots of factors other than income that may have a bearing on your decision of when to claim: free time, declining health, etc. The examples in this concept now are mostly made up, but the idea is that your claiming decision is going to be based on more than just a Spock-like assessment of when is most financially logical.
See the effects
The third of three variations on a theme.
Here, a lot of the same visualizations are present from the first two concepts, but they're all overlaid on each other to give a more integrated view of your post-retirement finances. Again, this visualization may be generic or may take into account user inputs we decide to as for. As always, non-optimal claiming choices are framed as losses rather than optimal choices being framed as gains.
Following the One Graph to Rule Them All are alternate strategies that you can explore. Hitting that "see the effect" button will shift your graph to see what, say, claiming later will do for you.
This concept ends with stories from other people, again to help bring an outside perspective to the claiming decision and as a way for us to gently prompt you to think about what will happen to your plan if it doesn't go as planned (hey-o!).
Giant timeline
A totally different approach from the first three concepts, this one pretty much requires you to put in some basic info in a previous step. From that info we whip up a timeline of your financial life from today through the great unknown showing expected income, expenses, and places where you might be leaving "money on the table." Your inputs are shown above the timeline and could be sticky so that you can see how changing an input might change your timeline.
Alongside that timeline are action steps around how you can change your financial future (claim later, work longer, pay off debt now, etc.) with links to more information, as needed.
After your timeline are alternate timelines that give you options you might not have thought of.
Action steps
This concept ditches a single, large visualization for a series of smaller ones and is much more focused on action items to change your claiming strategy rather than a graph of your retirement finances.
Like the previous concept, this one depends on collecting input on your current situation as a first step. From there, though, the output is organized into action items you can take to optimize your claiming strategy. Each step would have a little visualization with it to show how implementing the item would change your plan. We could have a repository of lots of different action items and only show the, say, three most relevant to each user.
This might be a good concept to explore if we want to move away from gathering the standard info (age, income, etc.) in the first step and instead want to focus on questions that get more at why you may want to claim early, like "are you worried about being forced into retirement by a layoff?" or "do you expect to retire early because of health concerns?" The action items could be a good way to start addressing those reasons for not claiming optimally (this idea comes from Melissa's research, "According to EBRI's (2006) report, 38 percent of individuals reported retiring early; although 39 percent of early retirees surveyed said they did so because they could afford to, 24 percent reported that they wanted to do something else and 22 percent indicated that they retired early for family reasons. If individuals in those latter two groups have little personal retirement savings and no pension, they will quite likely claim Social Security benefits upon retiring." http://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v71n4/v71n4p15.html)
Just wait!
This concept came from an offhand comment I made after a meeting that maybe our MVP is a single web page that says "Just wait six months!"
What if we actually structure the tool that way, though? You come to the tool, tell us when you're thinking of claiming and how long you might be willing to hold off (or another consideration that might impact your claiming strategy, like a layoff or sick spouse), and we show you what would happen. You'd have the option of entering more information about your specific situation to get a really customized report. We'd also give you action items on how you can fit whatever event you've selected into your retirement plan.
Affective forecasts
This concept is heavily influenced by the "Predicting Future Happiness" section at http://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v71n4/v71n4p15.html. Basically, humans are terrible at accurately predicting how they'll feel in the future, so we'll help them out by asking (sometimes pointed) questions that could affect their decision of how to claim. We'll provide feedback based on their answers.
The sketch has all the questions and feedback on a single page, but questions could come on one page, followed by feedback on the next.
Other ideas
- One-month graph view instead of multi-year graph to focus in on a single, representative month and prevent information overload
- Play with sliders to see how changing inputs affects outputs
React
Typescript
Django
Laravel
Facebook
Microsoft
Google
Alibaba
D3
Tencent