The "no silent drift" promise lives here. When engine fidelity changes — a tax law update, a methodology refinement, a bug fix, a new feature — it gets documented with the date, what changed, and who's affected.
Fidelity & methodology
Complete since launch. Every change that moved a number, or corrected one you had already been shown, is here.
September 10, 2026
Improved: a pension’s yearly increase can also be a fixed dollar amount. A reader of the morning’s entry pointed out a third pension shape: plans that add the same dollar amount every year, set once as a percentage of the first year’s check and never recomputed. That’s different from a compounding percentage — at 2%, compounding overstates such a pension by about 6% after twenty years — so the Yearly increase control now takes either form: a percent that compounds, or a fixed dollars-per-month bump added each year. Saved plans are untouched unless the new field is used.
September 10, 2026
New: a pension can increase at its own fixed rate, not just CPI. Plenty of pensions raise the cheque by a rate written into the plan document — a fixed 2% a year is the CalPERS-style classic — and until now the engine could only model “tracks inflation” or “never rises.” With the COLA checkbox on, a Yearly increase field now takes your pension’s own rate, and every projection compounds the payment at exactly that contractual rate regardless of what inflation does — including the honest part, where a fixed 2% raise slowly loses ground in a 3% world. Existing plans are untouched unless the field is used; both spouses’ pensions have the option.
September 9, 2026
Improved: the temporary $6,000 senior tax deduction (2025–2028) is now in the math. Federal law added a temporary deduction for people 65 and older — $6,000 per person for tax years 2025 through 2028, shrinking for incomes above $75,000 single / $150,000 married and gone entirely above $175,000 / $250,000. It stacks on top of the existing 65-plus standard deduction, which was already modeled. The projection now applies it in exactly those calendar years, per qualifying person. Who’s affected: anyone 65 or older during 2026–2028 with income under those caps — projected federal tax for those years was overstated, typically $900–$1,950 a year for a household in or below the phase-out range; those tax rows drop and long-run balances rise slightly. Plans under 65 through 2028 are unchanged to the dollar. The deduction expires after 2028 and the projection drops it then automatically. One deliberate boundary, disclosed in the app: Roth-conversion room sizing still excludes it — slightly conservative for a 65-plus converter through 2028.
September 7, 2026
New: tell us your birthday and the calendar snaps into place — exact RMD timing, an honest first Social Security year, and an age that updates itself. The app used to know only your age, and an age alone can place your birth year — and the calendar with it — one year off if your birthday hasn’t happened yet this year. At exactly the wrong boundary: someone born in December 1959 read as 1960 and had required withdrawals scheduled two years late. You can now add your birthday (month and year — no day needed) beside your age, for you and your spouse. Required-withdrawal timing lands on the true IRS schedule, every projection year carries the right calendar label, and the first Social Security year is credited honestly — checks start the month after your birthday, so a November birthday collects one check that year, not twelve. With a full birthday saved, your age computes itself: a plan reopened next year simulates the age you actually are. Everything stays optional — give nothing and your plan behaves exactly as before, to the dollar. Reported by an independent reviewer, down to the worked examples now in our test suite. One boundary is deliberately unchanged for now and disclosed in the app: the 59½ and 70½ half-year rules still work in whole years.
September 7, 2026
Improved: inflation now varies inside the Monte Carlo — your rate becomes the center of a realistic range, not a constant. Every one of the 1,000 simulated futures now carries its own inflation path: persistent year to year — a spike is followed by elevated years, not an instant return to normal — centered on the rate you entered as the typical year, and leaning against the same year’s market return, so the future where prices rise into a falling market is genuinely in the sample. Previously inflation was held at your stated rate in every simulation, which quietly flattered plans whose income can’t follow prices. The model is fitted from 75 years of actual inflation history — the same series the Historical Back-Test replays — and the constants and their derivation are published in the methodology. Who’s affected: success rates move — across our 48 test plans, about half moved down (typically one to three points, up to about six for strong plans holding lots of cash or income without cost-of-living adjustments), a third were unchanged, and a few thin-margin plans ticked slightly up. Nothing you entered changed, and the year-by-year projection table still runs at your stated rate — one legible future you can check by hand.
September 6, 2026
Fixed: the AI Advisor setup conversation could write a different retirement age than the one you stated. A user who opened the AI Advisor–guided setup by stating their retirement age — “retiring in two years at 58” — could get a final plan carrying a different age (62 in the reported case), and every downstream analysis then read the wrong date. The conversation’s instructions now require every figure you state to be copied into your plan exactly as you said it, and a permanent test opens with that user’s exact phrasing and fails if the stated age doesn’t survive to the finished plan. Reported and fixed the same day. If a plan of yours came out of the AI Advisor conversation with a number you didn’t say, correcting that field on the Inputs tab recalculates everything — nothing else in the plan is affected.
September 6, 2026
Fixed: a Social Security portal value alone now counts — entering only your age-70 or age-62 benefit no longer models $0. The Social Security fields take your benefit at full retirement age plus optional age-62 and age-70 values from your SSA account. Entering only a portal value — common if you plan to claim at 70 and that’s the number you trust — previously modeled $0 Social Security for the entire plan: the math anchored on the full-retirement-age field and ignored the other two when it was blank. Any one of the three figures is now enough; the engine derives the rest with the SSA formula, and entering only your age-70 value with a claim age of 70 uses exactly the number you typed. Reported by an independent reviewer. Affects plans that entered a portal value but left the full-retirement-age field blank — those plans showed $0 Social Security and a warning. Plans with the full-retirement-age benefit entered are unchanged to the dollar. Two projection labels also now say what the engine was already doing correctly: the year a household projection models a surviving spouse, the Social Security line is labeled as the survivor benefit, and the “RMD active” marker names whose schedule triggered it when an older spouse’s required withdrawals begin first.
August 29, 2026
New: a partner program — and the referral cookie that credits it, disclosed. Bloggers and reviewers who send readers our way now earn a commission on purchases. To credit them, both sites include a small script from Rewardful, our affiliate platform. Arrive through a partner’s link and a cookie stores a random referral ID for 90 days so that partner is credited if you buy; it identifies the link you clicked, never you, and carries nothing you’ve entered. Arrive any other way and nothing is stored. The privacy policy on both sites now lists Rewardful alongside our other processors.
August 30, 2026
Fixed: required minimum distributions now run on each spouse’s own schedule. Household plans previously started RMDs for all pre-tax money on the primary plan-holder’s birth-year schedule (73 or 75). For couples with an age gap that was wrong in both directions: an older spouse’s real-world RMDs begin on their own schedule — potentially years earlier than the projection showed — and a younger spouse’s share was forced early. Reported by a user whose spouse, born 1958, starts at 73 while the projection showed 75. Each spouse’s share of the household pre-tax balance now follows that spouse’s own start age and their own IRS divisor each year; the Roth conversion window ends before the household’s first RMD year; a full-RMD charitable QCD covers your own required amount. Who’s affected: households where spouses differ in age or birth cohort — success rates barely move, but forced taxable income timing shifts ending balances either way. Same-age couples and single plans are unchanged. Details in the methodology’s RMD section.
August 27, 2026
New: repeating life events can skip years — a new car every 7 years is one entry. This one came straight from a user: their scenario needed a new car every 7 years, and the Life Events cards could only repeat a cost every single year — so it took five separate entries, or got left out. The cards now ask the natural first question — is this a lump sum or a payment? A lump sum is a cost at an age, once or repeating every few years, and the card lists the actual purchase years, each priced in the year it happens. A payment is an amount per year over a stretch — a loan, tuition — where “through age” is the last payment. Works for windfalls too, and every entry you already have lands in the right kind automatically with identical numbers. The AI Advisor can now set up repeating entries for you, it preserves an entry’s repeat and fixed-amount settings exactly when it edits your lists, and both lists grew from 10 entries to 15. The math is identical to entering the same years by hand — locked as an automated test, to the dollar — and every-year repeats and one-time entries are unchanged.
August 26, 2026
New: Divorce & Your Retirement — a private workshop for modeling a gray divorce. Some retirement questions are easier to explore than to say out loud, and this one was built for exactly that. From the Gray Divorce card on the Stress Test tab, the workshop models a split at any age against your real plan, side by side with staying: how each account divides, what happens to the house (four options, priced from your own home card), support paid or received, and your single-life spending — with single tax filing, health-coverage loss, and divorced-spouse Social Security (marriages of ten years or more) modeled on the SSA’s actual rules. Nothing you enter there is ever saved: no browser storage, no analytics, no trace in your plan — closing the workshop erases it. Three free searches show what would restore the household plan’s security; the Insulate search (part of Navigator) finds the change today that makes both futures sustainable at the app’s 85% bar. Full math in the app’s How It Works §37.
August 26, 2026
Fixed: the Rule of 55 / 72(t) penalty switch and the QCD switch were unreachable for most plans. The switch that removes the 10% early-withdrawal penalty when a plan will use a legal early-access route (Rule of 55, a 72(t)/SEPP schedule, or a Roth conversion ladder) — and the switch that sends an RMD to charity as a QCD — rendered only inside a panel that appears for households above the Roth IRA income limit. For every other plan, neither control existed anywhere in the app. Both now live in their own “Withdrawals & Giving” group in the app’s Tax section: the penalty switch for any plan retiring before 60, the QCD switch for any plan with pre-tax savings that reaches age 70½. No number changed — the penalty was always modeled correctly, and QCDs computed correctly where enabled; the controls were simply unreachable. The AI Advisor also now sees whether a plan asserts a penalty-free strategy.
August 24, 2026
Fixed: the Stress Test tab could crash when opened before its simulations finished. Opening Stress Test in the first seconds after loading the app — while the plan’s simulations were still computing — could crash the page to an error screen instead of the scenario grid. It depended on load timing, so it appeared random, and a reload usually recovered. The cause was in how the page was assembled, not in the math — no number was ever wrong. The tab now waits out the computation and renders normally.
August 24, 2026
Changed: the Compare radar now measures every scenario against one ruler. The “spend more” axis on the Compare tab’s radar used to be measured against each scenario’s own monthly goal, so comparing scenarios with different goals plotted them on different rulers — a small real difference in affordable spending could look like a large one purely because the goals differed. Every scenario is now measured against the first scenario’s goal, so the shapes are directly comparable; the legend says so, and the table below the chart still shows the absolute dollars. Same-goal comparisons are unchanged. Also in this release: when income sits within a few percent of the ACA subsidy cliff, the app now notes the year convention it prices the cliff on and points to healthcare.gov that close to the line; and the “retire earlier” goal color changed from pink to cyan.
