Updates & fixes

A US version of the planner · 21 October

Planner v7 now comes in two versions. The new US version is for people who live in the United States. It is the same planner, with the same engine, checks and AI co-pilot, but without the currency, country and living-abroad settings, and it costs less. The planner you already have is now called the International version, and it works exactly as before: this update puts that name in its title and header, nothing it calculates has changed, and your saved plans carry over automatically.

If you bought the planner before today, you have the International version and your updates carry on as usual. If you buy the US version and later need the International one, for a UK pension or a move abroad, say, write to dev at webnomad.org and you pay only the difference. From now on, a fix that only touches the international settings is marked (International version) on this page.

A full check of the calculations and forms, and RMD ages in the Roth Conversion Optimizer · 20 October

Your Monte Carlo figures will move slightly with this update. Each plan’s Monte Carlo run uses its own fixed set of random returns, so the same plan always gives the same answer. That set used to be chosen from the way the plan was saved, which meant typing a note in Plan notes changed the result. It is now chosen from what the plan works out to, so a note no longer moves it. Every plan gets a new set of random returns once; they are drawn the same way as before.

This release comes out of a full check of the planner against damaged files and awkward typing. A plan file with a damaged section now loads with that section reset and a note saying so; before, it could replace your plan and then stop the buttons working. A file that holds no plan is refused with a message instead of reporting success. A rate typed by mistake, such as a 20-digit return or a loss of more than 100%, is no longer used: the box goes back to the rate you had, so balances can no longer show $NaN or run off to infinity. The help calculators, the Annuities tab and the Replan hint now handle the same mistakes.

If you work in pounds or Canadian or Australian dollars, amounts no longer shift by a fraction each time you save. Each box is rounded for display, and reading it back used to convert the rounded figure, so a $512,345 401(k) could become $512,345.57 after an unrelated edit. A box you have not edited now keeps its exact amount. A US-dollar plan set to living abroad keeps that setting when you switch currency and back, and Undo after a Reset brings it back too. Under the hood no longer lists Medicare and ACA thresholds for a plan outside US healthcare.

The help now says RMDs start at 73, or 75 if you were born in 1960 or later, which is what the planner already used, and the Plan Health glossary lists all 14 checks. If you retire before 59½ with your 401(k) left untouched, a 401(k) withdrawal saved in that early phase by an older plan file is now dropped when the plan opens; it used to be paid until your next edit. The Roth Conversion Optimizer, version 24, in the bundle and on its own, now uses the RMD age for your birth year: it used 73 for everyone, which closed the conversion window two years early for anyone born in 1960 or later. Your saved plans carry over automatically.

Help for disability insurance from work · 14 October

A user asked how to enter disability insurance from their job: a fixed share of their salary that never rises and stops at a set age. The planner already handles this in the US pension / disability field, and the help now walks through it. Set the cost-of-living increase to 0 and the end age to when the payments stop, and enter what the policy pays after any reduction for SSDI. Choose the tax treatment by who paid the premiums: taxable if your employer paid them, tax-free if you paid them yourself with after-tax money, and split across the two pension fields if you shared the cost. On a joint plan, set its survivor share to 0, because the payments stop at death.

On the Australian card, the note about benefits already being paid when your plan starts now names your own Age Pension as well as your spouse’s. Your saved plans carry over automatically.

Benefits already being paid when your plan starts, and a spouse on SSDI · 10 October

If a benefit is already being paid when your plan starts, its figures may move with this update. The last release fixed this for SSDI and private pensions, and this one applies the same rule to everything else. A UK State Pension, CPP, OAS or Age Pension, your spouse’s Social Security and pensions, and your own Social Security claimed before the plan starts are now read as the amount being paid when your plan starts, and they rise with their cost-of-living increase from there. Before, the planner raised them from the age the benefit began, so a plan starting at 66 for a benefit claimed at 62 added four years of increases to an amount that already included them. Each box now says which amount it wants. If you typed the amount from the year you claimed, change it to what you will receive when the plan starts.

Your spouse can now be on SSDI. Tick the box beside their Social Security and the planner lets the benefit start before 62, skips the earnings test, starts their Medicare 24 months after SSDI begins, and follows SSDI’s rules in the survivor projection. The earnings-test warning is now worked out for each of you separately and stops at full retirement age.

Around the interface, text and buttons now meet the WCAG AA contrast standard in all five visual styles, light and dark, and four boxes that had no label now have a name a screen reader can announce. If you replan partway through a phase, the Lump sums tab points out any one-time event in that phase, which is paid on the day you replan, so you can remove one you have already received. The second pension’s ages now say whose age they are, the buttons along the top wrap at phone width instead of running off the screen, and the AI assistant and the help pages describe the new rule. Your saved plans carry over automatically.

SSDI and pensions you already receive, and tax for plans outside the US · 10 October

If you already receive SSDI or a pension, or your plan is set outside the US, some figures will move with this update. A user spotted that SSDI they already receive was projected too high: when the plan started after their SSDI did, the planner treated today’s check as the amount from the year SSDI began and added a cost-of-living increase for every year since. It now reads the amount you enter as what you receive when your plan starts and raises it from there, and a pension or disability benefit already being paid works the same way. SSDI still rises with the Social Security COLA every year and carries on for life as your retirement benefit, which is how SSA pays it. The instructions for SSDI and for private disability now agree, a disability benefit’s COLA and end age sit right beside it, and the planner points out a benefit that starts before 62 and is set to pay for life.

For plans outside the US, US citizens living abroad or in the UK now pay the 3.8% Net Investment Income Tax once their investment income is high enough. A UK resident’s tax on a taxable windfall now shows on the UK line, and the Foreign Tax Credit now covers only income both countries tax, so a Roth conversion made while living in the UK keeps its US tax. Australian residents can claim taxable money paid into Super as a concessional contribution, taxed at 15% up to the yearly cap, and the planner notes money paid into Super after 75. Canadian and Australian phase cards show your own tax band, and the Roth what-if tool, the AI assistant, the PDF report and the Tax & ACA tab now describe the rules that apply where you live.

Around the interface, the tax breakdown behind each phase card now adds up to the figure it shows, including a windfall’s tax and the early-withdrawal penalty, and the link to the full terms in the disclaimer is easier to read in dark mode.

Notes and warnings that update as you go · 6 October

We went through every screen of the planner looking for notes and warnings that only showed up after you reloaded the page, and fixed each one. The one you were most likely to meet is on the Lump sums tab: when a change somewhere else removes the phase a lump sum was in, the “Not counted” warning now appears right away, and it clears as soon as you pick the phase the event belongs in. The same now goes for the hint about phase cards wrapping onto a second row, the IRMAA table when you switch to married filing jointly, the notes under your income around retirement, the overseas healthcare row, the survivor spending goal and the Medicare start age for SSDI.

Two fixes affect what is saved. Your Monte Carlo and backtest settings in the Advanced section were not being saved, so a reload put the old values back; they are now kept with your plan. Typing your spouse’s age and moving quickly to the next box could put the previous age back; it now keeps what you typed. The Annuities calculator also opens on the annuity you added to your plan rather than on its starting example. Your saved plans carry over automatically.

