Optiml strategy

Set Your Estate Target

Name: Optiml
Availability: OnlineOnly
Rating: 4.9 (30 reviews)
Author: Optiml

Lock in your legacy. Spend everything else.

Set My Estate Target

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Optiml

Spending over time

Spending vs. estate target

Your spending

Estate target

Target

What is this strategy?

The Set Estate Target strategy gives you the best of both worlds. You decide the exact amount you want to leave behind, whether that is $100K to help with a down payment, $500K for your kids, or a specific charitable gift, and Optiml maximizes everything you can spend before then. No more guessing how much you can afford to enjoy.

What Set Target actually means

Lock in your legacy. Spend everything above it.

This strategy lets you set an exact after-tax dollar amount you want to leave behind for your beneficiaries. Optiml then tells you whether that target is achievable, and how much more you can spend through retirement on top of your base income needs while still hitting it.

Optiml first confirms your desired after-tax income is met every year of your plan. It then checks what your after-tax estate value could realistically be, compares it against your set target, and builds a plan that guarantees you hit that number. Along the way, it calculates your Surplus Spending: how much more you can spend each year, on top of your base income, without ever missing your estate goal.

Your estate financial target is typically made up of your liquid investments, such as your TFSA, RRIF, and non-registered accounts. You also have the option to include physical assets you want to leave behind as part of that overall value. It is recommended to keep them separate, but the choice is yours.

This is not about hoping you hit a number.

It is about knowing exactly what you will leave behind, and spending everything above that floor with complete confidence.

Base Expenses + Surplus Spending

Age 62

Base Expenses

$78,000

Surplus Spending

+$21,500

Your actual surplus spending depends on your estate target, accounts, income needs, and goals. Never a template.

The optimizer

Optiml does not follow an order. It tests everything.

There is no preset withdrawal order. Every possible combination of deposits and withdrawals is evaluated against your specific financial plan.

Candidate plan

optimizer

Under the hood

A guaranteed legacy floor, and as much spending as possible above it.

This strategy runs on the same optimizer as Maximize Retirement Spending. It finds the highest sustainable surplus spending within your chosen window, using the same objective. The key difference is one additional binding constraint: your after-tax estate at the end of the plan must be at or above the target you set.

Think of it as placing a floor under Maximize Retirement Spending. The optimizer cannot accept any plan that misses your estate goal: that target is a hard requirement, not a preference. Within that constraint, it finds the maximum amount you can spend during retirement. If both are achievable, you get exactly that: the legacy you planned for, and the highest possible surplus spending on top of it.

Your estate target is defined in after-tax dollars and covers your liquid investment accounts by default. You also have the option to include the value of physical assets such as real estate. Including assets raises the apparent estate value and can free up more spending room, but asset values are subject to market conditions, sale costs, and timing uncertainty. Keeping physical assets separate and treating them as a bonus above your liquid target is generally the more conservative approach.

The objective

Identical to Maximize Retirement Spending. The optimizer finds the highest surplus spending within your window, with each year weighted by Optiml's proprietary timing weight:

Maximize: ∑ₜ [ Surplus_t · w_t ]

= year index within the surplus window

Surplus_t

= above-base spending in year t

w_t

= Optiml's proprietary timing weight

proprietary

Optiml has a unique, proprietary way to make sure you spend the most when it matters most to you. It is built into every plan and calibrated to your own accounts and the window you choose.

Left alone, an optimizer would push your spending to the end of your plan. Optiml's proprietary timing keeps your surplus in the years you chose to enjoy it.

age 80 $1,259,400·ages 62–79 $0

Every path must satisfy the constraints

Your income from all sources, minus all taxes, living expenses, goals, and deposits, must net to exactly zero each year. No path is accepted that leaves you short of what you need to live.

Income − Taxes − Expenses − Goals − Deposits = 0

Outside your surplus window this holds exactly as written. Inside the window, surplus spending becomes part of the equation. The remaining funds after taxes, base expenses, goals, and deposits make up surplus spending, and that surplus must be positive:

Income − Taxes − Base Expenses − Goals − Deposits = Surplus ≥ 0

Additionally, every accepted plan must satisfy an estate floor condition. Your after-tax estate at end of plan must meet your target:

After-Tax Estate ≥ Estate Target

This constraint is enforced alongside the spending constraints. The optimizer first verifies the estate floor can be reached, then maximizes surplus above it. Both goals are solved simultaneously, not sequentially.

The Optiml layer

proprietary

The formulas above are the clean version of the problem. Solving them for a real Canadian household, year by year, is where Optiml's proprietary work happens.

calibration

Calibrated to your household

Optiml's proprietary timing weight is calibrated to your own plan, so your spending lands when it matters most to you, never a textbook constant.

tax engine

Every candidate plan, fully taxed

Each plan the optimizer considers runs through Optiml's complete Canadian tax engine: federal and provincial brackets, credits, OAS recovery, and RRIF and LIF rules, every year.

optimizer

Built in-house

The Optiml optimizer is engineered in-house to solve problems with hundreds of interacting decisions reliably, settling on the plan that best meets your goal.

Worth knowing before you choose this strategy

Including physical assets such as real estate can have a significant effect on the optimizer's behaviour. If your estate target is $1M but your primary residence is projected to be worth $1.5M at the end of the analysis and you have chosen to include it, the optimizer sees the target as already satisfied by the property alone. It will then behave like the Maximize Retirement Spending strategy, draining your liquid investments as much as possible, since there is no additional estate floor left to protect.

Liquid at 90

$1,000,000

Home

Not counted

Surplus Spending

$21,500/yr

The result is a precise, year-by-year plan: your estate target is locked in, your surplus spending is maximized above it, and every account-level withdrawal is sequenced for the lowest possible tax cost along the way.