August 24, 2026
Fixed: sharing a plan failed silently if it contained a curly apostrophe or other special text. Share links are built from your plan’s own text — future expense and windfall names, and the note you can attach to the link. If any of that contained a character like the curly apostrophe an iPhone types automatically (“Daughter’s wedding”), generating the link failed silently: no error, no link, and the Share button could stick in its working state. Links now carry any text exactly as typed, and links created before this fix keep working unchanged. Affects anyone who tried to share a plan containing such text — most commonly text typed on a phone. Also in this release: when the step-by-step setup estimates your Social Security from an assumed salary because you left the field blank, it now says so — and the contributions step states what is assumed for any field you skip. Nothing about how those assumptions are used changed; they are simply disclosed.
August 23, 2026
Fixed: plans built by describing your situation to the AI Advisor could carry the wrong spending, filing status and goal. If the conversation never captured a monthly spending figure, the plan was saved with a spending goal of zero. The projection then modelled almost no spending at all and reported a success rate near 100%. Anyone who built a plan this way and did not state what they expect to spend saw a result that was far too optimistic. The spending goal now falls back to the app’s default, and the figure is shown on the summary screen before you continue. Three related fixes to the same hand-off: if you are married but only wanted your own accounts modelled, that choice could not be recorded, so the plan was built either as a single filer — using single tax brackets on a jointly-filed return — or as a household with a spouse the app had no figures for, understating the plan by roughly 9 and 14 percentage points of success rate on a representative case; the retirement goal picked during the conversation was collected and then dropped; and the summary could describe your savings as split by a default 80/20 rule when the plan had actually used the balances you gave, or the reverse. Plans built through the step-by-step questions were not affected by any of these.
August 23, 2026
Fixed: two figures the AI Advisor quoted were wrong — the Social Security break-even age and the projected RMD. The Advisor was given a Social Security break-even age calculated with an arithmetic error that made it about twelve times too soon. On a $3,000 full-retirement-age benefit claimed at 67, it was told the break-even against claiming at 62 was age 68; the correct answer is about 79. Delaying Social Security therefore looked as though it paid for itself almost immediately, when the break-even in fact sits near life expectancy — which is the substance of the claiming decision. The projected required minimum distribution grew the pre-tax balance from retirement to RMD age without subtracting anything spent along the way, so it returned the same number regardless of withdrawals: on one plan it reported $122,867 where the projection’s own figure was $69,130. Both now come from the projection itself. Neither figure appeared anywhere on screen, and no projection, success rate or balance in your plan changed — they were only ever used in conversation with the AI Advisor.
August 23, 2026
Fixed: Compare now names every input that differs between two scenarios. The “Δ What Changed Between Scenarios” section on the Compare tab tracked a short list of inputs. If the only difference between two scenarios was an input outside that list — a spouse’s retirement age, for example — the section did not appear at all, so a comparison could show a large difference in success rate with nothing named as its cause. It now covers every input the Progress tab already tracked. Affects anyone comparing saved scenarios. On the same tab, the Couples Social Security map now states that its shading and its ★ are measured at different resolutions: the ★ marks the winner scored at full resolution, while the shading is a faster read across all 81 combinations, so a near-tie can look level while the ★ still separates them. The figures themselves are unchanged.
August 23, 2026
Fixed: Progress no longer describes a plan that runs out of money as more predictable. When a plan depletes, every projected path ends at zero, which collapses the range of outcomes. The Progress tab read that collapse as good news and reported that outcomes had become more predictable. It now names it as depletion. Affects anyone whose plan reached zero between check-ins. Separately, the lens radar on Compare and Progress described all five of its axes as absolute. Four are. The spending axis is measured against your own spending goal, so raising your goal can move that axis down even as the spending you can afford goes up. Both legends now say so and point to the figures in dollars. No scores changed.
August 22, 2026
Fixed: the Roth conversion figure now reads your real bridge-year income, and says it is a ceiling. The Roth conversion figure — shown on the Inputs tab and the Roth Strategies card, and used by the AI Advisor — estimated your taxable income during the bridge years instead of reading it from your projection. The estimate assumed your spending was withdrawn from your pre-tax accounts in proportion to your account balances. For a plan funded from an earmarked bridge reserve, or one with a still-working spouse or interest on cash set aside, that estimate could be off by tens of thousands of dollars a year, in either direction. It now reads the ordinary income the engine actually realises in each bridge year, and reports the largest amount you could convert in every year of the window rather than in an average year. Two limits were added: the recommendation now stops at the ACA subsidy cliff and says so when that is what constrains it, and the Medicare income-related surcharge now applies only from age 63, the first year whose income can reach a Medicare year under the two-year lookback. The wording changed too. Every surface used to call this number a recommendation; it is a ceiling — the most you could convert before crossing a limit — and being able to convert that much is not a reason to. On some plans converting nothing leaves the most behind, which is the question the Bridge Optimizer answers. The screens now say which is which. The amount changes on most plans — up where the old estimate overstated your bridge income and suppressed the suggestion, down where it missed the subsidy cliff. Nothing recalculates on its own: if you applied the earlier figure, that conversion is still in your plan and still drives your projection. The Inputs tab now shows how far your entered amount sits from the ceiling, and which year sets it.
August 22, 2026
Fixed: the SS Income Gap card now includes the tax in “total portfolio draws”. The SS Income Gap card reports what your portfolio has to carry between retiring and claiming Social Security. Its headline counted the spending you need to cover, but not the tax you withdraw in order to cover it — and withdrawing from a pre-tax account means pulling both. On a plan funded mainly from a 401(k) or traditional IRA the figure was understated by roughly 16–19% from the second bridge year onward. It now shows the withdrawal the projection actually makes, so the card, the Projection tab and the year-by-year table below the card all report the same number. The headline also states that it is in today’s dollars, which the expanded panel already did and the collapsed card did not. The figure on this card goes up — your plan has not got worse, the card was reporting less than the plan always withdrew. No projection, success rate or balance changes. Reported by a subscriber who could not reconcile the card against the projection chart.
August 22, 2026
Clearer: the money-flow diagram names the Roth conversion tax inside a 401(k) withdrawal. On the Projection tab, “Where your money flows” shows what left each account in a given year. In a year you convert to a Roth, the tax on that conversion can be withheld from the converted money — so the 401(k) figure legitimately runs well above the spending draw shown elsewhere, with no explanation of the difference. The diagram now names it, the same way it already names a required minimum distribution: “401(k) — incl. $43k Roth conversion tax.” Labelling only — no figure in the diagram moves, and the flows balanced correctly before and after.
August 20, 2026
Fixed: a plan for one person no longer shows a spouse scenario. If your plan was set to “Just me”, the Stress Test tab still offered the Survivor Scenario — the card that models a spouse’s death — as though you had a spouse. The check for whether a plan includes a partner was reading an internal starting value rather than your answer to “Who is this plan for?”, and that value is present on every plan. It now reads your answer. This app does not raise the subject of death on its own: the survivor scenario exists because a plan with two people in it has a real question to answer, and it belongs to plans that have two people in them. Household plans are unchanged, and no projection, success rate or saved number changed.
August 20, 2026
Every stress test scenario is now free. The Stress Test tab has 26 scenarios. Twenty-one were always free; the other five — the “Moves That Help” group, which shows what your plan does when you improve it rather than when it breaks — were partly held back, with a free plan seeing two of the five. All five are now open to everyone, with their full numbers. Smart Moves and Deep Search, which size these moves, sequence them and price them in combination, are unchanged and remain part of Navigator. What is free is the question — “if I delayed Social Security to 70, where does that put me?” Found via a bug report: because the hold-back was applied when the grid was drawn rather than when it was counted, the filter read “All (26)” above a grid of 23 and the missing scenarios showed no card and no explanation. Fixed in the same pass: the AI Advisor could not send you to a scenario locked on your plan and would open the tab and leave you at the top of it; it now takes you to the card and highlights it. No projection, success rate or saved number changed.
August 21, 2026
Fixed: two cards on the Results tab both said “nest egg” and showed different totals. If you have earmarked money as a bridge reserve — a home sale, a windfall, or cash set aside to live on before Social Security starts — that money is deliberately held apart from your invested accounts. Two cards reported it differently while using the same words: one counted only the invested accounts, the other counted everything. Both figures were right, but nothing on the screen said which was which. Both now show the same total, and the card states how much of it is your bridge reserve. Wording only — no projection, success rate or withdrawal figure changes.
August 21, 2026
Fixed: an already-retired plan no longer overstates its nest egg in today’s dollars. If your retirement age is at or before your current age, the Projected Nest Egg card converted your balance as though retirement were still ahead of you — so the “in today’s dollars” figure beside it read about 9% higher than the balance itself for someone three years past their retirement date. Money you already hold is in today’s dollars once you have retired, so there is nothing to convert. The card now says so, and the label beside it no longer names a retirement date in the past. This affected the displayed figure only — the projection, the success rate and every row of the projection table were computed correctly throughout.
August 21, 2026
Fixed: a stress scenario that cannot run no longer shows a success rate. The Part-Time Bridge scenario models semi-retiring a few years early, so it needs at least a year between today and your retirement date. For plans without one — anyone already retired, or retiring this year or next — the scenario was correctly not run, but its card still displayed a 50% success rate and described semi-retiring a negative number of years early. The card now locks and states why, the way other scenarios that do not apply to your plan already do. The 50% was a placeholder rather than a computed result, so no scenario was ever scored wrongly.
August 22, 2026
Fixed: six more places a screen disagreed with the plan behind it. A second sweep covered ground the first missed — the conversational setup, the Compare and Progress tabs, and the paid Deep Search tools. As before, the underlying plan was correct in every case; what was wrong was what was shown or stored on top of it. Two affect anyone who used the conversational setup: a described home sale always had its proceeds earmarked as a bridge reserve whether or not you said so, and clicking “Edit Details” then pressing Continue through the questions quietly rebuilt a household plan as a single-person one, dropping a spouse’s pension, retirement accounts and Social Security. On Compare, a saved scenario whose money never runs out was recorded as lasting zero years, so the “longevity edge” card could name the plan that runs out of money as the one lasting longer. On Progress, a plan moving from a monthly surplus to a shortfall was described as “Up” by that amount rather than down, and the bridge-funding target counted years already past for anyone already retired. In Deep Search, Solve for Goal measured most of its search at a lower simulation count than its footnote claimed and interpolated across the mixture, which on the plan that surfaced it recommended cutting monthly spending about $500/mo further than the goal required. Your success rate, projection tables and saved plans are unchanged: none of these altered a calculation.
