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How Retire Slider works

You can explore the app right away because every input starts with an example value. Those first results are only a starting point. Review each section and replace the examples with your own numbers to make the plan useful to you.

Why the result sometimes dims

Every change starts a new run of thousands of futures. While that run is in flight the previous figures stay on screen and dim. They brighten when the new run lands. A dimmed number belongs to your previous inputs, so wait for it to brighten before relying on it. If you use a screen reader, the figures are read out once the run has settled — once, not on every tick of a slider.

What the percentage means

It is the share of simulated futures in which your spendable savings last for the full plan. Flexible-spending rules, called guardrails, reduce spending after poor markets and may raise it after strong markets. You choose the size of each change and the lowest spending you can accept.

Typing a figure

Every box that takes a number takes shorthand as well: 850k, 2.4m and 1.4b are read as $850,000, $2,400,000 and $1,400,000,000. Currency signs, commas and a trailing percent are ignored, so a figure pasted from anywhere goes in as it stands. Leave the box and it shows you the amount it settled on — worth a glance, because a value outside a control’s range is quietly moved to the nearest one it will take.

Reviewing your inputs

An input affects the results even before you confirm it. Confirming simply marks that you reviewed the value and want it included as your own, and each group on the Inputs page shows how far through it you are. That is a record of what you have looked at, not a measure of whether the plan will succeed.

Scenarios

A scenario is a named what-if — “retire two years later”, “markets do badly early”, “we move to a cheaper state”. It is stored as the changes from your plan rather than as a copy, so it keeps meaning the same thing as you go on editing your plan. Tap its name and the figures at the foot of the screen show your plan and that scenario side by side; tap it again to stop. Open a row with the arrow to see exactly what it changes, one line per field.

Tap the box beside another scenario to add that one as well, and the two are combined — so you can ask what happens if both land together: retiring later and a bad decade in the markets. The name switches, the box adds; there is no key to hold down, so it works the same on a phone. If two of them change the same field, the one lower down the list wins, and the page tells you which field and which value it used.

To keep a combination, press Save this combination as a new scenario under the list, or pick Combine scenarios in the New scenario popup and tick the ones you want. Either way you get an ordinary scenario holding those changes — a snapshot, so editing one of the originals afterwards does not change it.

Your plan itself is never touched: the Inputs tab always edits your plan, and a scenario is only ever edited through its own Edit… button. Results, Answers and the PDF report always describe your plan, whatever is ticked — so a report can never be a hypothetical without you knowing.

One-off and short-term amounts

Under Retirement Income and Spending you can add named amounts that run for a span of years — a pension, an inheritance, a new roof, tuition. Each has an amount per year and a start and end year. A spending entry also names the account it comes out of, so a house down payment leaves the account you actually earmarked for it.

Starting one

New scenario at the foot of the list opens a popup with six choices: a blank scenario, four wizards, and — once you have two scenarios — Combine. Picking one only marks it; Create scenario is what makes it, so a mis-tap costs nothing. Whichever you pick opens straight away on the page you will be working in, with the name at the top ready to type over: a scenario is read by its name in the list, so naming it is the first thing worth doing.

A wizard asks for one decision in the terms you already hold it in and writes every field that decision touches — which for most of them is four or five fields across three different groups. Edit… on a wizard scenario takes you back into the wizard on the figures you left it holding, and applying a second time replaces the first answer rather than doing it twice.

Buying a house

On the Scenarios page, New scenario offers Buy a house. It asks for the things you know about a house — price, deposit, rate, term, and what the tax, insurance and upkeep run to — and writes the whole purchase in one go: the payment, the term and the rate; the house itself onto your balance sheet; and two entries under Spending, the one-off deposit out of the account you name, and the yearly cost of keeping the place. If your plan pays rent, it also offers to stop it. Without all of that, a larger deposit would show its cost and none of what it bought, and the house would look free to own once the mortgage was paid.

Your annual spending figure is deliberately left alone. The cost of keeping the house is its own entry, so you can see it, change it or delete it — rather than being folded into a budget number you could no longer reconcile against your own.

It is a scenario rather than an edit to your plan, because “should we buy this?” is a question about two futures side by side. Edit… takes you straight back into the wizard on the figures you entered, so pricing it again is one press — and applying a second time replaces the first purchase rather than buying the house twice. It finishes with what the house costs a year — the mortgage, the cost of keeping it, and the total. Both buttons below that buy the house; they differ only in where they leave you, so use Customize additional inputs if the move involves other changes you want to make next.

To rename a scenario, type over its name in the box at the top of the page Edit… opens.

Selling a house

New scenario also offers Sell a house, which shows its working rather than just an answer: what the sale fetches, what it costs to sell, what the house cost you, what that makes the gain, how much of the gain is excluded from federal tax, and only then the tax itself. It opens on figures your plan already holds — what the house is worth, what is still owed on it, and what your other income looks like — and you can change any of them.

