Type in your situation and a what-if. A Roth conversion, a year off, starting a business. You get the taxes, the brackets and the account balances for every year.
It also points out things you didn't ask about. For example, that converting this year will raise your Medicare premium two years from now, or that the capital loss you're carrying will never get used against the gain sitting next to it. These aren't things you forgot to fill in. They're things nobody would have worked out by hand.
Findings
Three of the worked examples from further down the page. In each one, someone asked a question, got their answer, and also got told about a second problem they hadn't asked about. Every number here comes from an actual projection, and an automated test re-runs all of them on every build.
“How much should I convert to Roth in these low-income years?”
Also found: The $80,000 converted in year 3 adds $1,299 in Medicare surcharges in year 5, two years after the conversion.
Open this plan“If I pay myself $150k, does this beat the job I left?”
Also found: The business earned $254,904 but only paid out $150,000, so you're taxed on $104,904 you never received. The year's $71,758 tax bill pulls $44,758 out of your personal accounts to cover it.
Open this plan“I put $1.2M into that stock and $250k came back. What is a loss like that worth?”
Also found: The plan ends with $863,000 of capital losses still unused, while $2,457,333 of untaxed gain sits in the same brokerage account. Without a sale, the loss only offsets $3,000 of ordinary income a year.
Open this planAges, account balances, income, spending. The form explains why each answer matters (whether money is pre-tax or Roth changes almost everything), and if you skip a field it tells you what value it's using instead.
“What if I convert $50k a year until I'm 73?” Your question is turned into a scenario you can read and edit, so you can fix anything it got wrong before anything is calculated.
Lifetime tax, which bracket you're in each year, when surcharges kick in, and how long the money lasts. Below that, anything else your numbers turned up. Change an assumption and everything recalculates.
The checks
14 checks run on every projection. Each one looks for a spot where two of your own answers work against each other. A check only shows up if it applies to your numbers. None of them is generic advice for people in your situation.
A pass-through business is taxed on what it earned, not on what it paid you. If profit stays in the company, or the company spends it, the tax on it still shows up on your personal return.
Business losses carry forward indefinitely and can offset any kind of income. A plan can end with losses still unused while a pre-tax account is waiting to be taxed on the way out.
A capital loss can offset unlimited capital gains, but only $3,000 a year of ordinary income (a limit set in 1978). Without a sale to pair it with, the loss and the gain can sit in the same account for decades and never cancel out.
The full QSBS exclusion needs five years of holding. Below that, you get a partial exclusion in steps. The same sale on either side of one date can be a very different amount of tax.
Medicare sets each year's premium using your tax return from two years earlier, and the surcharge jumps in steps rather than sliding. So a Roth conversion this year raises your premium two years from now.
One dollar of income over the limit ends the premium tax credit completely. There's no taper. Most often it's a Roth conversion that pushes someone over.
Some states add a supplemental tax at higher incomes that cancels the benefit of every lower bracket, so you end up paying the top rate on all of your income. You won't see this in a rate table.
Maxing out a plan is what the rules allow, not necessarily what your income covers. A year that puts money into a plan while pulling money out of a pre-tax account early pays a 10% penalty on the withdrawal.
The year after a death, the survivor files single with the same accounts, the same required distributions and one Social Security check instead of two, but half the bracket width and half the standard deduction. Income goes down and the tax bill goes up.
Long-term gains and qualified dividends sit on top of your ordinary income, so the 0% rate only applies to gains that fit below the threshold. A Roth conversion raises your ordinary income and pushes those gains up into the 15% bracket, even though you didn't sell anything.
The IRS treats all your traditional, SEP and SIMPLE IRAs as one account, so a conversion is taxed pro-rata across all of them. After-tax contributions only convert tax-free in proportion to your total IRA balance, including any old rollover.
A match is only paid on what you actually contribute. If you defer less than the formula rewards, the difference isn't delayed or deferred. It's never paid at all, and nothing on your payslip shows what you missed.
Net worth includes your house, but you can't pay bills with it. A plan can show growing net worth every year and still hit a year where the accounts are empty and there's nothing left to spend.
The QSBS exclusion is federal law, and several states that founders actually live in don't follow it. The gain that was fully excluded on your federal return can be fully taxed on your state return.
25 made-up households with real questions. Open one and the planner is prefilled with their numbers. Edit anything you like and run it yourself. A dot marks the 17 examples where the projection found something the person hadn't asked about.
Read the full write-upsIn depth
Three situations where the obvious move costs more than people expect. Each page shows exactly how much.
Go one dollar over 400% of the poverty level and you lose the whole premium tax credit. Here's what that dollar costs in each state.
Medicare sets your premium using your tax return from two years earlier, and the surcharge jumps in steps. Here's what converting at 63 does to your premium at 65.
The IRS treats all your traditional IRAs as one account, so an old rollover IRA decides how much of a backdoor Roth is actually tax-free.
Method
A language model reads your question and explains the results, but it never calculates anything. Every number on this site, including the findings above, comes from tax code we wrote ourselves and test to the cent against the IRS's own published examples.
Return rates, inflation and future tax law are all yours to change, and each one is labelled as our default until you do. The same goes for anything you leave blank. If you don't enter Social Security, the projection assumes you never claim it, and it tells you so, with a link to the field that fixes it.
A finding tells you what your numbers add up to and which input changes it. It doesn't rank your options or tell you what to do. This is a projection of the scenarios you describe, not financial or tax advice.
Pricing
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