August 22, 2026
Fixed: eight places where a number on screen disagreed with the plan behind it. A sweep of the app found eight surfaces that recalculated a figure the projection had already worked out, and got it wrong. The underlying plan was correct in every case — the arithmetic running your simulations, projection tables and success rate was never affected. What was wrong was what some cards and tables displayed on top of it. The largest: the “Total nest egg” breakdown inside the Projected Nest Egg card could differ from that card’s own headline by as much as $1.15M on plans involving a home sale or purchase. Also corrected: the withdrawal rate shown against the 4% rule was understated for anyone already retired, and increasingly so the longer you had been; the Roth Conversion Window stress card had its condition reversed, so it was locked for the people who do have a gap between retiring and claiming Social Security and offered to those who don’t; the bridge-year ACA table left Other Income out of its estimate and could claim premium savings you would not receive; a pre-Medicare healthcare figure subtracted the ACA credit twice and could display as a negative amount; and for reverse-mortgage plans the banked part of a cheque now appears as its own column so the projection rows add up on screen. Two of these ran optimistic — the withdrawal rate and the ACA subsidy table — so a few plans looked safer on those specific readouts than they were. Your success rate, projection tables and saved plans are unchanged: nothing here altered a calculation, only what was printed from it.
August 21, 2026
Fixed: the guided setup no longer invents a Social Security benefit. In the guided setup, choosing “I know it” for Social Security and entering $0 did not store $0 — it stored an estimated benefit instead, and the same happened for a spouse’s benefit. The plan then modelled income that will never arrive, always in the optimistic direction: on a household with $1.4M saved and no Social Security at all, the verdict read 97% where the honest answer is 41%. The setup screen now offers a third choice — “I won’t get it” for you, “None” for your spouse — so the answer can be given and is carried through to your plan. This affected people whose benefit is reduced or eliminated: non-covered public employment (WEP/GPO), fewer than 40 credits, or a spouse with no U.S. earnings record. If you set up a plan this way, open Inputs → Social Security and check the figure. Everyone who entered a real benefit, or asked us to estimate one, is unaffected.
August 21, 2026
Fixed: a household plan no longer assumes a 40-year-old spouse. In the guided setup, choosing “Married, planning together” adds a step asking your spouse’s age — and that field arrived pre-filled with 40. Left uncorrected, the plan modeled a spouse who could be decades younger than you, and because a household plan runs to whichever spouse lives longer, that stretched the modeled retirement well past your own horizon and pushed your spouse’s Social Security years further out. On the plan that surfaced this — a 54-year-old retiring at 63 — the verdict read 41% where the same answers with a same-age spouse give 77%, and the projection table ran to age 103 instead of 91. The field now starts empty and states what we assume if you leave it blank: that your spouse is about your age. The error ran pessimistic, so affected verdicts were understated rather than inflated, and saved plans keep the spouse age they carry. Also on the setup screens: the surplus figure beside the live estimate compared your income against a spending goal of zero until you’d answered the spending question, so it always read as a surplus; it now compares against the spending the estimate actually prices.
August 21, 2026
Fixed: spouse contribution suggestions now show the 2026 IRS limits. The Smart Moves suggestions covering a spouse’s catch-up contributions, super catch-up and Roth IRA quoted last year’s IRS limits while the matching suggestions for you quoted this year’s — so the same screen could offer you $8,600 of Roth room and your spouse $8,000 on identical eligibility. Two of the spouse cards also disagreed with themselves, stating one figure in the headline and a different one in the explanation beneath it, and the spouse catch-up’s Enable button wrote a third amount again. Every one of these figures now derives from the same published limits the engine uses: $9,100 of combined catch-up at 50+, $3,250 more per year between 60 and 63, and $8,600 of IRA room at 50+. Your own contribution suggestions carried the correct figures throughout, and no projection math changed.
August 21, 2026
Fixed: the AI Advisor now always links to the card that answers your question. When your question is the one a specific card, workshop or tool exists to answer — “does my Social Security claim age actually matter?”, say — the Advisor’s reply carried a button taking you straight to that card only some of the time. The same question, asked twice on the same plan, could go either way. That button is now part of the answer every time, including when the card sits on the tab you are already viewing. Affects the AI Advisor chat only; the answers themselves are unchanged.
August 21, 2026
Fixed: the Roth eligibility warning now uses the same income figure as the rest of the app. A red banner near the top of Inputs could say you were locked out of direct Roth IRA contributions while the Roth Building Strategies panel further down the same page said the opposite. The banner compared gross salary against the income limit; every other Roth surface — that panel, the Results Roth card, Smart Moves and the projection engine — compares estimated MAGI, which nets out pre-tax 401(k), catch-up and HSA contributions. High savers were the ones who saw both messages at once. All of these now read one number, and the banner states what the estimate does and doesn’t include. No projection changes: the MAGI figure was always the one driving the math. Also corrected on the same screens — the eligibility banner no longer shows a spouse row on a single-person plan, and the mega backdoor Roth suggestion no longer keys off gross pay.
August 19, 2026
Fixed: both setup paths now assume the same savings rate and state tax. The guided setup quietly assumed a 4% return on cash savings and a 5% state tax rate when unspecified, while the AI conversation setup used the app’s standard assumptions (4.5% for both) — same answers, about three points of success-rate difference nobody chose. Both paths now read the standard assumptions from one place, so the two doors produce the same plan for the same answers. Same motion: the guided setup’s flat $1,200 placeholder for an unknown spouse Social Security benefit is replaced by the standard spousal benefit — half the primary earner’s estimated check — matching the AI conversation; and every remaining setup assumption both paths write (growth rates, inflation, planning horizon) now reads from the same single source. Existing saved plans keep their values; only what new setups assume changed.
August 18, 2026
Fixed: the AI conversation setup now uses the app’s own Social Security estimate. When someone building a plan through the AI Advisor conversation didn’t know their Social Security benefit, the AI itself estimated a monthly figure — and its estimates could land far from what the salary actually earns. In the case that surfaced this, a $95,000 earner was set to $1,900/month where the Social Security formula gives about $3,030 — enough to swing the plan’s success verdict. The AI no longer writes benefit numbers: it captures the salary, and the app computes the estimate with the same real SSA formula (bend points, wage base) the guided setup has used since August 6 — both setup paths now produce the same number for the same answers. An unknown spouse benefit follows the same rule, estimated from their salary or set to the standard spousal benefit (half the primary earner’s) for a spouse without an earnings record. Affects plans built through the AI conversation where the AI estimated Social Security; a benefit the user gave it was always kept as-is and still is. Found in an internal review of the two setup paths.
August 18, 2026
Fixed: the quick-start estimate now shows the same number Results does. The guided setup’s live estimate priced a different plan than the one the answers build — the full spending goal charged flat for every retirement year, while the app models spending easing with age (100% → 85% → 75%), and a pension entered during setup never reached it. On the plan that surfaced this, setup said 65% of simulations succeed; Results computed 94% from the same answers seconds later. The estimate now runs the exact plan the setup hands over, with the same 1,000 simulations Results runs, so the numbers match to the digit. The summary screen’s observations also now read the finished plan — previously its guaranteed-income note could claim 0% covered beside a real estimated Social Security benefit. Setup preview only: saved plans and every Results figure were always computed correctly. Found via a user report.
August 17, 2026
Fixed: home sale and replacement at exactly retirement age now show in the nest-egg table. When a plan sells (and optionally replaces) the home at exactly the retirement age, the amounts fold into the starting nest egg — correct math, but the “Building your nest egg” table either netted the two into one unlabeled line or, with proceeds earmarked as the bridge reserve, showed the sale nowhere. The table now itemizes each piece — sale proceeds and their destination, the replacement purchase, any long-term-care reserve — so the nest-egg figure visibly adds up. No number moved. Found via a user report.
August 17, 2026
New: Spending Guardrails — the two portfolio numbers worth watching. A market drop raises one real question: do I need to do anything? The newest Deep Search tool answers it in advance. It finds your two guardrails — the portfolio level where a modest spending trim would genuinely protect your plan, and the level where you’ve earned a raise — by re-running your whole plan at falling and rising balances until your success odds cross the acting lines. The answer comes back in dollars, with the action pre-sized: “if your portfolio closes below $X, trim to $Y a month.” Between the lines, the advice is explicitly to do nothing. This is the risk-based guardrails approach from recent research — the successor to withdrawal-rate rules like Guyton-Klinger — brought out from behind advisor-only software. Part of Navigator; built from a paid user’s request.
August 17, 2026
The bridge reserve becomes visible, and its growth promise is kept. Money earmarked for the bridge reserve was modeled correctly but shown almost nowhere. It now has a full on-screen life: set-aside years appear in the nest-egg table, a new “At retirement” section itemizes what built the reserve, and “everything you have at retirement” — nest egg plus reserve — is stated outright. Also corrected, and it moves numbers: earmarked money now grows at the reserve’s savings rate from the day it exists, not the portfolio rate — parked means parked. Reserves funded by earmarked windfalls come down; the standing cash reserve, which previously earned nothing before retirement, comes up. Success rates essentially unchanged — the correction is the reserve’s size at retirement.
August 16, 2026
New: a life event can be a fixed amount. Costs and windfalls on the Life Events timeline used to rise with inflation, no exceptions — right for college, wrong for a contract. Each entry now carries a “Fixed amount” checkbox: a loan payment, a lease, deferred comp, or an installment sale is charged or received at exactly the typed figure in every year it fires — the same fixed-vs-inflating honesty the engine has always applied to Other Retirement Income, and new money-in entries start as fixed because most repeating payouts are contracts. Existing entries are untouched to the byte. The add buttons were also renamed — “Future expense” and “Windfall / payout” — because both lists have supported repeating entries since July.
August 16, 2026
New: your next home can carry a mortgage. A retirement move doesn’t have to be a cash purchase any more. Enter a down payment on the app’s Your home card and the plan finances the rest: only the down payment leaves the portfolio at the purchase, and the new loan’s payment is added on top of spending — held flat until it’s paid off, because a fixed-rate payment doesn’t rise with inflation. The rate and length are visible, editable assumptions, the Home Equity Workbench and Your Next Home tools price the financed plan automatically, and it’s locked by a permanent hand-arithmetic test plus a new saved test plan — the 44th — that finances a pricier home.
August 16, 2026
Fixed: the ACA subsidy column now shows by default in the projection table. When a plan receives an estimated ACA subsidy, the year-by-year projection credits it back to savings — but since late July the column showing that credit was hidden in the default view, so the visible columns came up short of the end balance by exactly the subsidy. The column now appears automatically whenever a subsidy exists, the same rule the Medicare-surcharge and conversion-tax columns follow. Display only — no number changed; the column was always available under COLUMNS, and column choices users made themselves are kept.