Most people owe nothing. Federal law excludes the first $250,000 of gain on a main home you lived in for two of the last five years, or $500,000 if you file jointly, and the page tells you which case you are in. Note that commission and fees come off the amount the sale is treated as having fetched, so they lower the taxable gain as well.

Applying it takes the house out of your property, clears the mortgage, sets what you will pay in rent, stops the running costs, and puts what is left into the account you name — or takes it out, if the sale does not cover the loan.

Converting to a Roth

Do a Roth conversion moves money out of your 401(k) or IRA into your Roth, on purpose, before required distributions start moving it for you. You pay the tax now, at a rate you choose, so that the money and everything it earns afterwards comes out untaxed — and never has to come out at all, since a Roth has no required distributions.

You can convert a set amount each year, or say “whatever fits under the 22% bracket” and let the amount differ every year with the rest of your income, or “whatever fits under the next Medicare tier” — that last one because the Medicare surcharge is a cliff rather than a rate: one dollar over a threshold costs the full step, for both of you, for a whole year. The page prices the first year for you: your other income, what moves, the federal tax on moving it, and what rate that works out at.

The years between your last paycheque and your first required distribution — age 73 or 75, depending on the year you were born — are usually the cheapest you will ever have, which is why the wizard asks when to start as well as how much.

Watch the inheritance figure rather than the ending balance. A conversion is a trade, and the two sides of it land on different cards: it lowers your ending balance, because the tax is paid now and a balance counts a Roth dollar and a pre-tax dollar alike, and it raises what your heirs keep, because they inherit money nobody owes tax on rather than an account they must empty, and be taxed on, within ten years. If both move the same way, the answer is not close.

Moving to a new state

Move to a new state shows what the move does to the five things that change the moment your address does, and that almost nobody can work out for themselves: state income tax — using full schedules where implemented and documented proxy rates elsewhere — the sales tax on your spending, whether the state taxes Social Security, whether it exempts pension and IRA income altogether, and whether it takes its own cut of your estate on top of the federal one.

It also takes a cost-of-living figure against where you are now (type -15 for somewhere fifteen per cent cheaper), what you would pay in rent there, and the one-off cost of moving. It does not handle the house itself: selling one place and buying another are decisions of their own with a wizard each, so make those as their own scenarios and tick all three together — they combine into the whole move.

Paying for long-term care

Pay for long-term care asks the question a plan is least able to answer by looking at it: not “can we afford this” but “can we afford this and the years at the end that nobody budgets for”. Give it a monthly cost, an age to start and a number of years, and it adds the cost on top of your ordinary spending for that span — indexed, because care has risen faster than prices for as long as anyone has measured it.

If you hold a long-term-care policy, its monthly benefit comes straight off the bill. That is a different figure from the premium under Spending, which is what such a policy costs. Most policies also cap the total and then stop; if yours does, shorten the years rather than trusting the monthly figure to the end. Watch the success rate rather than the ending balance here: the question is not how much poorer the care leaves you, but whether the plan survives it.

While you are inside a scenario, the × and the Esc key take you back to that scenario’s own page rather than closing everything — so working through two groups of inputs does not drop you out of what you were editing. Done closes it.

Biggest drivers

The app changes one assumption at a time and runs the plan again. A larger change in the success rate means your result is more sensitive to that assumption. The ranking is specific to your plan.

What the model includes

• Federal income tax, including the standard deduction and extra deduction for eligible older adults
• State income tax for all 50 states and Washington, DC
• Tax on Social Security benefits, dividends, interest, and investment gains
• Required minimum distributions (RMDs) from 401(k) and IRA accounts
• Roth conversions you schedule, taxed as income in the year they are made
• Medicare Part B premiums and income-related surcharges (IRMAA)
• Different possible lifespans for each person, instead of assuming one fixed end date
• Federal and state estate tax, plus estimated tax on an inherited IRA
• Loans you are still paying, and any balance still owed if the plan ends before they do
• One-off and short-term amounts you schedule, on either side

All figures are in today's dollars. This is an educational model, not financial advice.

Model & Tax Rules sets out the whole of it: what each simulated year does, the tax rules applied, the shortcuts taken, and what is left out.

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Move a slider and the plan re-runs. Every assumption already has a sensible default, so there is a real answer on screen from the first moment — and the more of those defaults you replace with your own numbers, the more the answer is about you rather than about someone average.

Everything runs on this device. Your figures are never sent to us: once the app has loaded it makes no request of any kind, and its security policy refuses a connection to any other site even if a bug tried to open one. Two things are not us: a link you tap yourself — the ones below open a website, which sees your address the way any site does, and they carry nothing about your plan — and, on iPhone and iPad, your own iCloud backup. If you have it switched on, your saved plan is included in it, encrypted, under your Apple account rather than ours. The Android app switches its backup off entirely, so nothing is copied off the device there. Your figures are also visible to anyone else using this browser or device; use Clear Data in the menu to remove them.