Your income around retirement, and Medicare and ACA costs worked out year by year · 4 October

Some of your projected figures will move with this update, mostly in the years around Medicare. The planner now asks for your income in the two years before you retire and any salary you earn in the year you retire, so your first Medicare premiums, that year’s tax and your ACA subsidy reflect them, with the SSA-44 work-stoppage option if you expect to file it. We have also made improved engine calculations for healthcare and one-off events: IRMAA is priced on the calendar-year tax return Medicare reads for each month, ACA premiums use each year’s own poverty line, and one-time expenses and windfalls now count in that year’s ACA, IRMAA and investment-income tax, along with any extra Social Security they make taxable. The release also carries several engine bug fixes, among them the age-65 deduction in the phase you turn 65, and a taxable windfall you pay into your 401k, which is now taxed when you withdraw it, as a rollover is.

Around the numbers there are general interface updates. Phase cards, popovers, Plan Health, the PDF report and the AI assistant now quote the same year-by-year figures the planner charges, so a note about the ACA cliff or IRMAA names the year it applies to, and whichever IRMAA option you choose on the Taxes & healthcare tab (the two-year rule, SSA-44 relief, or the premium from your SSA notice) carries through to every screen. Your saved plans carry over automatically, with nothing to re-enter.

Improved engine calculations and general interface updates · 29 September

Your projected figures will move a little with this update. We have made improved engine calculations right across the planner: how growth compounds, how US, UK, Canadian and Australian tax is worked out, and how Social Security is paid to married couples and survivors. Most long-range balances now come out a few percent lower, and some plans will see bigger changes, so open yours after updating and check the headline figures. The release also carries several engine bug fixes, and Monte Carlo, the historical backtest and the stress tests now judge your plan by the same rules as the main projection.

Around the numbers there are general interface updates. The setup wizard, Replan, Plan Health, the PDF report and the AI assistant show clearer and more consistent figures, and more screens keep up when you switch currency, undo a change or open another plan. Your saved plans carry over automatically, with nothing to re-enter.

UK residents: Social Security is now shown and taxed the same way everywhere · 22 September

Some figures will change if your plan uses UK residence. Plans on any other residence are unaffected.

Phase cards now say how your Social Security is taxed when you live in the UK. Under the US-UK tax treaty, US Social Security paid to a UK resident is taxed in the UK and not in the US, and the planner’s tax figures already work that way. The note under the US tax bracket now says so directly, SS taxed in the UK only, in place of a US “percent of Social Security taxable” figure that did not apply. The step-by-step working in Help and in the report’s calculation pages explains the same thing, and the AI assistant now sees the UK treatment rather than the US percentage.

If you live in the UK and are not a US taxpayer, your Social Security is now included in your UK tax. The treaty rule applies to every UK resident, not only to US citizens. With Non-US — no US tax selected, UK tax in the phases where Social Security is paid now includes it, and net income is lower to match.

One-off withdrawals by UK residents are now taxed on top of your full UK income. A lump sum taken from your 401k or brokerage account is taxed on top of that year’s income, and for a UK resident that income now includes your Social Security. On a sample plan, the UK tax on a $60,000 401k withdrawal went from $16,617 to $23,898. If you are planning a large one-off withdrawal while living in the UK, check how much of it now reaches the expense.

Smaller things in the same release: the AI assistant now treats IRMAA and ACA subsidies as not applying to plans outside US healthcare (UK, Canadian and Australian residence, and plans marked as not US taxpayers), and the hint beside the report’s Include calculations option now says it adds about three pages per phase rather than one.

Changing an exchange rate now leaves the rest of your plan exactly as it was · 17 September

None of your figures will change with this update.

Editing a plan after changing an exchange rate now touches only what you edit. The planner keeps every amount in US dollars and converts it for display. If your plan was shown in another currency and you changed an exchange rate, either under Override rates or with Use live rates, the boxes on the Edit values tab went on showing figures converted at the old rate. The next change you made on that tab then read all of them back at the new rate, which scaled every balance, benefit and withdrawal by the size of the rate change. Those boxes now update the moment a rate changes, so nothing moves except the figure you edit.

If you have used custom exchange rates while viewing your plan in another currency, please check your balances and income figures against your own records. Plans viewed in US dollars, and plans where the rate was never changed, were not affected.

Smaller thing in the same release: for UK residents, the AI assistant now describes US Social Security the same way the planner calculates it, taxed in the UK rather than the US under the US-UK tax treaty.

The historical backtest names your own toughest years, and the AI starts on Sonnet 5 · 16 September

None of your figures will change with this update.

The historical backtest now names the toughest start years for your own plan. The card below the stress-test grid used to close with a general remark that the late 1960s and 1970s tend to be the hardest years to retire into. That holds for studies that replay past inflation as well as past returns. This backtest replays real market returns against the withdrawals in your plan, which stay at the amounts you set, so its hard years can be different ones. The card now reads them from your own results, lists any start years that ran out of money, and says what the test leaves out. For inflation risk, look at the high-inflation rows of the grid above it, or at Monte Carlo. The user guide in your download carries the same change.

The AI assistant now starts on Claude Sonnet 5. If you have never chosen a model, that is the one it opens with. A model you picked yourself stays exactly as it is, and the full list is still read live from your provider, so newer models keep appearing without an update. The short fallback lists the planner uses when it cannot reach that live list now name current models too.

Smaller thing in the same release: the Real (today’s money) badge on each phase card, and the inflation info icon on the What-if tab, now link through to the fuller glossary entry on real versus nominal income.

ACA premium figures corrected, and a refresh now shows its working · 27 August

If your plan has ACA years before Medicare, your figures will move slightly with this update, and not in your favor. Two separate things were wrong with how those years were priced, and both pushed the same way.

The percentages were rounded. The ACA caps your premium at a share of your income that climbs as your income does. The planner was carrying those figures as 3%, 4%, 6% and 8% where the published 2026 schedule is 3.14%, 4.19%, 6.60% and 8.44%.

And the climb was being treated as a staircase. The real table rises steadily across each income band; the planner applied one flat rate for the whole band, the rate from its lower edge. So unless your income sat right at the bottom of a band, your premium came out low — by a little at the start of a band and by more towards the top of it. The planner now follows the published curve between the same published points, which is what it should have been doing all along. Small differences on their own, but they apply to every ACA month in the plan, and understating a cost quietly overstates what you have left to spend.

The help text was out of date in a way that mattered more. It told you the ACA caps your premium at 8.5% of your income. That was the enhanced-subsidy cap, and it expired at the end of last year alongside the return of the 400% cliff. Five places in the planner said it. All five now describe the real sliding scale.

Those percentages can be refreshed now, like every other tax figure. They had been written into the calculation itself rather than stored as settings, which meant Fetch current rates could not reach them — they were only correctable by me, in a release, which is how they came to drift without anyone noticing. They are ordinary figures on the Edit values tab now, and the annual refresh picks them up with the rest.

After a refresh, each figure now tells you what happened to it. The old summary said how many figures were updated and stopped there, which left the more useful question unanswered: what about all the others? Every figure is now marked — updated, confirmed as already correct, changed but not applied, or requested and not returned. That last one is the case worth catching: a figure the lookup quietly skipped used to look exactly like one it had checked and found fine. A control on the Edit values tab quietens the markers once you have read them, though the count of anything unchecked stays visible either way.

