Templates for Retirees.

A curated set of 15 spreadsheets and binders — and the guides that go with them — for the decade either side of retiring. Work out the number, decide where to live, make the house work for the next twenty years, and put the records somewhere the people who need them can find them.

The decisions cluster, and then the paperwork does

Retirement arrives as a run of large, mostly irreversible choices taken close together — when to stop, whether the number is really enough, whether to stay in the house, whether to move nearer the grandchildren — and then, quietly, as a filing problem nobody warned you about. These templates are built for both halves. They plan and record; they are not financial, tax, legal or medical advice, and none of them tells you what to decide.

The hardest of those choices is usually where. The Where-to-Retire Decision Helper scores up to five places — including staying exactly where you are — on cost, taxes, healthcare, closeness to family, climate and fit. It handles the money differently from everything else on purpose: cost and taxes are the two criteria where lower is better, so it won't let you hand-rate them. You enter what a year in each place would cost and it converts that onto the same scale as the things you can't price, using a built-in reference covering all 50 states and DC. Try the free where-to-retire web scorer first, or read what weighted decision scoring is.

If the answer turns out to be stay — and it does more often than people expect — the work moves to the house. The Aging-in-Place Home Safety & Modification Planner scores each room, ranks the fixes by safety per dollar, and tells you what to do first rather than handing you a list of everything at once. Start with what aging in place involves. If it turns out to be go, the Senior Downsizing & Move-Management Binder does the arithmetic that move actually turns on — every item sized, checked against the capacity of the new home, and the move priced off the volume you keep.

Underneath all of it is the number. The Retirement Planner and Mortgage Payoff Calculator cover the two figures that most often decide the date — what you'll have, and what you still owe on the house. And when the questions turn to the generation above you, the Elder-Care Decision Helper scores the care rather than the lobby.

Then the filing problem. The Estate & Life-Admin Binder records where everything lives — accounts, policies, deeds, passwords, the people to call — so the people who need it can find it without a search. Read what an estate binder is. You own every one of these files outright: no seats, no monthly fee, and nothing that stops working if you stop paying.