August 16, 2026
Fixed: pension-covered health insurance no longer gets ACA subsidy math. If your pension or retiree plan covers your health insurance (the checkbox under Inputs → Healthcare), the engine no longer estimates an ACA marketplace subsidy against the premium you still pay — coverage that isn’t bought on the marketplace has no premium tax credit and no subsidy cliff. Previously, checking that box hid the cliff warnings on the Healthcare Bridge card but left the subsidy estimate itself running, so low-income bridge years could credit a subsidy the plan can’t actually receive. The Roth conversion card’s cliff gauge and the Bridge Optimizer’s subsidy notes now also stand down when the box is checked. Affects plans with the box checked and a pre-Medicare premium entered: success rates essentially unchanged; ending balances shift down by the amount of the former credit — the honest direction. Found via a user report; locked by a permanent test.
August 15, 2026
New: choose when Roth conversions start and stop. Conversions no longer have to end when Social Security starts. A “Convert from age / until age” pair on the Inputs tab runs conversions on your schedule — up to the year before RMDs begin, the planning window pre-tax-heavy plans actually use. Post-SS conversion years are priced honestly: they stack on Social Security income, and the year-by-year table marks them and shows the higher per-dollar cost. Also: the projection’s Medicare surcharge (IRMAA) estimate now counts planned conversions — previously it left them out, understating Medicare premiums for plans converting past 65 (success rates essentially unchanged; ending balances slightly lower, the honest direction) — and a $0-conversion plan’s Roth Strategies card now clearly labels its recommendation as an exploration. Defaults unchanged — plans that don’t touch the new fields convert exactly as before. Locked by a permanent test with hand-computed amounts to the dollar.
August 16, 2026
Fixed: Career-Break Workshop honors contribution start/stop ages in both-spouses mode. Affects households that set contribution timing (released earlier today) and model a joint career break. That one screen’s both-spouses path ignored the timing windows — a stream set to start later contributed nothing, a stream set to stop early kept contributing. The headline projection, Monte Carlo odds, and every table were always correct; single-person mode was always correct. Caught by the automatic post-release test sweep within the hour and fixed the same evening. Locked by the workshop’s reconciliation test, now proving the workshop matches the engine to the cent on every household test plan.
August 16, 2026
New: start and stop ages for every contribution stream. Every account’s contribution — 401(k), Roth IRA, savings, brokerage, HSA, each spouse separately — can now carry its own timing, set right beside the contribution amount. Model the plans people actually have: brokerage contributions that begin when the mortgage is paid off, a spouse’s 401(k) that resumes with a return to work, an HSA that ends with the health plan. Yearly increases ramp from the window’s first year, catch-up and employer match apply only in contributing years, and the Coast FIRE stop-age remains the master switch. Plans that don’t touch the new ages are unchanged to the byte, verified across every saved test plan; locked by a permanent test where every figure is hand arithmetic.
August 16, 2026
Fixed and rebuilt: the backdoor Roth is now a marker on your real contribution, per spouse. Two defects, one rebuild. The Roth Strategies card’s spouse Enable button saved a setting the engine never read (the row showed active while the numbers stayed put), and the backdoor toggle added its own separate contribution on top of the regular Roth contribution field — the same real-world action could be counted twice, up to $15,000/yr into an account the law caps at $7,500. Now each person’s Roth contribution field is the single source of the dollars, with a per-spouse “via backdoor” marker recording how the money legally gets in above the income limit; enabling the strategy sets the marker and fills the contribution to the IRS maximum. Mega backdoor is separate and per-spouse, landing in each person’s own Roth. Existing plans convert automatically and keep their numbers to the cent — except plans that modeled both streams at once, which are now capped at the IRS maximum (the previous figure wasn’t legally achievable). Locked by a permanent test with to-the-cent fixtures, plus a new guard that flags any control writing a setting the engine can’t read.
August 15, 2026
Two more tax rules corrected: Roth-ladder shortfalls and state tax on harvested gains. Success rates are essentially unchanged — measured within a fraction of a percentage point on every test plan. First: when a Roth conversion’s tax bill has to come out of the converted money itself — a ladder whose cash accounts run dry mid-ladder — the engine was taxing only the portion that survived, not the full amount that left the 401(k). The IRS taxes the full withdrawal, and before 59½ the withheld portion also carries the 10% penalty; the engine now does both. Second: tax-free gain harvesting was free everywhere — but only the federal 0% bracket is actually free. The engine now charges the state’s capital-gains rate on the harvested amount (the eight preferential-rate states honored; no-income-tax states still harvest free) and prices the way a harvest can pull Social Security into taxability. Affects: Roth ladders whose taxable buckets run dry mid-ladder (~$3,000–5,000/yr of previously understated tax per $100k rung), and harvesting users in the ~41 states that tax gains. Harvesting remains worth doing — the projection now shows the honest price. Locked by permanent tests with hand-computed fixtures to the dollar.
August 15, 2026
Fixed: big one-time costs paid from a 401(k) are now taxed. Success rates are essentially unchanged — measured within a fraction of a percentage point on every test plan. The correction lands in projected ending balances on plans that fund a large one-time cost — a home purchase, a wedding, college help — from a 401(k) or Traditional IRA: that withdrawal is ordinary income, and the engine wasn’t taxing it. A $300,000 purchase funded mostly from a 401(k) generated $0 of tax, where the honest figure is roughly $90,000 once the withdrawal also covers its own tax bill. The engine now withdraws enough extra to cover the tax the event creates — what a person actually does — and the year’s tax charges the exact figure. Closed in the same motion: the 10% early-withdrawal penalty now applies to event withdrawals before 59½, a big taxable event year correctly loses its health-insurance subsidy, and tax-free gain harvesting no longer claims 0%-bracket room an event has already filled. One deliberate exception: the modeled long-term-care event is not taxed this way, because the IRS medical-expense deduction would offset most of it in reality. The same honesty applies before retirement: a college cost or home purchase that digs into a 401(k) during the working years is taxed on top of salary, with the penalty where it applies, and the nest-egg build table shows the tax on its final row. Affects: plans funding large one-time costs from pre-tax accounts — lower, honest ending balances; plans whose events are covered by savings or brokerage money are untouched. Found by the same professional-lens review as the other August 15 fixes; locked by a permanent test with hand-computed fixtures to the dollar.
August 15, 2026
Three tax rules join the engine: the investment-income surtax, the 65+ deduction, and tax on cash interest. Success rates are essentially unchanged by all three — the projections most people use to decide whether they can retire were already honest; the corrections land in the later-years detail, in both directions. Money back for most plans: from age 65 the IRS allows a larger standard deduction, and the engine now applies it — nearly every plan shows less tax from 65 on, compounding to a higher ending balance over a long retirement. In the other direction: the 3.8% net investment income surtax now applies above the IRS thresholds ($200,000 single / $250,000 married, unindexed by law), and interest on cash — high-yield savings and bridge reserves — is taxed as the income it is. Affects: everyone 65+ gains the deduction; high-income plans with large realized gains, and cash-heavy plans, show the honest higher tax — five to six figures on the leftover-at-the-end of the largest affected plans, little or nothing on typical plans. Found in the same professional-lens review as the Social Security fixes; each rule is locked by a permanent test.
August 15, 2026
Fixed: the full year’s tax is now computed in one pass. Success rates are essentially unchanged by this fix — the projections most people use to decide whether they can retire were already honest. The correction lands in projected ending balances: plans with large pre-tax accounts in the required-withdrawal years see lower leftover-at-the-end figures — five to six figures at the top — while typical plans see little or nothing. The cause: the engine assembled each year’s tax bill from separate estimates — one for guaranteed income, one for the withdrawal that funds spending, one for the required minimum distribution the IRS forces out of a pre-tax account after 73. Those estimates measured against inconsistent starting points, and in years with a large required distribution, a slice of real taxable income fell between them and was never taxed. The year’s tax is now computed once, on the income that actually happened, and the money moves with it — less of the forced withdrawal is reinvested, because more of it goes to tax. The same review closed a matching gap: tax-free gain harvesting now counts the required distribution when checking how much 0%-bracket room a year has left. Affects: large pre-tax portfolios in the required-withdrawal years — the corrected, lower ending balances. Locked by a permanent test that independently recomputes every year of every test plan.
August 15, 2026
Fixed: Social Security taxability thresholds now stay fixed, as the law does. The IRS thresholds that decide how much of a Social Security benefit is taxable — $25,000/$34,000 single, $32,000/$44,000 married filing jointly — have been fixed by statute since they were created; Congress has never indexed them for inflation. The engine was raising them with inflation each projection year, so in the later years of a long plan, less of Social Security was taxed than the law calls for — on a $40,000 benefit twenty-plus years out, several thousand dollars a year of understated federal tax. The thresholds now stay put, exactly as the statute does; tax brackets, the standard deduction, and capital-gains breakpoints continue to index, as the law indexes them. Affects: plans drawing Social Security alongside other income — most plans — show somewhat more tax in later years, and success odds may read slightly lower. The new figure is the lawful one. Found in a professional-lens review of the tax engine; locked by a permanent test the same day.
August 15, 2026
2026 annual values trued up; Alabama pension treatment corrected. Two annual IRS/SSA values had carried their 2025 amounts into the 2026 engine and are now current: the Social Security earnings-test limit ($23,400 → $24,480) and the qualified charitable distribution cap ($108,000 → $111,000). Separately, the engine taxed Alabama pension income at the state rate, but Alabama exempts defined-benefit pension income. Affects: early Social Security claimers still working (slightly less modeled withholding), charitable giving above the old QCD cap, and Alabama plans with a pension (less state tax; 401(k)/IRA withdrawals remain fully taxed there).
August 14, 2026
Fixed: the projection's year detail mislabeled required withdrawals. In years where the IRS forces money out of a pre-tax account, the expanded year detail in the app said “No portfolio draws this year” beside the forced draw, and folded the reinvested portion of the withdrawal into the “Lifestyle spending” line — on a large account, that could label hundreds of thousands of reinvested dollars as spending. The money always moved correctly; the labels were wrong. The detail now names the required withdrawal as its own source, shows the reinvested portion on its own line, and the pieces sum to the draw on screen. Affects: display only — every balance, tax figure, and projection was already correct.
August 14, 2026
Fixed: a decimal in an age field switched off required minimum withdrawals. If any age in a plan carried a decimal — 62.25 instead of 62 — the engine computed no required minimum distributions at all: the projection showed pre-tax accounts untouched from the required beginning age onward, no tax on the withdrawals the IRS would have forced, and success odds that ran optimistic because that tax was never charged. Whole-number ages always computed correctly. The IRS divisor table is keyed by whole ages, and a fractional age missed it every year — which the engine silently read as “no withdrawal required.” The lookup now rounds down to the age attained that year, the same way the IRS tables work. The quick-start questions accepted decimal ages without rounding them; the main input screen already snapped them to whole years, which is why most plans never saw this. Affects: only plans with a decimal in an age field. Those projections now show the required withdrawals, their tax and any Medicare surcharge, and the success rate may read a little lower — the honest number. Found through a user report; reproduced and fixed the same day.
August 10, 2026
The AI Advisor now checks which age a Social Security figure is for. If you told the Advisor a benefit amount and named the age you planned to claim — “we’ll both start at 65, and it’s about $2,500” — it could record that as your benefit at full retirement age, which is a different number. The plan then reduced it again for claiming early, so Social Security came out lower than it should have been for the rest of the projection. The field is described to the Advisor properly now, and it is instructed to ask when the age you named is not 67 rather than assume. It will not convert the figure itself — if you give it the cheque you receive today, it points you at the Social Security section, which already back-solves the full-retirement-age amount for you. A regression test holds it in place. Reported by a reader on r/DIYRetirement, who spent an afternoon in the app and wrote up what he found. Who is affected: anyone who gave the Advisor a Social Security figure in conversation and named a claim age other than 67 — worth opening the Social Security section and checking the benefit shown is your amount at 67. The calculation itself did not change, and figures typed in directly were never affected.
August 10, 2026
We now charge your long-term care premium while you are still working. The engine charged an LTC insurance premium only once you retired, so every payment made before that date was invisible to your plan. The test that made it obvious: the projected nest egg came out identical whether the premium was $0 or $10,000 a year. That is the wrong way round for a policy we tell people to buy between 52 and 58 — which means paying for a decade or more before they stop working. Those years are now charged, inflated, and they also cost the growth that money would have earned, which is the larger number: on the plan that surfaced this, 13 years of $2,500 premiums is $32,500 of payments but $65,209 once the forgone growth is counted. Limited-pay policies stop on schedule — set a paid-up age and we stop charging there, in both your working years and retirement. You can watch it happen: the “Building your nest egg” table shows the premium leaving each year, labelled, and every row still adds up on screen. Who is affected: anyone with a premium entered who has not yet retired. Their nest egg reads lower, and it should have all along. Plans without a premium are unaffected to the cent. A second, older fault surfaced with it and is fixed too: the retirement-side premium had been charged in the drawdown but never recorded, so the cash-flow diagram had been short by exactly that premium every year since the field shipped.
August 9, 2026
Your long-term care policy now pays out in your plan. Until now we charged your LTC premium as a cost and modelled nothing on the other side, so buying insurance made a plan read worse. You can now describe what the policy pays — a monthly benefit in today’s terms, an inflation rider, a benefit period and an elimination period — and we net it against the care cost month by month: you pay through the waiting period, the policy pays for as long as its benefit period lasts, and anything beyond that is yours again. The inflation rider turns out to be most of the answer, and it is worth seeing the size of it. A $6,000/mo policy held from 49 and claimed at 87 is worth $1,951/mo in today’s money with no rider, $4,176 with a simple 3% rider and $6,000 with a compound one — 22%, 47% and 67% of an $8,942/mo care bill. Three policies that look identical on a premium statement. That is also why there is no “typical policy” preset to pick from: it would be wrong by a factor of three. We ask for the benefit in today’s terms, so there is no question about when you bought it. The fields appear under Inputs → Healthcare once a premium is entered, only the monthly benefit is required, and if your policy is quoted as a total pool rather than a benefit period there is a converter. Leave it blank and nothing changes — the care cost is charged in full, which is the conservative reading.
August 9, 2026
The long-term care stress now charges care when it happens. A care event is a concentrated late-life cost. We were modelling it as a small monthly increase spread across every year of retirement — the same total money, very different timing, and not a neutral simplification: money taken out decades early forfeits its compounding and raises your withdrawal rate through exactly the years a bad market does the most harm. Measured across our test plans, the spread-out version charged roughly twice the damage of the real shape; on one it showed an 80-point drop where the honest answer is 46. The stress test was overstating a risk that is frightening enough stated correctly. It now charges the cost as a real window at the age care would actually arrive, so most plans will see the care hit get smaller. Three faults in the same card are fixed alongside: its cost slider opened at $6,000/mo (the out-of-date figure we corrected elsewhere in August) and now opens at your own state’s published median; it stopped at $15,000/mo, below the real cost in the most expensive states, so some people could not dial their own number; and dragging it silently switched the model, because the card charged a three-year event while the slider charged a permanent lifetime increase.
August 9, 2026
What your long-term care premium actually does in your plan. If you had entered an LTC insurance premium, the Long-Term Care card told you your coverage was keeping your plan robust. That was not true, and we would rather correct it than let it stand. Here is what actually happens: we charge your premium as a cost, and unless you describe what the policy pays we model no payout at all — so the care cost is charged to you in full and your coverage is never netted against it. Every surface that discussed it now says so, including the AI Advisor, which is instructed never to tell you your policy protects the plan. Where a plan genuinely absorbs a care event the verdict is unchanged; it now credits the plan rather than the coverage. Two smaller fixes alongside: a $2,500 premium was displayed as “$3k/yr insured” and now shows what you entered, and the verdict quoted the national care cost while the simulation charged your own state’s — both now quote your state. Fixing the wording turned up something worse underneath, so that is fixed too: the care-cost stress behind your ranked risks was raising your spending goal in a way the engine ignored whenever spending phases are set, which is every saved plan. It ran, changed nothing, and reported no exposure — so long-term care could never appear among your ranked risks at all.
August 8, 2026
What we record, said plainly. We have replaced our third-party analytics with our own. What gets recorded: which features you open, whether you are a customer, and whether anything crashed — tied to a randomly-generated local ID, never to a name or an email. We now also record a general description of your plan: whether it is for one person or two, whether you have already retired, the goal you chose, and roughly how well-funded it is. Never a dollar figure you entered — money-shaped values are stripped before anything is stored, which is enforced in code rather than promised. Raw records are deleted after 90 days. Why: it is the only way to tell whether a tool we built is reaching the people it was built for, and we would rather hold that ourselves than hand it to someone else. We also corrected the privacy page, which said we had “no backend server and no database.” There is a server — it holds what a purchase needs (what you bought, how much of your AI allowance you’ve used) so it keeps working across your devices. There has never been a database of customers or their numbers. Affects: nobody’s numbers. Your retirement figures still live in your browser, we still never receive them, and we still keep no copy.
August 7, 2026
Your Medicare surcharge is now shown, not just charged. If your income in retirement crosses the Medicare threshold you pay IRMAA — a surcharge added to your Part B and Part D premiums, per person, from 65. The projection has always charged it. It just never named it: the figure was folded into your healthcare cost and then thrown away. It now appears as its own column in the projection table, with a line in the year-by-year detail, both making clear it is part of your healthcare figure rather than an extra cost beside it. The column only exists for plans that actually cross the threshold, so most people will never see it. On our own test plans it reaches $314,997 across a retirement, which is a lot of money to take out of a plan without a label. Worth knowing if you are married: when one spouse dies the survivor is measured against the single-filer threshold on barely reduced income, so the surcharge often rises. We have always modelled that; now you can see it happen. Affects: nothing in your plan changed — no balance, success rate or projection moves by a cent. This reports a cost that was already being charged.
August 6, 2026
How likely long-term care is, stated more carefully. Inside the app, the long-term care card said 70% of people over 65 need some form of care, printed beside a three-year paid nursing-home scenario. Both true separately, misleading together — the 70% counts any help at all, including unpaid care from family. It now uses the federal figure for the kind of care it actually prices: 56% of people turning 65 will develop a disability serious enough to require long-term support. It also states what paid care really looks like — 55% of older adults use none at all, the average paid stay is 0.8 years, and only about 4% reach five years. Source: HHS/ASPE, 2022. No projection or cost figure changed.
August 6, 2026
Long-term care is now priced where you live. Inside the app, the Stress Test priced a severe care event at one national figure. Care costs vary 4.9x across the country — $5,627/mo in Texas against $27,831 in Alaska — and that single figure was more than 20% out for 24 of the 50 states, understating the cost in 29 of them. Your own state’s median is now used, from the CareScout 2025 survey. You can also pick the level of care modelled: home care, assisted living, or a nursing home. If your plan includes moving to another state, care is priced where you will be living. Your projection and saved plan are unchanged.
August 6, 2026
Fixed: your estimated Social Security, and the cost of a long-term care event. If you didn’t enter your own Social Security benefit, the app estimated $1,800/mo for everyone regardless of salary — and on some paths entered nothing at all. It now runs the Social Security benefit formula on the salary you give it and shows the figure used; higher earners often see close to double the old number. Separately, the Stress Test priced a severe care event at $6,000/mo, where a semi-private nursing home room runs a national median of $9,580/mo (CareScout 2025). Your projection and saved plan are unchanged.
August 6, 2026
Fixed: two Inputs buttons that did nothing. Inside the app, since the Inputs sections were made to stay open, two controls stopped working: switching to a household plan no longer opened the Spouse Portfolio section, and “Add detail” left you at the top of Inputs. Both now take you to the section they name. No numbers changed.
August 6, 2026
The ACA subsidy cliff is now measured the same way on both cards. Inside the app, two cards check your pre-Medicare income against the ACA subsidy cliff — the gauge on Roth Strategies and the Pre-Medicare Gap card — and they were adding that income up differently. The gauge left a spouse’s Social Security out altogether; the other left other retirement income out. On a test household where one spouse claims while the other is still bridging to their own claim, the two came out as much as $14,451 apart. The gauge was the one understating, and it is the card you size a Roth conversion against, so it suggested more room under the cliff than you actually had. Both now share one calculation and agree to the dollar. Your projection, success rate and nest egg are unaffected — the engine was never involved; what moved is the income figure those two cards compare against the cliff.
August 4, 2026
Fixed: the Combined Risk Scan said “your plan held up” when it could not tell. The scan asks whether two risks landing together hurt more than the two individual Stress Test cards suggest. If they did not, it said your plan held up — a claim the maths behind it could not support. To find extra damage there has to be some left to do: if retiring early alone takes your plan to 5% and a crash alone takes it to 6%, no combination can be worse than expected, so the scan finds nothing regardless of what is true. It went blind on the plans in the most trouble and reported the silence as good news — on one test plan sitting at 87%, every stacked pair landed at 2% and the card still said it held up. It now says which combinations it could test and which it could not, and an untested pair makes no claim either way. “Your plan held up” appears only when every combination was tested and passed, with the worst pair’s number beside it. Combinations that cannot apply to you collapse into a single line. Affects: anyone who has run the Combined Risk Scan on a plan under strain. No numbers changed — the simulations were always right. What changed is what we say about them.
August 4, 2026
Fixed: we were inflating your mortgage payment. A fixed-rate mortgage is the same cheque every year. Your spending goal is entered in today’s dollars with that payment inside it, so inflating the goal inflated the payment too. We now hold it flat and inflate only the rest of your spending. This started at full size on day one of retirement rather than drifting in slowly: ten years from retirement at 3% inflation the payment was modelled about 34% too high, and on a test plan with a mortgage running to 82 the success rate moves from 52% to 62% — better because it was wrong, not because the plan changed. The “Your home” card now asks whether your goal includes the payment; if it does not, we add it on top instead, still flat. Other Retirement Income has the same option, since a fixed annuity was also being grown with inflation. Not fixed, and worth saying: when spending guardrails cut after a bad market they still cut the mortgage, a payment you cannot reduce — that needs the split between essential and discretionary spending, which we have not built. Affects: anyone with a mortgage in their plan, or a fixed annuity entered as other income. Nothing you entered changed — only how we model it. Verified against all 38 saved test plans.
August 3, 2026
Spending Shape now lifts your whole plan instead of re-carving it. Asked how much more you could afford, this tool used to answer by raising your early-retirement spending and cutting your later years to pay for it — figures you had entered yourself. On one plan it proposed $19,800 a month until 70 and $6,545 after, a shape almost nobody would choose. The arithmetic was right; it was answering a question you had not asked. It now lifts your whole spending curve and leaves your proportions exactly as you set them — every phase moves together. Your result is also priced at every success level, so you can see what each one leaves behind: your success floor has always been the dial between spending more now and leaving more behind, and nothing said so. And where the money runs out in some futures, we now say roughly when, and what you would be living on from then — your Social Security and pension do not stop. Because that is stated in years and dollars rather than as a percentage, you can choose levels below 80% if you want to spend down harder. The search is finer-grained too: it used to report the nearest step below your limit, which could leave up to $750 a month unclaimed, always in that direction and never the other. It now finds the actual number.
August 3, 2026
Fixed: we were charging you to run a house you had not bought yet. If your plan sells your home at one age and buys the next one later — sell at 64, rent a few years, buy at 70 — we were charging the next home’s property tax, insurance and upkeep across all of those in-between years. You do not own a house in those years, so that cost is not real. It came from treating the sale and the purchase as one moment when they are not. Those costs now stop when you sell and start again when you buy, priced for the home you actually buy. On one test plan — a $720,000 house in New Jersey sold at 64, a $320,000 one bought at 70 — that is about $23,500 a year of spending we were adding back for six years, and roughly $279,000 by the end of the plan. You can see it in the year-by-year table: open a year between the sale and the purchase and it now reads “No home to run.” Not one of our saved test plans had a sale age and a purchase age that differed, so nothing we already had could have caught this — there is now one that does. Affects: only plans where the sale age and the purchase age are different. If you buy the same year you sell, or sell and rent from then on, nothing moves — verified unchanged against all 36 saved test plans.
August 3, 2026
Your Next Home can now say “sell, rent a while, then buy”. The Deep Search tool that prices your housing move could only describe two of the four things people actually do: sell and buy again the same year, or sell and rent from then on. It had no way to say “sell at 62, rent until 68, then buy” — or the version where you spend those years in an RV and pay almost nothing. The setup is now one timeline you read as a sentence: sell at an age, buy at an age, and the rent clause appears by itself for the years in between. Your plan has always been able to describe that gap, and the math has always modelled it properly — the money from the sale is invested and compounding through those years, rent is charged only across them, and the next home is priced in the year you actually buy it. It was only this one tool that could not say it. If a gap has nothing charged in it, we now say so plainly rather than quietly pricing several years of free housing. This also fixes something for anyone who had already set a later buy age on the “Your home” card: applying a move from this tool used to overwrite that age with your sale age and drop the rent along with it. It now opens on your own timeline and leaves it alone. Affects: a paid tool. No number in anyone’s plan changes on its own.
August 2, 2026
New: build the housing move you’re turning over, and we’ll cost it. A new tool in the app’s Deep Search. The free Home Equity Workbench compares three paths we name — keep, downsize, sell and rent. This one prices the move you actually have in mind: sell at 64, buy a $380,000 place in Florida, stop a year earlier. It runs that exact combination against your real plan, and tells you what it is worth alongside the most your next home could cost while the plan still holds. Each control shows what changing it is worth, so you can see which ones matter to you rather than guessing, and a move to another state breaks into its parts — income tax, property tax, whether Social Security is taxed there — because “Florida is worth $310 a month” is a slogan and three named figures are something you can check against your own life. There is no star, no ranking and no list of states we think you should move to: the arithmetic would happily tell everyone to sell up and move to the cheapest state in the country, which is true, useless, and not our call. You build the move; we cost it. Affects: a new paid tool. Nothing changes in your plan until you press Apply.
August 2, 2026
You can tell us you’re moving to another state. Plenty of people retire in one state and move to another a few years later — and until now your plan could not say so. It assumed you stayed put for the whole of retirement, which meant we taxed every year where you live today, including the ones you would spend somewhere else. On the “Your home” card you can now set the age you would move and where to. From that year on we tax your plan as that state — its income tax rate, whether it taxes retirement income at all, whether it taxes Social Security — and the years before it stay taxed where you are now. Property tax follows you as well, so a home you buy there costs what it costs there. Retiring in New Jersey and moving to Florida at 70 was worth about $107,000 on one test plan. Set only one half and we leave your plan exactly where it is rather than guess. Affects: only plans that record a move. Everything else is unchanged — verified against all 35 saved test plans.
August 2, 2026
Fixed: our property tax rates were too high, and it flattered selling your home. When we added the cost of running a home (below), property tax came from a set of ballpark rates rather than a published source — the internal note said as much. We have now checked all 51 against the Tax Foundation’s published table (Facts & Figures 2025, Table 32, calendar year 2023, from Census ACS data), and every one of them was wrong — 49 of the 51 too high, by a quarter or more in some states. New Jersey was 2.23% against a true 1.77%; New Hampshire 1.93% against 1.41%. The direction is what matters: because we model the change in running costs when your home changes, too high a rate makes downsizing look like it saves more than it does. On a $700,000 to $300,000 move in New Jersey we credited $1,243 a month of saving where the truth is $1,090 — roughly $46,000 of imagined saving across a retirement, all of it pointing toward selling. That is the last thing this app should do. Rates now come from one published table, cited by year, never blended across sources. Affects: only plans that sell, downsize or move house. Everything else is unchanged.
August 2, 2026
What your house costs to run is now part of the decision. Property tax, insurance and upkeep have always lived inside your monthly spending goal, and the app’s home card said so. That works when you are only comparing — keep and downsize both carry them — but it quietly distorted every decision about the house, because those costs scale with it. Moving from a $700,000 home to a $300,000 one saves roughly $870 a month, which is about the size of the whole answer. Selling and renting was hit hardest: we charged you the rent and kept charging you to run a house you no longer owned. On one test plan that was worth 55 points of success rate. The plan now models the change when the house changes — never as a new expense, since your goal already carries today’s costs. Property tax uses your state’s rate (0.29% in Hawaii, 2.23% in New Jersey), insurance and upkeep are flat assumptions, and you can override the whole rate on the home card if you know your real numbers. Both errors this fixes pointed the same way — toward keeping the house — which is the status quo, so nothing ever looked wrong. Affects: anyone whose plan sells, downsizes or rents. Nothing changes for anyone staying put — verified unchanged against all 33 saved test plans.
August 2, 2026
The free Home-in-Retirement calculator now runs the real engine, and hands off. The calculator on this site worked out keep / downsize / sell-and-rent with a simplified formula — one sustainable-payment calculation, a flat tax, a level withdrawal. It now runs the same three paths through the same engine the app does, year by year, with taxes, healthcare, Medicare premiums and sequence-of-returns risk. On the default scenario that moved the sell-and-rent answer from $1,224/mo to $622/mo: a rent that rises with inflation for thirty years does far more damage than a flat formula can show, and the calculator was overstating that option by nearly double. It also now reports how often each choice actually holds up, which it could not do before. And its button carries your answers into the app — it was the one calculator whose call to action took you to a blank page after you had entered your whole house. Affects: the free calculator only. Worth re-running it if you used it to weigh renting.
August 1, 2026
Fixed: the app’s home explorer could describe a result it wasn’t showing. In the Home Equity Workbench, the sentence above each result was written in advance for each combination of path and goal — so it could state the opposite of the number beside it. Judged on what you leave behind, selling and renting could come out ahead (the money you don’t spend buying again outgrows the rent) while the text still said rent trims what’s left. The figures were correct throughout, including the rent, which is charged for life. Now every claim about whether a path helps or hurts is worked out from that path’s actual result.
August 1, 2026
Your home, as retirement money. A new free explorer in the app’s Stress Test tab. For most people the house is the largest thing they own and the only one paying nothing — and until now we modelled the pieces (a sale, a downsize, a rent) without ever showing you the decision. Keep it, downsize, or sell and rent now run side by side through your real plan, judged by whichever of five things you actually care about: your odds, income now, retiring earlier, what you leave behind, or how a survivor would fare. It opens on the priority you already set. Nothing changes until you press Apply.
Show all 64 earlier entries
August 1, 2026
Reverse mortgages, modelled honestly. From 62 you can now record one and the engine models it properly: the payments are tax-free, they are the same amount for life rather than rising with inflation, the loan clears any remaining mortgage so that payment stops, and the balance compounds against your equity — including the age it would use the equity up. Selling later repays the loan out of the proceeds, and you can never owe more than the house is worth. We also cap what you can model at roughly what a lender would actually advance, so a plan can’t be built on a payment nobody would write. Two deliberate choices: it is never ranked against keeping or selling and never crowned the best option, because it carries more sales pressure than anything else we model and the plans it flatters most are often the ones it serves worst — and the app will never take one out on your behalf. If you already have one it is simply part of your plan, with no warnings attached to a decision you have already made.
July 30, 2026
Fixed: the free Stress Test calculator was modeling almost no inflation. Fixed: since launch, the free Retirement Stress Test calculator on our website — a standalone tool, separate from the app — had its inflation assumption entered as 0.025 where the engine expected 2.5, so it modeled 0.025% inflation instead of the intended 2.5%. It now models 2.5%, and a new automated check compares each free calculator's answers against the app's on every release. The impact depended on your plan: if Social Security and a pension cover most of your spending, the error was roughly neutral, because inflation raises costs and benefits together in our model; portfolio-heavy plans saw survival rates that ran too high (on one test plan, 71% instead of 27%). The value also carried into the app if you opened your full plan from that calculator. Affects: the free Stress Test calculator only — the app and its own Stress Test tab were never affected. Worth re-running the calculator; if you carried a plan from it into the app, check the inflation field in Inputs.
July 28, 2026
Fixed: opening someone else's plan could overwrite your own. Your saved plan is now protected when you open someone else's. If you already have a plan of your own, a plan arriving in a link — one a friend shared, or one carried from a free website calculator — is treated as borrowed: explore it freely, change anything, and your saved plan is untouched. A line at the top offers “Replace my plan with this” (the only thing that will ever overwrite yours) and “Back to my plan”. The same protection covers the example scenarios. Previously, because the app saves on every change, editing a borrowed plan could write it over your own — that is what this fixes, and we're sorry it was possible. If you don't have a plan saved yet, nothing changes: the plan you arrived with is yours to keep. Affects: anyone who edited a shared plan, a calculator arrival, or an example scenario in a browser with a plan already saved. If that happened to you, a copy may still be in Save Scenario or an exported backup.
July 28, 2026
Fixed: visiting a calculator could make your own plan look like it wasn't yours. When you arrive in the app from one of the free website calculators, we note which figures came from you so we never score a plan on numbers you didn't give. That note was stored browser-wide and never expired — so an unrelated tab showing your own plan could claim your numbers came from us, even days later. The note now belongs only to the tab that came from a calculator and clears when that tab closes; any leftover note is cleared the moment you load this version. Affects: anyone who has opened one of our free calculators in the same browser as their own plan. Your figures were never changed, only mislabelled.
July 28, 2026
Fixed: parts of the app scored a plan the rest of it was declining to score. Arriving from one of the free website calculators, the app holds back a success rate until the numbers behind it are yours. Two surfaces missed that rule: the bottom summary bar still announced a success rate, nest egg and surplus built on our placeholders (it now shows “not scored yet” and names what it needs), and the arrival banner computed what you'd given us once, on landing, and never updated (it now recomputes as you type). The wording was corrected at the same time: “you haven't told us what you'll spend” became “the spending here came from us, not from you” — accurate whether you kept our starting figure or were never asked. Affects: only visitors arriving from a free calculator, and only what was displayed — nothing was miscalculated. The following day's change (above) replaced this approach: rather than a half-scored plan, we now ask for the missing numbers up front.
July 28, 2026
Six free calculators now hand you the normal setup instead of a plan we invented. Six of the free standalone calculators on our website — ACA Subsidy, Backdoor Roth, IRMAA, Roth Conversion, Pension Lump-Sum and Social Security — ask nothing about what you've saved or what you plan to spend — so opening the app from them landed on a page of refusals about a plan we had invented (the ACA calculator was sending a $500,000 401(k) for someone it asked only age, income and household size). Those six now send no plan at all: you get the same five-minute setup any new visitor gets and a scored result at the end, with a line at the top naming the calculator you came from. The other eleven calculators collect enough to be worth carrying across and are unchanged. Affects: only visitors arriving from those six calculators — no saved plan, projection or number changed. One rough edge: the Social Security calculator's benefit amount gets asked again in the setup for now.
July 27, 2026
Fixed: required withdrawals were being calculated on the wrong year's balance. The IRS sets your required minimum withdrawal from your balance on December 31 of the previous year. The app's engine was using the balance after that year's investment growth — so every required withdrawal came out roughly one year of returns too high, about 6% in a typical year — and a large mid-year withdrawal could wrongly shrink that year's required amount. Both fixed: the calculation now uses the prior year-end balance, as the IRS defines it. Found while cross-checking the free RMD website calculator against the app's engine. Affects: plans at or near the age when withdrawals begin — numbers change, generally slightly in your favour (we were showing more forced taxable income, and so more tax, than you'll actually have); a few plans move the other way. One limitation we have not fixed: a spouse more than ten years younger as sole beneficiary is entitled to a smaller-withdrawal table we don't yet apply, so those households still see a figure that is too high.
July 27, 2026
Our free calculators no longer hand the app numbers you never gave us. Opening your full plan in the app from one of the free website calculators carries your figures across so you don't retype them — but most calculators were also filling in figures they never asked about. The ACA Subsidy calculator, which asks only age, income and household size, was sending a $7,500/month spending target and a $2,500 Social Security benefit; fourteen calculators did some version of this, and the app scored the result as though you'd given it a complete picture. Fixed: calculators now send only what they genuinely ask, and tag which figures came from you. Where something important is missing, the app says so instead of guessing. Calculators that legitimately pass a computed figure — die-with-zero and safe-withdrawal carry the spending number they just worked out — label it as ours. Affects: anyone opening the app from a free calculator. No saved plan changed — the app's math was never wrong; it was being handed inputs you never gave. You may now see the app decline to score a plan it would previously have scored — that is the point.
July 27, 2026
Fixed: our free calculators had drifted from the app — the Stress Test and Tax calculators now match it exactly. We audited all 17 free standalone calculators on our website against the app after one disagreed with it. Fifteen run the app's real engine; the differences found were bugs, and all made the calculator look kinder than the app. The Retirement Stress Test's “Lost Decade” used a milder definition than the app's (48% survival where the app said 20% on a typical plan), its longevity stress used a different horizon, and its Social Security cut used 25% where the app uses 20% — all three now match the app exactly, and its documentation was corrected. The Retirement Tax calculator computed state tax on a pre-deduction base the app abandoned in May, overstating state tax by roughly $440–$1,630 a year — fixed. The RMD calculator's arithmetic was correct but its framing wasn't: it answers what the IRS forces at 75 if you never draw on the account first, which runs high for anyone who'll spend from that balance beforehand (about 43% high mid-range across 36 test plans) — the headline now says so, next to the number. Three new automated checks now keep all 17 calculators matched to the app. Affects: anyone who used the free Stress Test or Tax calculator before today — re-run it; the new numbers are the ones the app would give you. No saved plan in the app changed.
July 27, 2026
Fixed: the Career-Break calculator under-stated breaks that weren't a whole number of years. The free Career-Break calculator on our website worked in whole-year steps, which understated any break that wasn't a round number of years: a six-month break showed about $12,000 of cost where the real figure is closer to $89,000 (whole-year breaks were always correct). Every break length now matches the full engine within about 1% — partial-year cost figures are higher than before, and they're the accurate ones. The app's own Career-Break Workshop was never affected. Also shipped: the calculator now states the Social Security figure it assumes and passes it through when you open your full plan, and the app opens on exactly the break you were viewing — same length, same spending, same market assumption. Affects: anyone who ran a break that wasn't a round number of years. Whole-year breaks were always correct and are unchanged.
July 27, 2026
Fixed: shared plan links were briefly told they were missing data. For part of today, opening a shared plan link showed “we haven't scored this plan yet” alongside “this plan is on track”, plus wrong summary tiles, even when the sharer had entered everything. A new check that holds back scores when numbers are missing was accidentally applying to shared links, where nothing is missing. Fixed the same day. Affects: nobody's numbers — nothing was miscalculated; the summary was wrong about what it knew.
July 26, 2026
Fixed: money moving before your retirement date now counts — and you can see it. An expense dated before your retirement age — college at 57, a wedding at 60 when you retire at 65 — was being modeled only from your retirement date onward: the entry sat in your plan looking counted while the money was never actually deducted. Fixed. A pre-retirement expense now draws from your accounts in the year it happens (savings, then brokerage, then Roth, then 401(k)), reducing the nest egg you retire on and the success rate that depends on it; an expense spanning your retirement date is handled on both sides. It's visible, too: the “Building your nest egg” table gained a Life Events column, and every row still reads Start + Contributions − Life Events + Growth = End, tying to your nest egg to the dollar. Pre-retirement windfalls — always counted, but previously invisible year by year — now show in the same column. Affects: any plan with an expense dated before its retirement age — your projection now includes it, so those numbers will be lower than before. The checks that missed this now include a hand-computed test that fails if the money doesn't actually move.
July 26, 2026
Multi-year inflows and expenses: model a stream once, not a row per year. Any windfall or one-time expense can now repeat: check “repeats every year until an age”, set the end age, and the plan models a payment or draw every year in that window, each inflated to its own year. Built for deferred compensation, installment sales, structured settlements, multi-year tuition and gifting — streams that previously had to be faked as one lump or entered a row per year. A recurring entry equals the same list of single-year entries to the dollar. Affects: nobody's existing numbers — a one-time entry behaves exactly as before. Enter inflow amounts as what you keep after tax.
July 26, 2026
A career gap now counts against your Social Security record. Social Security is calculated from your 35 highest-earning years, but a modeled career break left the future benefit untouched — flattering anyone whose career won't reach 35 earning years. Now the Career-Break Workshop and Employment Pause solver model the effect: we assume earnings from age 22 to your retirement age (the same continued-work assumption your SSA statement makes), test whether the gap pushes your filled years below 35, and when it does, re-run the actual benefit formula with the missing years removed — through the real 2026 bend points, so high earners lose little per missing year and middle earners more. Both tools show the result either way, including “Social Security: untouched” when a long career absorbs the gap. Affects: only the two break-planning tools, and only if the break would leave fewer than 35 earning years. No saved plan changed.
July 26, 2026
Am I really staying for the insurance? The Pre-Medicare card now answers with numbers. The Pre-Medicare Gap card gained a free scan: the cost of leaving earlier. It runs your real plan at each candidate leave age (55 through 65, plus your planned age) and shows, per age, the bridge length, the net coverage cost in today's dollars — including the ACA subsidies that age's income would earn — and your success odds. Years covered by a still-working spouse's employer plan charge nothing, and in that case the scan says so: your leave date isn't the insurance date; the bridge starts when they stop. The verdict runs whichever way the numbers point — leaving earlier holds up, your planned age is protecting you, or the insurance was never the obstacle and your plan's overall odds are. Affects: nobody's numbers — a free, opt-in scan that changes nothing in your plan.