Smaller thing in the same release: the blue dot marking a value you have changed since your baseline was rendering red in one of the color themes, which read as an error rather than a note to yourself. It is blue everywhere again.

Housekeeping: the planner now tells me which version it is · 24 August

Nothing works differently and none of your figures will change.

Here is what changed and why. When I release an update I have had no way of knowing whether it reaches anyone — whether people are still running a version from months ago, or whether the update notice works at all. So once a day the planner now sends the site a single number: the version it is running. That is the whole message. No name, no email, no identifier, nothing about your plan, and nothing that could tie one day's check to another.

The version check that shows you the Update available notice is deliberately untouched by this — it talks to a separate address, so if the new part ever fails or I remove it entirely, your update notice carries on working exactly as before. The planner still runs completely offline, and every one of these requests fails silently by design rather than interrupting you.

Canadian tax figures corrected, and a safer rate review · 22 August

If you plan in Canadian dollars, your figures will shift slightly with this update. The planner was carrying a mixture of two tax years: the lowest federal rate and the first two bracket ceilings from one year, the upper two ceilings from another. That combination matched no actual year. The federal rates and all four ceilings, plus the basic personal amount, are now a single current set. The 2026 Medicare Part D premium is updated too.

The rate review now shows you the whole IRMAA table. That ladder holds twenty separate figures — five income thresholds and both a Part B and a Part D surcharge for each — and the review used to summarize it in a single line. You could not see which of the twenty had actually moved, which is not really a review at all. It now lays out every tier side by side, marking only what changed.

It will also tell you when a proposed change is not a real one. If every figure comes back within a dollar of what you already have, that is a rounding artefact rather than a rate change — Medicare does not adjust a surcharge by pennies — and the planner says so instead of quietly offering to overwrite correct numbers with slightly wrong ones.

A correction for anyone retiring to the UK, and this year’s tax figures built in · 22 August

If you are planning a move to the UK, your numbers will change with this update, and not in your favor. The planner treated US Social Security as taxable only in the United States. That is the wrong way round. Article 17(3) of the US–UK tax treaty says social security is taxable only in the country you live in — so once you are a UK resident, your Social Security is taxed by the UK and not by the US. It is also a “saved exception”, which means it still applies even though you are a US citizen.

The practical effect is that UK-resident plans now show a higher tax bill and less net income. Depending on the size of your benefit that can be a few thousand dollars a year. Nobody enjoys an update that makes the picture worse, but a plan built on the wrong rule is not worth having, and it is better to find this now than at your first UK tax return. The Foreign Tax Credit does not cancel it out: the UK starts taxing at 20% above the personal allowance, while the US taxed only part of the benefit behind a standard deduction.

The tax figures the planner starts with are current again. A fresh download now opens with this year’s numbers already in place — the standard deduction, the tax bands, the poverty levels behind ACA subsidies, the Medicare Part B and Part D premiums, and the full six-bracket IRMAA table. Previously you had to refresh those yourself before the plan meant much. You still can, and should, once a new year’s figures are announced.

Long-run assumptions are now kept separate from this year’s facts. Inflation, the Social Security COLA and the UK triple lock are not figures to be looked up and applied for ever — the planner compounds them across your whole retirement, so one year’s announcement is not the rate to assume for the next thirty. Refreshing rates no longer touches them, and if the AI does suggest a change to one, it now arrives unticked with an explanation of why it matters.

The interactive demo on this site has been rebuilt on the same figures, so what you try before buying matches what you get.

Fetch current rates now covers everything — and shows you the figures before it uses them · 22 August

The button at the bottom of the Edit tab is called Fetch current rates now, because tax brackets were only ever half of what it does. It reaches every annual figure in the planner: the whole six-bracket IRMAA ladder rather than just the first threshold, the Part B and Part D premiums, the poverty levels behind your ACA subsidy, the RMD age, the UK State Pension age, the disability earnings limits, and the Australian marginal rates.

The bigger change is what happens when the answer comes back. It used to go straight into your plan. Now you get a table first: every figure it wants to change, what you have beside what it proposes, and a tick box against each one. Nothing moves until you press Apply.

Anything that looks wrong arrives already unticked, with the reason next to it — a figure outside the range that number can sensibly take, brackets that do not rise in order, a value that has jumped much further than a year's indexation would explain. These figures come from an AI, and an AI states a wrong number in exactly the same tone as a right one. Putting them in front of you first is the only honest way to hand them over.

Two things make the answers better as well as safer. Where your AI provider supports it, the lookup now searches the web rather than answering from memory — which matters, because every number here is reset each year and a model working from memory will give you last year's. And it only asks about the figures your plan actually uses, so a US plan is not paying for a lookup of Canadian brackets. There is a tick box if you want the lot.

Under the button you will now see when the figures were last refreshed, so a plan carrying last year's numbers says so instead of looking exactly like one you updated this morning.

Australian plans: the four marginal rates are now proper settings you can see and edit, alongside the bracket ceilings and the Medicare levy threshold, and they arrive set to the current post-Stage-3 rates. If you plan in Australian dollars, your tax figures will shift a little to match.

Two more things you had to read; now you can see them · 20 August

The Floor & Upside strategy on the Drawdown tab splits your income in two: the part that is guaranteed for life — Social Security, pensions — and the part your portfolio has to produce. The whole point of the strategy is that the guaranteed half grows as those pensions start, so the share riding on the markets shrinks as you age. Until now that story was told in a column of percentages. It is now drawn: two stacked bands across your phases, each as wide as the phase is long, with your net income after tax and healthcare stepped through them.

The Roth conversion tool in the What-if explorer used to answer one amount at a time — move the slider, read three numbers, move it again. It now plots the whole range at once. You can see the amount you can convert for little or no tax, the point where each bracket fills and the cost per dollar steps up, and exactly where a conversion would tip you over the IRMAA threshold or the ACA cliff. The slider still moves a marker along the line, so the detailed figures are always for the amount you have picked.

One thing the chart made obvious that the numbers never did: convert enough and the tax bill starts to fall. That is not a bargain — it is the point where the conversion has emptied the 401k, so there is less left to withdraw and be taxed on. That stretch of the line is now shaded and labeled, rather than left looking like a saving.

The What-if explorer is also a little wider, which gives the sliders and their results more room.

The IRMAA ladder now shows you where to hover · 20 August

The surcharge ladder on the Tax & ACA tab has always had a tooltip on every tier step, giving you the MAGI that triggers it and what it costs a month. The catch was that you had to find it: the step corners were the hover targets, and there was nothing drawn to say so, so most people would never have known it was there.

Every tier step now carries a dot, and the area that responds to your pointer is more generous, so you no longer have to land on an exact corner. Hover any dot for the figures at that step. Nothing about the chart or your numbers has changed — it just stopped hiding what it could already tell you.

See where you stand on the two cliffs that cost the most · 19 August

Two of the most expensive edges in US retirement are step changes rather than gradual slopes: cross the ACA subsidy cliff by a single dollar and the whole subsidy goes, and the IRMAA surcharge jumps in tiers based on your income from two years earlier. The planner has always calculated both and explained them in words. Now the Tax & ACA tab draws them, with your own plan marked on each, so you can see how much headroom you actually have before the next step.

