Retirement Projector

Retirement Projector models an early-retirement plan year by year, from the age you stop working to age 90.

It is a projector, not a portfolio tracker. You enter what you have and what you plan to spend, and it shows what happens to the balances, the tax bill and the health-insurance cost in every year in between.

WHAT IT MODELS

• Four buckets — taxable brokerage, Roth IRA, traditional IRA and crypto — grown at your assumed nominal return.
• An optional run-up from today: current balances and recurring deposits compounded forward to the year you retire, which then become the starting balances everything else runs on. Deposits are entered in today's money and inflated forward, and the result can be read in today's dollars or in the dollars of the year you retire.
• A withdrawal plan split into age phases anchored to the ages that actually matter: 59 1/2, 65 for Medicare, your Social Security start age, and 73 for RMDs.
• Roth conversion ladders, with the five-year seasoning rule and the 59 1/2 gates enforced in the correct order — contributions first, then seasoned conversions, then earnings.
• 2026 federal brackets and standard deduction, long-term capital gains stacked on top of ordinary income, a flat state rate, and the 10% early-withdrawal penalty.
• Social Security, including the "tax torpedo": the $25k/$32k taxability thresholds are not indexed to inflation and never have been, so more of the benefit becomes taxable as the years pass.
• ACA premium subsidies before 65, under either the 2026 cliff regime or the enhanced regime — because a Roth conversion that pushes MAGI past 400% of the federal poverty level can cost more in lost subsidy than it costs in tax.
• Inflation, applied to expenses, benefits, brackets and the standard deduction, with a toggle to read every figure in today's dollars or in nominal dollars.

WHAT YOU SEE

• Six headline figures: starting total, peak portfolio and the age it peaks, balance at 90, the age the money runs out (or how long it lasts), lifetime tax paid, and the traditional IRA balance still exposed to RMDs at 90.
• Three charts — balances by account, annual cashflow against your expense target, and annual taxes paid — each with a drag-to-read scrubber.
• Plain warnings when a plan breaks: an income shortfall, an early-withdrawal penalty, or a missed RMD.
• A strategy optimizer: six named conversion strategies — no conversions, fill the standard deduction, fill the 12% bracket, fill the 22% bracket, fill to the ACA cliff, and hold MAGI down for the subsidy — each run through the same simulator on your own numbers and ranked by lifetime tax, final net worth or after-tax spendable. A strategy that would break the five-year seasoning rule before 59 1/2 is flagged rather than quietly recommended, and one that fails to fund the plan never outranks one that does. Apply the one you like and it loads into your own phase plan, where you can edit it.
• Saved scenarios, and CSV export with one row per year.

PRIVATE BY CONSTRUCTION

No account, no sign-in, no analytics, no advertising, no third-party services. The app makes no network requests at all. Everything you type stays on your phone.

The same tool runs in a browser at projector.noobingear.com, and saved scenarios use the same format in both, so a plan built on one can be opened on the other.

NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE

This is an estimation tool, not financial, tax or legal advice. The modeling is deliberately simplified — a single ACA premium as a proxy for a real benchmark plan, a flat state tax on ordinary income only, cost-of-living adjustments equal to inflation — and every simplification is written out inside the app under "How taxes, inflation & ACA are modeled". Check anything that matters with a qualified professional.