Most retirement forecasts assume your investments earn the same return every year, for the rest of your life. Investments: Future shows you what your plan looks like when your forecast shifts with your stage of life, and how much investment risk suits you along the way. This article is the technical companion: it explains how Allocation Path, the glide-path model inside Investments: Future, is built and where its numbers come from.

Investments: Future lets you compare two ways to forecast your plan:

Investments: Future is currently available to all PlannerPlus members. You can find it in the left menu.

This article is for readers who want to see under the hood — the exact allocations, rates, and methodology behind Investments: Future. You don't need any of it to use the tool.

Allocation Path is built on 25 model portfolios: five risk levels crossed with five life stages. Each portfolio holds six asset classes, grouped into three sleeves:

The equity share drives the differences between portfolios:

Equity share, by strategy and life stage

The remainder is split between fixed income and cash. Cash grows from a 1% sliver in Early Growth to as much as 8–16% in the Retirement Risk Zone and Retirement Income stages, with more for conservative strategies. At that point it doubles as a spending reserve: a cushion for down markets, so a plan isn't modeled selling investments at a loss. Within fixed income, the share of inflation-protected bonds (TIPS) steps up from 5% of the fixed income sleeve in Early Growth to 15% by Retirement Income, adding inflation protection as spending from savings begins.

Each combination of strategy and life stage has its own expected return and volatility — these are the numbers the Allocation Path projections use.

Expected return is a forward-looking annual average — an estimate of what a portfolio like this may earn per year, on average, over the long run. It is not a prediction for any single year.

Volatility describes the typical size of year-to-year swings around that average. In roughly two out of three years, a portfolio's return lands within one volatility measure above or below its expected return; some years fall outside that range entirely.

Expected annual return, by strategy and life stage

Volatility (typical annual swing), by strategy and life stage

Reading the two tables together tells the Allocation Path story: as you move down the rows toward retirement, expected returns give up a little — and volatility gives up a lot. A Moderate portfolio in the Retirement Risk Zone earns about 1.1 percentage points less per year than in Early Growth, but its typical swings shrink by over a third. That trade — modest return for major stability, timed to the years a downturn hurts most — is what the strategic adjustments are for.

You're probably moving from one life stage to the next, for example from Retirement Onramp into the Retirement Risk Zone. Each stage has a different risk profile designed for how close you are to retirement, and the allocation automatically shifts in the projection to match.

If you've used Boldin's existing model portfolios (Historical Rates) to set your rates of return, the Allocation Path numbers will look familiar in shape but lower in level — and it's worth understanding both differences, because they're deliberate.

Difference one: where the numbers come from. The current model portfolio (Historical Rates) rates are built from 30 years of market history — from 1994 through 2024, US stocks returned about 11% per year and 10-year Treasuries about 3.75%, and each model's rate is a blend of the two. Allocation Path's rates are forward-looking: estimates of what markets may return from here, published by major asset managers and reflecting today's valuations and yields. History describes an era that included an exceptional run for US stocks; forward-looking estimates describe the starting point your plan actually faces. Neither is "wrong" — but a plan built on the more sober number has more room to be pleasantly surprised.

Difference two: static versus shifting. A current model portfolio (Historical Rates) holds one allocation and one rate for your entire plan (unless you set a one-time future change) — an Aggressive election is 90% stocks at 30 and still 90% stocks at 80. Allocation Path adjusts automatically: the same Aggressive profile holds 90% equity in early career and steps down to 70% through retirement, with returns and volatility shifting to match. That's why each Allocation Path strategy shows a range rather than a single number.

One more thing the table shows: the comparison doesn't cut one way. Aggressive profiles see meaningfully lower expected returns under Allocation Path — that's the honest cost of not counting on history repeating. But a Conservative saver early in their career sees a higher expected return under Allocation Path (6.94% vs. 5.92%), because the life-stage design lets them hold more growth when time is on their side.

Each model portfolio is constructed from eight low-cost Vanguard ETFs covering the six asset classes:

The equity sleeve is 70% US and 30% international, with the US portion balanced across growth, value, and small-cap funds. The fixed income sleeve blends a total bond market fund with short-term TIPS. The cash sleeve uses an ultra-short bond fund.

Expected returns are forward-looking capital market assumptions — estimates of long-run future returns published by major asset managers. Boldin's figures use BlackRock's assumptions as the primary basis, cross-checked against J.P. Morgan and Vanguard so no single firm's outlook drives the model. Volatility is measured from 10 years of actual monthly market history (through May 2026), computed from the full relationships among the eight holdings — how they move together, not just how much each moves on its own. A 20-year window that includes the 2008 financial crisis is used as a cross-check. The framework has been back-tested from October 2012 through April 2026.

Questions we didn't answer here? Ask Boldin AI in the planner, or reach out to support — we're happy to go deeper.