Under the hood has a picture too. Where it lists the working — income in, tax out, healthcare out, what you keep — there is now a chart above it where each bar starts where the last one finished, so you can see the shape of where the money goes rather than reading down a column. It appears on any calculation that genuinely adds up to its own total, and is left off the ones that are not a running sum.

And the account balances chart on the Balance tab now switches between By phase and By year. A plan can look perfectly healthy at every phase boundary and still dip hard somewhere inside one — the yearly view shows that.

Sharper hover on the new tax-bands chart · 19 August

A same-day follow-up to the chart that shipped a few hours earlier. Hovering a bar on Which tax bands your income lands in now reports the phase you are actually pointing at, and the bottom bar responds like the rest. The figures on the chart were correct throughout — this refines only what the hover reported. Worth picking up if you downloaded earlier that day.

Four new charts — and three refinements they prompted · 19 August

The stress test is the one I think you will notice first. Those twelve scenarios are now color-shaded by how the portfolio ends up, so instead of reading twelve boxes of numbers you can see the shape of where your plan gets thin. The SS Optimizer finally draws the picture that tab has always been about: total benefit received by age, one line for each claiming age, and the point where waiting catches up is simply where the lines cross. The Balance tab shows which tax bands each phase of your income actually lands in. And the Annuities tab plots annuity income against what the premium would have grown to if you had just invested it.

Putting figures on a chart is a good way to check them, and building these prompted three refinements elsewhere.

The Canadian and Australian tax figures are more precise — worth about $57,000 on one test plan. Canada's provincial tax and Australia's Medicare Levy are flat charges on your whole income rather than tax bands, so they now sit outside the band breakdown instead of being counted as an extra band on top. The chart now names where those levies sit.

The Annuities tab now measures the comparison more strictly. It used to describe an annuity as "winning" once its income overtook what investing would have earned, and marked years "Ahead" from break-even — but break-even there only ever meant the annuity had paid back its own premium, which is a much lower bar. On a typical setup the income does not catch investing at all: $492,000 paid out against $2.1 million invested. The wording now names exactly what is being measured, and the chart lets you see it for yourself.

The annuity timeline table now shows the full timeline whatever your purchase age. Where that age landed on a half year — 59½, the common case — the table used to condense down to a single row.

A smaller one: the charts used to re-animate every time you typed in a field. They hold still now, and animate when you actually change view.

See which pot is paying for each year of your retirement · 19 August

The Balance tab could already tell you, year by year, what came out of each account and what your pensions paid — but only as a table. Reading a plan that way means holding thirty rows of numbers in your head at once.

There is now a chart above that table, and it is driven by the same four switches you were already using. Every bar is one year. Each color is one source: your 401k, cash and equity on the Account view, and on the Income view your Social Security, state and workplace pensions, part-time work and rental income stacked on top. Hover any bar and it lists every source for that year with the total. Switch to By phase and each bar becomes a typical year in that phase instead.

What it makes obvious in a second is the handover — the point where you stop living off savings and your pensions take over, and whether the bar dips in between. The colors follow whatever palette you have chosen under Appearance, so it matches the rest of your plan.

Note that these bars show your gross income, before tax and healthcare. Those two are worked out once per phase rather than per year, so they stay in the table underneath, where the figure can be labeled for the span it actually covers rather than split across years it was never calculated for.

Also tidied while I was in there: those four buttons used to shift sideways slightly each time you clicked one. They hold still now.

Your PDF report now adds up · 19 August

The report lists your income, subtracts each cost, and shows what is left. Three of those costs are now itemized as lines of their own, so the arithmetic can be followed all the way down the page — which matters, because this is the document people take to an advisor.

Healthcare is the largest of the three. Where your income puts you over the ACA subsidy cliff, the full unsubsidized premium — over $4,000 a month in one test plan — now appears as its own line rather than only inside the net figure. On Medicare, Part D and any IRMAA surcharge are listed alongside Part B. And the 3.8% investment surtax has been lifted out of the federal tax total onto a line of its own, so that number now squares with the tax brackets.

Every cost now has its own line, named for what it is, and they add up to the net income shown at the bottom. Your plan and your figures are unchanged — this is purely a fuller report.

There are two Roth 5-year rules, and the Glossary now explains both · 19 August

Almost everyone merges these into one rule, and mixing them up is how a conversion ladder goes wrong. One clock runs once, from your first ever Roth contribution, and decides whether your earnings come out tax-free. A completely separate clock runs on every single conversion and decides whether that converted money escapes the 10% penalty before 59½.

The new The two Roth 5-year rules entry in the Glossary lays out both, plus the bit that makes a ladder work at all: the order money leaves a Roth — your contributions first, then conversions oldest-first, then earnings. There is also a quirk worth knowing, that both clocks run on tax years rather than birthdays, so a conversion made in December seasons after about four years and one month.

A warning if your Roth conversion ladder is spent too soon · 19 August

A conversion ladder is one of the standard ways to bridge to 59½, and there is a rule inside it that is easy to miss: each conversion has to sit for five years before you can spend it penalty-free, and every conversion starts its own separate clock. Your own contributions come out at any age, which is what makes a Roth feel like an open account — but converted money spent too early carries the same 10% penalty you were trying to avoid.

The planner now watches that for you. A Roth Conversion Seasoning check in Plan health works out how much of what you are spending has genuinely had five years to season, and tells you the age at which your plan runs past it, and by how much — so a ladder that converts at 50 and spends at 52 shows its cost rather than reading as free.

It only appears if your plan has both conversions and a Roth withdrawal before 59½; otherwise you will not see it. And it is a flag rather than a tax figure: the planner holds your Roth as one balance rather than tracking each conversion separately, so it can tell you the pattern looks wrong but not compute the bill. That one is worth a conversation with a tax professional.

Retiring before 59½? You can now take the 401k early and see what it costs · 18 August

Until now, if you retired before 59½ the planner simply held your 401k back and made you fund those years from everything else. That is one real strategy, but it is not the only one — you can take money out early, you just pay a 10% penalty on top of the usual income tax. Holding it back meant some workable early retirements could look out of reach when they were simply expensive, with no way to tell which.

The Pre 59½ phase now asks how you are reaching the account. Leave it untouched as before, or withdraw and have the 10% priced in — it shows as its own line rather than being folded into your tax figure, so you can see exactly what the choice costs, in the plan and in the PDF report.

If you stopped work at 55 or later there is also the Rule of 55, which removes that penalty entirely from the plan of the employer you just left. It is easy to lose by accident — rolling the money into an IRA destroys it, and leaving at 50 and waiting until 55 does not count — so the planner spells out the conditions rather than just offering a tickbox. Nothing changes unless you change it: existing plans still open exactly as you left them.

A 72(t)/SEPP series remains outside what the planner models, and it now says so where that matters. If you are retiring well before 55, that is the route worth discussing with a tax professional.

Moving a phase boundary past the next one now removes that phase · 18 August

In Edit values you can set where each phase ends. Push one past the next and you are asking for a phase to be squeezed out of existence. Previously it reappeared as a six-month sliver — a card covering half a year with little on it — so setting Phase 1 to end at 67 produced two of them.

Collapsing a phase is a reasonable thing to want, so it now does what you asked: the phase goes. The ones that remain keep their own numbers, so you might see Phase 1, 2, 4, 5 — the gap tells you a phase was collapsed, and every card still matches the phase of the same name in Edit values.

Your claiming age now gets a phase of its own · 18 August

If you set Phase 1 ends to an age later than you claim Social Security, the planner used to cut that phase in half and call the second piece Phase 1B. That worked, but a lettered half-phase appearing the moment you claim was easy to read as a glitch.

Claiming is one of the biggest decisions in the plan, so it now gets a proper boundary: Phase 1 ends the day your benefit starts, and the years after it are an ordinary numbered phase. If you had typed a later age, the Edit box updates to match, so what you see there and what the cards show never disagree.

Only the first phase works this way. Claiming later — at 67 or 70 — still splits the phase it lands in, where being able to set different withdrawals either side of it is genuinely useful.

The phase strip stays where you left it · 18 August

With enough phases to scroll sideways, changing an amount and clicking away used to send the row back to the beginning, taking the box you had just edited off the screen with it. It stays put now.

Two small things on the phase cards · 18 August

When you have enough phases that the row scrolls sideways, Nominal and Real now sit next to each other again instead of one above the other. They were stacked because the cards used to get squeezed thin, which is no longer how the scrolling row works, so it was just costing you height for nothing. Phones are unchanged.

The Medicare Part D line has its own blue dot now. The explanation behind Part B always covered both premiums, but only Part B looked clickable, so it was easy to miss.

Medicare now starts at 65 whatever your phase ages · 18 August

Medicare now keys off your age rather than your phase layout. If you had moved any of the phase ages, healthcare after 65 used to follow the boundary instead: set Phase 1 to end at 65 and the following stretch was priced as marketplace cover, subsidy included, when being on Medicare rules that out. It could go the other way too — pull a boundary down to 63 and Medicare started two years early.

A phase that straddles your 65th birthday is now split by months, so it costs marketplace cover for the months before and Medicare for the months after, rather than being pushed entirely one way.

If you left the phase ages alone, none of your numbers change — on the standard ages the old rule happened to land on 65 anyway. If you did move them, reopen your plan and the healthcare figures from 65 onward will correct themselves.

A place to tell us how you are getting on · 8 August

Open the ? menu → Updates and there is a short note at the bottom now. It links to three questions on the website: what you were trying to work out when you bought it, what it showed you that you did not already know, and what frustrated you. That last one is the useful one — this planner has been shaped by buyer emails more than by anything else.

If you are happy to be quoted on the site, there is a box you can tick. Ticking it only lets us ask. If we would like to use something you wrote, we email you the exact sentence and the name it would carry, and it goes up only if you click Approve. Ignore that email and nothing happens. Change your mind later and we take it down.

We do not offer discounts, refunds or freebies in exchange for a review, and we are not going to. A paid-for opinion is not worth reading.

Six or seven phases now keep the cards readable · 6 August

If your plan has six or seven phases — common if you retire early, or if you are on SSDI and Medicare starts part-way through a phase — the cards were compressed to fit the screen, so labels wrapped onto three lines and the figures were harder to scan.

Cards now have a minimum width: they will not go narrower than they would be with five across, which is the last count that reads comfortably. When that will not fit on your screen, the row scrolls sideways instead, and the cards get roomier rather than tighter. There is a note beside the Retirement phases heading telling you how many there are and that they scroll — click it and the cards move along.

If your monitor is wide enough to show every card at a comfortable width, none of this appears: no scrollbar, no fade, nothing changed. The Fit phases button now respects the minimum too, so it means “one row, still readable” rather than “one row at any cost”.

Retired or stopped work? Medicare may not have to use your old income · 6 August

Medicare sets its high-income surcharge from your tax return two years ago. That is fine while your income is steady, and well wide of the mark the year after it falls away — the year you retire, or the year you stop work because of illness. You can be charged a high-income surcharge out of an income you no longer have.

Social Security knows this. Form SSA-44 lets you ask them to use your current income instead, after a life-changing event: retiring or cutting your hours, the death of a spouse, marriage or divorce, losing a pension. The planner now lets you model that — or simply type the premium your SSA notice actually quotes, if you already have one.

We have been careful with the wording, because this is an assumption rather than a promise: Social Security decides each request on its merits and looks at it again every year. The planner says so wherever you use it. On a test plan with SSDI it is worth $733 a month, which is well worth knowing you may be able to claim back.

A warning if part-time work could affect an SSDI benefit · 6 August

If you are on SSDI and you put part-time earnings into a phase, the planner now tells you when those earnings are above the level Social Security uses to judge whether you are still disabled for benefit purposes. There is a higher limit if your disability is blindness, and a tick-box to say so.

It is a warning only, and the note says so plainly: the plan carries on paying the benefit in full, because whether a benefit actually stops depends on trial work periods and review timing that no planner can predict. Flagging it and pointing you at the rules is more use than modeling something no planner can predict.

Two smaller fixes · 6 August

The investment income surtax was using the same income figure we corrected for Medicare a few days ago, so it was counting the untaxed part of your Social Security when it should not. Where it matters it was overstating the surtax by around a fifth.

And on plans with a lot of phases, the healthcare labels were wrapping onto three lines and squeezing the cards. The extra wording now lives in the tooltip instead — hover the line to read it.

Married and both on Medicare? Both sets of premiums are now counted · 6 August

Worth reading before you open the update, because your figures will move. Part B and Part D are billed per person, so a couple who are both over 65 pay two of each. The planner now counts both, where it previously costed one set per household.

For a couple that adds roughly $250 a month at today's rates, and more once IRMAA is involved, so it is a change worth seeing coming. The phase cards now show Medicare Part B est. ×2 with a line underneath confirming both of you are counted, so the figure explains itself rather than simply moving.

If only one of you is on Medicare, say so — there is a tick-box under the married-filing-jointly settings. If your spouse is younger, put their age in and they will join at their own 65, counted month by month rather than jumping a whole phase at a time.

IRMAA has six brackets, not one · 6 August

The Medicare high-income surcharge arrived in the planner as a single figure — one bracket, one amount. There are in fact six, and the range is wide: about $95 a month at the bottom against about $640 at the top. If you are running Roth conversions of any size, selling a business, or taking a big year of withdrawals, you land somewhere in the middle of that table, so a single figure was only ever right at the foot of it.

All six brackets are now in the planner, with Part B and Part D listed separately because they are separate bills. You can see which bracket a phase lands in, and what each part costs, under Under the hood. The bracket amounts sit on the Edit tab if you want to check them against your own notice, and Fetch current rates refreshes them when CMS resets them each autumn.

A detail worth knowing: the top bracket is fixed in law rather than rising with inflation, so it reaches more people every year. The planner models it that way rather than assuming it drifts upward.

Tax-free bond interest can still raise your tax bill · 6 August

You can now enter tax-exempt interest — municipal bonds — phase by phase, next to rental income. It is not taxed, and the planner does not tax it.

