The math changes depending on who you're planning for. Pick the setup that fits your life.
Starting at 38 and starting at 50 are different trips. Both can get you there — the pace just changes.
There's no wrong answer here. But picking a target is what makes the math real.
What you've already saved is your starting point. Everything from here builds on it.
This is the number that moves the most. Small changes here add up more than almost anything else.
Your income shapes what retirement needs to cost — and how much you can realistically set aside each month.
Let's talk about how to get there.
↓Marcus's prospects. Marcus's prospects. Mostly dual-income families, 35–55, asking "are we okay?" for retirement. This answers it before the meeting starts.
Five questions framed as a camping trip. Are you on track to make camp before dark? If not, live sliders show what closing the gap actually looks like.
The metaphor keeps hard news from feeling like a verdict. When someone's behind, they get a route adjustment, not a final answer. The visual arc — dawn to dusk to campfire — earns the emotional weight without stating it. Also did not want to have to type in numbers.
This was a fun challenge and I wanted to make something fun and not at all financial feeling, because dealing with money can be scary and a bit impersonal, so I also wanted to connect it to a relatable emotional journey.
To create the final output I used the Workspace Builder from Jake's GitHub repo and used Marcus's and the Competition's brief as the input context. Then I described the goal: to create an interactive journey similar to a choose your own adventure or a twine. Then I used the brand-voice skill from Anthropic to extract Marcus's brand voice and with Claude laid out a 5 stage plan to get to the final output. After that it was a matter of following the stage setups one by one, answering Claude's questions and tweaking the spec for each stage. I outputted 2 times because of a silly mistake but other than that it was a fairly straightforward process. Note: I paid zero attention to the math except for the visual progression of the imagery.
A few takeaways: