You can do everything right on paper — save diligently, spend reasonably, stay invested for the long haul — and still land in a very different retirement than someone who did the same things. The difference often comes down to a factor many retirement checklists leave out entirely: timing. A lot of advice fixates on a single number: the balance. Have I saved enough? It's an important question. But it assumes that two people who...

Many people can tell you their portfolio balance. Far fewer can tell you what else determines whether their retirement actually works. That's understandable. The balance is the number on the statement. It's concrete, and it feels like a score. But judging retirement readiness by that one figure is a little like judging your health by your weight—useful, and nowhere near the whole story. A framework published in the Journal of Financial Planning offers a wider...

It's easy to set estate planning aside once you've done a version of it. You sign the paperwork. You name a beneficiary. You mentally close the file. The only thing is, the file keeps changing. Accounts get opened. Families grow. Laws shift. And in the space between signing and revisiting, a handful of reasonable-sounding assumptions can start to stand in for an up-to-date plan. Here are six of those assumptions, along with what tends to...