But it is not invisible either, and this is the part that catches people out. That interest counts toward the income test that decides how much of your Social Security is taxable. On a test plan, adding $30,000 of tax-free bond interest took the tax bill from nothing to $1,645 a year — not by taxing the bonds, but by dragging the taxable share of Social Security from 8% up to 85%. Buying municipal bonds to reduce a tax bill can increase it, and entering the interest is what makes that visible.

It also counts toward the income figures behind your ACA subsidy and your IRMAA bracket, so putting it in makes those warnings honest.

The IRMAA check now reads the right MAGI · 6 August

“MAGI” is not one number. The health insurance marketplace counts your Social Security in full; Medicare counts only the part that is actually taxable, because it reads your tax return. The planner had one figure doing both jobs; the two are now calculated separately.

That matters most for anyone living mainly on Social Security or SSDI, whose benefit is barely taxable. On one test plan the figure Medicare should read is $1,675 rather than $32,462 — the difference between a surcharge applying in every Medicare year and not applying at all. Both figures are now shown separately under Under the hood, so you can see which is which.

Better handling for plans where Medicare starts mid-phase · 6 August

If you are on SSDI, Medicare starts 24 months after your benefits do, whatever your age — so it often begins part-way through one of your phases rather than neatly at 65. Three things now work properly for those plans.

The healthcare box on the phase card now shows its working rather than opening empty. IRMAA is charged only for the months your Medicare has actually started, instead of the whole phase. And the ACA subsidy and cliff warnings stay put on a phase that is still mostly on ACA cover, where a single month of Medicare at the end used to suppress them.

The same month-by-month handling has been carried through to the dozen or so other places it applies — the PDF, the plan health check, the conversion explorer.

Capital gains: the help text now matches the calculation · 2 August

A customer asked how the planner handles capital gains when you are living off a brokerage account in early retirement. Checking the answer properly turned up three places where the help text described equity gains as getting a lower rate rather than being treated as ordinary income. The calculations have never worked that way, and the help text now matches what the planner actually does.

What it actually does: when the plan sells from your taxable account, only the gain inside that sale is taxed — getting your own money back is not income. The split comes from the Pre-plan taxable gain % on the Edit tab, so it is worth setting that from your broker's cost-basis report; left at zero, the planner assumes there is no gain to tax.

That gain is then taxed at ordinary income rates. Real long-term gains usually qualify for the lower 0% / 15% / 20% rates, so the planner shows more capital-gains tax than you would actually pay, never less. That is the cautious direction to err in, but it is worth knowing about — the gap is widest if your income is low enough that your real rate would be 0%, which is common when you are bridging to Medicare on taxable savings. It is written up in full under Under the hood, alongside the note about tax being worked out per phase.

The part that usually matters more was already right: gains count in full toward your MAGI, so they drive ACA subsidies, the Silver cost-sharing band, the subsidy cliff and the Medicare IRMAA lookback exactly as they would in reality.

See your plan year by year — by account, or by income · 2 August

The planner has always shown you a phase at a time: five or six cards, each covering a stretch of years. That is the right way to design a plan, but it is an awkward way to answer questions like “what is left in the Roth when I am 78?” or “which year does the cash actually run out?”

There is now a table at the bottom of the Balance tab with two switches. Account view gives you a column per account and shows the balance each one ends on, with the money that moved through it underneath — what you drew, what was paid in, anything converted, and how much it grew. Income view turns it round to show where the money came from: what you took from the portfolio, your Social Security, other pensions, any work or rental income, then what tax and healthcare took and what was left.

The second switch sets the rows. By phase gives you one line per phase. By year opens it out to a line per year, which is where it earns its keep: you can watch balances compound, see the exact year a pension starts and what it is worth by then, and spot the year an account empties. Where a withdrawal was more than the account could actually supply, the table says so rather than simply showing the figure you asked for.

Download CSV saves whatever you are looking at, ready to open in a spreadsheet or hand to your accountant.

There is one limit worth knowing about here, written up in full under Under the hood. The planner works out tax once per phase, on that phase's income, rather than separately for each year. When your income holds steady through a phase those are the same number exactly. When it moves around inside a phase — a conversion ladder running for a few years, or an account emptying partway through — the phase figure comes out slightly low, never high. We have now put numbers on it: nothing at all if your income stays inside one tax band, around 5–6% of the tax if it drifts up through one, and up to about 20% in the lumpiest cases. That is why the year-by-year table shows tax as a phase figure spanning its years rather than inventing one for each, and labels it for what it is.

Also tidied: the Downloads list in the ? menu now pulls the user guide, the free eBook and the technical documents straight from our own website rather than a file-sharing link. It means you always get the current version, from a single source rather than two copies that could drift apart. Two documents that were on the website but never listed in the planner have been added while we were in there: Methodology & Assumptions and Calculation Validation.

Two smaller things. If you use Fit all phases to get every card on one row, the Nominal and Real income figures were running past the edge of their boxes and the last card was cutting off mid-number — they now sit one above the other and fit properly. And the disclaimer has been expanded to cover the things it should have all along, including that AI answers can be wrong about tax figures and need checking.

On the same note: there are now proper Software Terms on the website, readable before you buy rather than only inside the file afterwards. They set out the license, what the planner does and does not promise, refunds, and which law applies — and they name the person you are actually buying from, Paul Hankin, trading as WebNomad Studio. Nothing about what you have bought has changed; it is simply written down properly now.

Tooltips now match the planner, whichever browser you use · 1 August

Hover almost anything in the planner — a tax line, a balance, a button — and a small note explains it. Those notes were being drawn by your browser rather than by the planner, and every browser draws them differently: white on dark in Edge, dark on white in Chrome, something else again in Firefox. None of it matched the look you had chosen, and there was no way to make it.

The planner now draws them itself. They pick up whichever visual style and light or dark setting you are using, they sit neatly against whatever you are pointing at, and they read the same wherever you open the file. If you use the larger text sizes, they scale with everything else.

The same goes for the little labels that appear when you hover a chart — those now match too, instead of staying gray in every theme.

The planner now tells you when there is a newer version · 31 July

Until now, the way to discover we had improved something was to come back to this page, or to dig out the download link from your original receipt — so it was easy to run a copy from months back without knowing there was anything newer.

Your planner now checks once a day whether a newer version exists. If there is one, an Update available button appears at the top. Click it and you land on a new Updates tab: type the email address you bought with, and your files come straight back — no receipt to hunt for, no link to have kept. Updates stay free, as they always have been; there is nothing more to pay.

Your new copy arrives as a fresh file, so use Export in your old one and Import in the new one to bring your plan across. Nothing about your plan is ever sent anywhere: the daily check sends no information at all, and your email address leaves your computer only when you press the button. The planner still works completely offline — if it cannot reach us, it says so quietly and carries on.

The tab also shows when it last looked, with a Check again link beside it. Opening the tab always asks afresh rather than trusting the once-a-day check, so if you go looking, you get a straight answer there and then.

Retiring before 59½? Three things you could not enter, you now can · 30 July

We went looking for anything else of the same shape as the fixes below, and found one. If you retire before 59½ the planner gives you a separate stretch of years for that period — and on that stretch there was nowhere to put Roth withdrawals, Roth conversions or rental and passive income. The sums have always handled all three there; the boxes were simply missing, so they came through as zero.

