A Net Worth Tracker for People Approaching Retirement: What to Track

Five years before retirement is the window where a monthly budget stops being the most useful artifact in your financial life and a net worth tracker starts. The Federal Reserve's 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances puts median household net worth for ages 55–64 at $364,500, with a mean of $1,566,900 — a spread that says the "average" retirement profile is a statistical fiction and each household needs its own balance sheet.^[]

What matters in this stretch — often called the retirement risk zone — is not whether this month's grocery spending was on target. It's whether the pre-tax, taxable, Roth, HSA, and pension accounts add up to a number that can cover 25–30 years of withdrawals under realistic assumptions. A good tracker shows that number, broken out by account and tax treatment, updated monthly.

The accounts a pre-retiree needs on one page

Most people approaching retirement have accumulated accounts in pieces: a current 401(k), one or two rolled-over 401(k)s from prior employers, an IRA, a spouse's IRA, a taxable brokerage, an HSA, Series I bonds from a panicked 2022 purchase, a checking buffer, and a mortgage that's paid down or close. A net worth tracker that only sums them into one total leaves most of its value on the table.

The breakdown that actually helps is by tax treatment:

• Pre-tax (traditional 401(k), traditional IRA, pension lump sum): taxed as ordinary income on withdrawal, subject to Required Minimum Distributions starting at age 73.
• Roth (Roth IRA, Roth 401(k)): qualified withdrawals are tax-free, and Roth IRAs have no RMD.
• Taxable (brokerage, bank): cost basis matters, long-term capital gains are taxed at preferential rates, and a step-up in basis at death.
• HSA: pre-tax in and pre-tax out for qualified medical expenses, and after 65 it acts like a traditional IRA for non-medical withdrawals.

Seeing these four buckets side-by-side is what lets you plan withdrawal order and decide whether to do Roth conversions during the low-income window between retirement and Social Security claiming. The same framework flips at the other end of the life cycle, which is why we cover a net-worth tracker from a new-parent angle separately.

The two numbers that anchor the plan

Every pre-retiree should know two numbers cold. First, the annual draw the portfolio supports at a conservative safe withdrawal rate. At a 4% SWR, a $364,500 balance supports roughly $14,580 per year, or about $1,215 per month.^[] Second, the gap between that draw and the retirement spending target after Social Security.

The Social Security Administration reported an average monthly benefit of $2,076 for retired workers in February 2026, with a maximum of $4,018 at full retirement age (67) in 2025 and $5,108 at age 70.^[][] Pair that with the 4% SWR math: a median-net-worth household aiming for a $5,000-per-month retirement leans on about $3,291 of combined SWR-plus-benefit income, leaving a roughly $1,709 monthly gap to close with more savings, lower spending, or working longer. The calculation rendered below frames that math.

What a net worth tracker adds in the risk zone

The five years before and five to ten years after retirement are the window where a bad sequence of returns does disproportionate damage — the portfolio is at its peak and withdrawals are about to start. A common playbook is to build a bond tent: gradually raise bond allocation from roughly 60/40 at age 55 to something closer to 50/50 or 45/55 at the retirement date, then let equities rise again through the first decade of retirement.

A tracker that only shows total net worth misses the allocation drift that makes the bond-tent strategy work. What you need, on a rolling basis, is overall asset allocation versus your target glide path (at least quarterly), account-level allocation (because the 401(k) target-date fund might be doing something very different from the taxable brokerage), and a cash reserve expressed in months of expenses — for a bond-tent approach, holding two to three years of expected withdrawals in short-duration bonds and cash removes the forced-selling risk. That is the shift: from a budget that asks "am I under target this month" to a balance sheet that asks "does this month's allocation match what I'll need to start selling from in 2031."

Catch-up contributions are worth more than most pre-retirees realize

The SECURE 2.0 Act created a super catch-up for workers who reach ages 60 through 63 in a calendar year. For 2025 the extra catch-up is $11,250, on top of the standard $23,500 401(k) limit, compared with the normal $7,500 age-50 catch-up.^[] That's a four-year window where a high earner can push an additional $3,750 a year into tax-advantaged space.

A net worth tracker is the right place to confirm you're using it. The contribution shows up as a payroll deduction, the balance shows up on the dashboard, and the tax reduction shows up in the refund-vs-liability line. Linking the three tells you if March and April contributions are on pace for the annual cap.

What I'd actually track monthly

If I were five years out, a one-page view would show the four tax-treatment buckets and their month-over-month change, allocation drift against my glide path, and months of expenses held in cash and short-duration bonds. It would also show year-to-date contributions against the IRS cap for each tax-advantaged account, the projected Medicare Part B premium at 65 (standard $185 in 2025, $202.90 in 2026, with IRMAA surcharges tied to MAGI from two years prior),^[] and a months-of-retirement-expenses-covered projection at a 4% draw.

Half the value of a tracker at this stage is that 50% of workers in the 2025 EBRI Retirement Confidence Survey said they wanted help figuring out whether they have saved enough.^[] The answer usually lives in a spreadsheet nobody has opened in six months. A tracker that pulls accounts automatically, classifies them by tax treatment, and puts the draw gap on page one replaces that spreadsheet with a standing answer.