The Roth conversion box is the one most people will want, because a conversion ladder is exactly what many run in those years to bridge to 59½ — and the planner has a whole tab for planning them. Rental income at 55 is just as ordinary. In a test plan, filling in all three moved that stretch from $100 a month of net income to $2,049.

All three boxes are now there, and they appear only if your plan actually has pre-59½ years. Nothing changes for anyone retiring at 59½ or later.

The setup wizard now asks when disability stops · 30 July

A gap spotted after the updates below: the Quick Setup Wizard asked for a pension or disability amount, when it starts and whether it rises each year — but not when it stops, so a private disability benefit set up through the wizard still ran for life. It now asks, with the same reminder that employer and private cover usually ends at 65.

The wizard now also spells out that SSDI goes in the Social Security box, not the disability one. And there is a new ⓘ beside Income streams in Edit values that opens a plain list of eleven kinds of income and which box each belongs in — useful if you have ever paused over where a survivor benefit or a VA payment should go. There is a fuller written guide behind it too.

Two rough edges on the SSDI update, smoothed · 30 July

Two details left rough in the SSDI update below, now finished off properly.

The first: if your SSDI started after you retired but before 59½ — you finished work at 55, say, and were awarded SSDI at 57 — SSDI income did not appear until 59½, which is exactly the stretch you most want to see it in. The pre-59½ stretch now splits at the age your SSDI began, with its own card, so you can set different withdrawals before and after and the income shows up where it belongs.

The second: Medicare arriving mid-way through a stretch of years. The planner works in phases spanning several years, and Medicare was treated as on or off for a whole phase — so a start at 57 inside a 55-to-59½ stretch rounded to the nearest boundary. The cost is now split properly: 2½ of those 4½ years on Medicare, the rest on marketplace cover, priced accordingly, with the subsidy still counted for the months before Medicare starts. The phase card, the PDF and the AI all label it ACA → Medicare so you can see what is happening rather than wondering why the figure looks odd.

If you are not on SSDI, none of this touches your plan — we checked every one of our test scenarios comes out to the penny it did before.

If you're on SSDI, the planner now fits your situation · 30 July

Following on from the disability update below. If you are receiving SSDI — Social Security Disability — the planner was built around the rules for a retirement benefit, and those are not the rules for SSDI. Two things follow from that, and both were understating your position on paper.

First, it would not let you enter a start age below 62. That rule exists because you cannot claim a retirement benefit earlier than that. SSDI has no such limit, and it does not get the reduction you take for claiming early — it pays your full retirement-age amount from the day it starts. So if your SSDI began at 55, the planner simply would not show that income. Tick the new I'm receiving SSDI box and the limit lifts: put in the age it actually started and your income appears from there. Nothing else changes, because SSDI already gets the same annual increase and the same tax treatment as Social Security — and at full retirement age it just becomes your retirement benefit at the same figure.

Second, and this one matters more: SSDI brings Medicare 24 months after your benefit starts, whatever your age. Someone on SSDI at 55 usually has Medicare at 57. The planner previously assumed 65 for everybody, which put you on marketplace insurance with subsidies that would not apply, and left Medicare premiums out for years. Ticking the box asks when your Medicare began and models it properly from then.

To be clear: employer, private and VA disability are not SSDI, and still belong in the pension and disability fields, where you set their own annual increase and the age they stop.

Disability that stops at 65 · 30 July

A customer got in touch about disability income, and it turned up something worth fixing. Most employer and private long-term disability policies stop paying at 65, or at Social Security full retirement age — that is the point the cover is designed to hand over to your retirement income. The planner had no field for that, so a benefit entered there ran for life alongside your Social Security. On a $3,000 a month benefit that comes to around $900,000 of income that would not actually arrive, so it is well worth setting.

Both pension and disability streams now have an end age. Leave it blank and nothing changes — a normal pension, an annuity or VA disability carries on for life exactly as before, and every plan you have already saved is untouched. Put 65 in it and the benefit stops there. If it stops before your Social Security starts, you will see the gap on the phase cards, which is the whole point of putting it in.

The question behind all this was whether disability should rise every year the way Social Security does. It should not, and it already did not have to — each pension and disability stream has always had its own annual increase, separate from the Social Security one, and setting it to 0 keeps the payment flat for life. That setting lives on the Inflation card, which is why it was easy to miss, so the disability field now says so where you are typing.

If SSDI applies to you, one thing to check: it belongs in the Social Security box, not the disability box. It rises with the Social Security increase, it turns into your retirement benefit automatically at full retirement age at the same amount, and it is taxed under Social Security rules — so putting it in the disability field gets the tax wrong. Employer, private and VA disability all belong in the disability fields.

The UK State Pension now has one off switch · 30 July

A customer wrote in to say they could not work out how to stop the UK State Pension appearing in their later phases. The reason was the interface rather than anything they had done: the amount sat in two places, in Income streams, where you would expect it, and again in a box on the Phase 4 and Phase 5 cards. The phase box was the one the sums actually used, so setting it to zero in one place changed that phase and left the others still paying it, while the Income streams box carried on showing the old figure. Nothing on screen said which one was in charge.

There is now one figure, in Income streams, and that is the only place it is set. If the UK State Pension does not apply to you, put a 0 there and it is gone from every phase. The boxes on the phase cards are still there so you can see what each phase receives, but they are read-only and say where to go to change them. Social Security works the same way now, for the same reason.

Two things this also puts right. If you claim Social Security part-way through a phase, the planner splits that phase in two — and the second half now receives both your Social Security and your UK State Pension, where before it received neither, which had been pulling that stretch of the plan down. And if you are modeling what happens when one of you dies, the survivor is now shown the larger benefit they actually inherit rather than the original one. Both now read correctly. Open your plan and check the phases after 67 look the way you expect.

A free way to compare retiring in four countries · 29 July

If you have ever wondered what your savings would actually be worth living in Britain, Canada or Australia instead of the States, there is now a free page on the site that shows you: the Retire Abroad comparison. Put your balances, your monthly withdrawals and your Social Security in once, and it lays out what you would have left each month in all four countries side by side, after income tax and after healthcare.

It runs the same sums as the planner you bought, so the two agree — we checked every figure against the current build before putting it up. What surprised us with the numbers we tried is that the order changes as you get older: the country that leaves you best off at 60 is not the one that leaves you best off at 80, because Medicare at 65, Social Security and the withdrawals you are forced to take from 73 all arrive at different moments and pull in different directions.

It is free and there is nothing to sign up for. It only handles one straightforward scenario — no phases, no saved comparisons — so it is a taster rather than a replacement for the planner. Do send it to anyone you know who is weighing up a move.

How close a one-off takes you to the line · 27 July

Following on from the update below: paying for something out of a 401k and paying for it by selling investments are not the same thing. The whole 401k withdrawal counts as income that year, but on a sale you are only taxed on the growth — you already paid tax on the money you put in. The same $200,000 adds $200,000 to your income from a 401k but nearer $60,000 from a brokerage account, which is worth knowing before you decide where the money comes from. It also means a sale often lands just under the ACA or Medicare line rather than over it, and until now nothing told you it had moved you at all. The ACA and Medicare panels now say where you end up either way: over the line, with the warning you'd expect, or under it with the amount you have left — "still under the $66,806 cliff, with $6,465 to spare" — and a reminder that anything else arriving that year, a fund payout or a bit of interest, eats into what's left.

A warning where you'd actually look for it · 27 July

If you pay for something large out of a 401k, that withdrawal counts as income in the year you take it — enough, often, to put you over the ACA subsidy cliff or into a higher Medicare band. The planner works in multi-year phases, so the MAGI figure it shows you is the average across the phase, and a single big year barely moves it. The planner already flagged this on the phase card, and the panel you open to check now says the same thing rather than reporting the phase average alone: the ACA and Medicare panels show the phase average as before, then tell you plainly what your income would be in the single year you take the expense, which line it crosses, and what it would cost you — along with the usual ways round it, like paying from cash or Roth savings, or splitting it across two years.

Every one-off expense shown separately in the working · 27 July

If you put more than one cash event in the same phase, Under the hood grouped them by account, so two expenses both paid from cash appeared as one line. The figures were right; the second event simply was not visible. Each event is now listed on its own, by the name you gave it, showing what it took from each account, the tax on it, and how much reached the expense. Where a phase has several, the combined totals are shown underneath so everything still adds up. The same applies to the calculations pages in your printed report.

You choose which account pays for a one-off expense · 27 July

Add a new roof or a car on the Lump sums tab and there is now a Paid from box next to it. Pick Cash and the planner takes it from cash and nothing else — if there isn't enough, it tells you how much is short rather than making up the difference from your investments or your 401k. Pinning the source down means the plan shows you exactly where the money for the builder came from. If you'd rather it did spill over, tick Use other accounts if short and pick exactly which accounts it may use — you might be happy for it to come out of the brokerage account but want the Roth left alone. There's also a Custom split if you want to say "$20,000 from cash, $40,000 from the brokerage account", and it shows you what each account will actually hold at that point in your plan. Money coming in works the same way: an inheritance or a house sale can be paid straight into your brokerage account instead of sitting in cash for twenty years earning the cash rate.

What that expense really costs, before you commit to it · 27 July

This one changes some numbers, so it's worth reading. If you take money out of a 401k to pay for something, that withdrawal is taxable income, and if you sell investments to pay for it you owe tax on the growth. The planner now prices that in. A $60,000 kitchen paid from a 401k used to come out at exactly $60,000; in reality the taxman takes a slice first and roughly $45,000 of it reaches the kitchen. You now see both figures. Under each event on the Lump sums tab is a line telling you what leaves each account, what goes to tax, and what actually reaches the expense — so you can weigh it up there and then, and try paying for it a different way if you'd rather. If you want the full amount to get there, tick Withdraw extra to cover the tax and the planner works out the larger withdrawal for you: for that kitchen, $69,477 out of the 401k so the full $60,000 arrives. It will also warn you if a withdrawal that size would push you over the ACA subsidy cliff or into a higher Medicare band in the year you take it. Your account balances are unchanged — that money was always leaving the account. What's changed is that you can now see how much of it never reached what you were buying, so an expense funded from a retirement account will look dearer than it did before. That is the figure worth planning against.

Your total tax figure now explains itself · 26 July

Click the Tax to 80 pill at the top of the dashboard and you'll see the working behind it: what each phase pays a month, multiplied by the months in that phase, adding up to the total — and, if your state charges income tax, how much that adds on top, since it isn't part of that figure. Like the other calculation panels, it links straight through to the full working under the hood. Phase 5 has also been given its own color: its badge and Phase 3's were near-identical shades of amber, which made two very different parts of your plan look alike at a glance.

Under the hood: every calculation, shown in full · 26 July

A new Under the hood section in Help shows the working behind every number in your plan. Pick a phase and open any step: your income broken into its parts, how much of your Social Security counts as taxable, each tax bracket applied in turn, how your MAGI was built, the divisor behind your RMD, and what you asked to withdraw against what the accounts could actually supply. You can search it, and each step links to the matching explanation and glossary entry. There is also a Verify the engine button that recalculates 20 reference retirement plans against known-correct results, so you can confirm your copy is working properly. If you print the report, you can now tick Include calculations to add the full working for every phase.

Three explanation panels put right · 26 July

While building the section above, we checked every explanation panel against the calculation sitting behind it — and found three that did not match. In each case the figures on your phase cards were right; it was the explanation alongside them that needed correcting, so nobody's plan needs redoing. If you live in Canada or Australia, clicking your income tax figure used to bring up US tax brackets; you now see Canadian federal and provincial tax, or Australian brackets with the Low Income Tax Offset and the Medicare Levy. The state tax panel explained the withdrawal you had asked for rather than the amount your account could actually supply, and counted only the first of two pension streams. And after a change of display currency, some pension notes kept the old currency symbol until you next edited them. Each panel now takes its wording straight from the calculation itself, so a figure and its explanation can no longer drift apart.

An account that runs dry now stops paying out · 25 July

Withdrawals are now capped at what the account can actually supply. Previously a pot that emptied in an early phase could still be drawn on in the later ones, and that carried through to the tax and MAGI figures, which could raise an ACA or IRMAA warning about income you would not actually receive. Affected rows now show what is genuinely available beside the amount you asked for, with the age the account ran out. We never overwrite what you typed, so you can still try a larger withdrawal and think better of it.

State pension-deduction caps · 23 July

Some states only let you deduct part of your retirement income — Colorado stops at $24,000, for example. The planner now applies your state's cap rather than exempting the whole amount.

See how any figure was calculated · 23 July

Click a federal tax, state tax, ACA or Medicare figure on a phase card and a panel explains how that number was arrived at. The state tax line now appears even when it is $0, so you can tell the difference between a state that charges you nothing and a figure the planner has not worked out.

Medicare IRMAA surcharges count as a real cost · 23 July

When income crosses the IRMAA threshold, the Part B and D surcharge is now added to that phase's healthcare cost and deducted from net income. Previously it raised a warning; costing it in shows the full price of a high-income phase.

Phases now split at RMD age 73 · 20 July

The Phase 4 / Phase 5 boundary now falls at the age required minimum distributions begin, so your RMD years sit in a phase of their own instead of straddling two.

Clearer survivor-benefit guidance · 19 July

Better in-app guidance on what to enter for a surviving spouse, and how Social Security differs from a pension in that situation.

Ask the AI about a plan comparison · 18 July

When you compare a saved plan against your current one, a button sends both to the AI and asks it to explain the trade-off in plain English — why one ends with a larger balance or a smaller tax bill.

Euro added as a seventh currency · 15 July

EUR joins USD, GBP, CAD, AUD, PHP and THB, using the same expatriate model as the Philippine peso and Thai baht — useful if you are retiring to the eurozone.

AI chat refinements · 2 July

A steadier chat layout with the input pinned to the bottom, the model shown above it, and the send button disabled until you have actually typed something.

Use the AI provider you already have · 29 June

The AI features are no longer tied to one company. Choose Anthropic (Claude), OpenAI, Google Gemini, OpenRouter, a local Ollama model that needs no key at all, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. The planner keeps a separate key per provider and discovers each one's current models on its own, so new models appear without waiting for an app update.