July 26, 2026
Lived math: the Employment Pause solver now answers the question a human is actually asking. Tester feedback showed the Employment Pause solver was answering “can you technically pay bills to your last dollar” — not a question anyone is asking. Four changes: “can carry” now means your accounts stay above a cash cushion you choose (3, 6 or 12 months of expenses, default 6), not scraping zero; the job-loss lens now assumes a 25% market drop landing with the layoff, on by default with a calm-market view one click away; “starting over” now also means your Social Security record never refills after the gap; and the chart plots whichever constraint actually binds — often how low your accounts get, against your cushion and $0. On one real household the both-out answer moved from 3.5 years to 2.3 under the new defaults — and 1.3 if they'd be starting over after. Affects: only this Deep Search tool. Its answers get shorter and more conservative — that is the correction.
July 25, 2026
Fixed: a wrong bracket label in the free Roth conversion calculator. The free Roth conversion calculator on our website — a standalone tool, separate from the app — was mislabeling the next tax bracket — “the 112% bracket” instead of 22% — when showing how much you can convert before the next dollar lands in a higher bracket. The headroom math underneath was always right; only the label was wrong. Fixed, and caught by a new automated sweep that feeds every embedded calculator hundreds of realistic and edge-case inputs and rejects nonsensical answers; the others came back clean. Affects: only the wording in that calculator — no plan, projection or number changed.
July 24, 2026
Career-Break Workshop — what would time away from work cost you? A new free workshop on the Stress Test tab models time out of work — a layoff, or a sabbatical you're weighing. Pick the gap's length and timing; it pauses contributions, draws living costs from your accounts in the real order (with the pre-59½ penalty where it applies), then runs your actual plan from the dented balances — so sequence risk, taxes, Social Security and guardrails all come from the same engine. It shows the cost four ways (retirement age, income, legacy, downturn margin) and finds the monthly savings that would fully recover. Couples can model either person's break. Affects: no existing plan — exploratory and fully isolated. Free.
July 20, 2026
Fixed: a deliberate 0% is now honored, and a catch-up tax detail. Two correctness fixes from an internal audit. First: a deliberately entered 0% rate — inflation, or an expected return — was treated as “unset” in a few places and quietly replaced with the default; a real zero is now honored everywhere. Second: the catch-up Roth-vs-traditional comparison read Social Security as a monthly figure where it needed the annual one, nudging its recommendation toward traditional. Both fixed and locked with hand-computed tests. Affects: only plans that entered a 0% rate, or that lean on the catch-up recommendation — most plans are unchanged. Engine version bumped, so a saved AI Plan Score will offer a refresh if your numbers moved.
July 20, 2026
Fixed: spouse savings timing for couples with an age gap. For couples where the spouses are different ages, the engine aligned the spouse's projected savings using the difference between the two retirement ages instead of the calendar years between the two retirement dates — correct only for same-age couples. Plans where you're younger than your spouse were understated; plans where you're older were overstated. The fix is verified against hand-computed values in both directions, and this household shape is now a permanent test case in the regression suite. Affects: households where the spouses are different ages — numbers move up (younger-than-spouse) or down (older-than-spouse). Same-age couples and single plans were never affected. Engine version bumped.
July 20, 2026
Where your health coverage comes from before Medicare. A new Household Coverage card captures where your pre-Medicare coverage comes from: your own plan, or a still-working spouse's employer. In the spouse-employer case the engine stops charging a marketplace premium (and the ACA subsidy goes inert) for the covered years — with Medicare's base premium still starting at each person's 65th birthday. You can also flag a high-deductible health plan to unlock HSA eligibility. The AI Advisor reads both, so it never warns about premiums for covered years. Affects: households with a spouse-employer coverage window, or anyone on an HDHP; every other plan is unchanged. Engine version bumped.
July 19, 2026
Fixed: who counts as a high earner for Roth (and the 2026 phase-out numbers). The “use the backdoor” warning compared gross salary to the Roth IRA limit, but the IRS keys eligibility off MAGI, which pre-tax 401(k) and HSA contributions lower — someone at ~$250,000 gross maxing two 401(k)s and a family HSA is genuinely under the limit, and was wrongly flagged over. The check now subtracts those contributions, per spouse. The 2026 phase-out figures shown around the app were also corrected to the IRS values — fully phased out above $168,000 (single) and $252,000 (married filing jointly). Affects: eligibility guidance, not any plan's projected balance. Engine version bumped, so a saved AI Plan Score will offer a refresh.
July 15, 2026
Social Security accuracy for couples: the spousal top-up. The engine now models Social Security's spousal top-up: once the higher earner files, a lower earner receives their own reduced benefit plus the excess of half the higher earner's full-retirement benefit over their own — the SSA excess method, automatic for this demographic. Without it, a lower earner stayed permanently at their small own benefit, which over-priced an early claim and biased the couples optimizer toward both-of-you-delay; with it, the optimizer can find the classic split — the higher earner delays, the lower earner claims early and steps up. Affects: households where one spouse's own benefit is below half the other's full-retirement benefit; equal earners and single plans are unchanged. Engine version bumped.
July 14, 2026
Your pension's survivor benefit is now yours to set. A pension's survivor benefit — the share that continues to the surviving spouse — is a joint-and-survivor election made per pension, not household-wide. So you can now set that carryover percentage separately for your pension and your spouse's (0–100%, default 50%): if you die, your pension carries over at your election; if your spouse dies, theirs carries over at theirs. It threads through both the base household projection and the Survivor Scenario card, replacing a single hardcoded assumption. Affects: households with a pension whose survivor election isn't the default 50%; everyone else is unchanged.
July 14, 2026
Deep Search — Combined Risk Scan: what if two risks hit at once? Plus two new stress cards. Stress cards test one risk at a time so you always know what moved the number — but two risks landing together can do more damage than the two cards suggest, because the first eats the buffer the second needed. The new Combined Risk Scan stacks six research-validated risk pairs against your real plan and reports the joint success rate next to what the cards predict separately. A pair only counts as a finding when it's at least 15 points worse than that prediction, so simulation noise never reads as danger; when a real gap exists, the scan re-runs your worst pair with dynamic spending guardrails on and shows the priced result. Also new on the Stress Test tab: Forced Early SS Claim (claiming at 62 because you need income now) and Sell in a Down Market (your home sells for 20% less exactly when you need the proceeds). Affects: Combined Risk Scan is in the Optimize tab, part of Navigator, opt-in behind a Run button; the two stress cards are free. No calculator math changed.
July 12, 2026
Deep Search — Spending Shape: how much are you allowed to spend? A new optimizer answers how much you're allowed to spend. It searches dozens of spending shapes against your real plan — more in your active go-go years, less later, or deliberately spending down — and finds the most you can spend while your success odds hold a floor you choose (80–95%) and your legacy stays above whatever you want left. The trade is stated plainly: how much median inheritance each extra dollar of living costs. Spend-it-down is honest about its limits — you can't hit exactly zero at an unknown end date. Deliberately not part of Deep Scan's combined optimization: spending more is a values choice, not a free win. In the Optimize tab, part of Navigator. Affects: anyone with a spending goal. Opt-in behind a Run button; no calculator math changed.
July 12, 2026
Deep Search — the Bridge Optimizer (and an ACA fidelity fix). First, a fidelity fix: 0% capital-gain harvesting is federal-tax-free, but harvested gains still count toward the income that sets your ACA marketplace subsidy, and the engine wasn't charging that cost (the on-screen cliff gauges already did). Harvesting on marketplace coverage now reduces your modeled subsidy — if you use gain harvesting and retire before 65, your projection may show a slightly lower balance; that's the correction. Second, the Roth Schedule optimizer grew into the Bridge Optimizer: it searches year-shaped conversion ladders and tests each with and without gain harvesting, since the two moves compete for the same bracket headroom and the same subsidy cliff. A plan is only crowned if it beats yours by more than simulation noise. Affects the fix: plans using 0% gain harvesting with ACA marketplace coverage before 65. Affects the tool: plans with pre-tax savings and a bridge window. Opt-in behind a Run button.
July 8, 2026
Model your savings growing over time (contribution escalation). Under any contribution (401k, Roth, savings, brokerage, HSA, for you or your spouse), a new “Increase this each year” option models contributions that grow by a percentage or a flat dollar amount; tax-advantaged accounts ramp to the IRS limit, then hold. A new “Building your nest egg” table on the Projection tab shows year by year how contributions and growth compound into your nest egg — every row reads Start + Contributions + Growth = End, so you can check the math yourself. A new Smart Move recommends ramping your 401(k) for savers who can't max out today. Affects: anyone still saving toward retirement. Free; plans with no escalation set are unchanged, so your saved AI Plan Score is unaffected.
July 6, 2026
Deep Search — one-click Deep Scan optimizes your whole plan. Deep Scan runs the searched optimizers together — the Social Security claim combination and the multi-year Roth conversion ladder — applies every winner to one plan, and runs a single combined simulation. The moves interact (delaying Social Security reshapes the room for Roth conversions), so the combined gain isn't the sum of the parts; Deep Scan reports the honest joint number, a ranked breakdown of each move's contribution, and your biggest remaining risk, with an Apply-all button. In the Optimize tab, part of Navigator. Affects: households with two Social Security records, or plans with pre-tax savings and a bridge window. Opt-in behind a Run button; no calculator math changed.
July 6, 2026
Deep Search — solve for your goal (the inverse calculator). This works backwards: pick a lever you control — annual savings, savings today, retirement age, spending, or Social Security claim age — and a target you want (95% success, a $1M legacy), and Deep Search finds the exact value that gets you there, with a curve showing where you cross. It's honest at the edges — it says when a target is out of reach with that lever alone, and when you already clear it with room to spare. In the Optimize tab, part of Navigator. Affects: anyone who wants to work backward from a goal. Opt-in behind a Run button; no calculator math changed.
July 6, 2026
Deep Search — your best multi-year Roth conversion ladder. During your bridge years — after you retire, before Social Security — taxable income dips, opening room to convert 401(k)/IRA money to Roth at low rates, and one flat annual amount isn't the best you can do. Deep Search tests filling the 12%, 22% and 24% brackets (staying under the ACA and IRMAA cliffs) across every bridge year, and finds the conversion ladder that leaves you the most, shown as year-by-year bars, optimized on median legacy across 750 simulations. In the Optimize tab, part of Navigator. Affects: plans with pre-tax savings and a bridge window. Opt-in behind a Run button; applies with one click.
July 5, 2026
Plan for how long you’ll actually live (Planning Horizon Workshop). Planning to your life expectancy is a coin flip — by definition, half of people outlive it. The free Planning Horizon Workshop (the “Not sure?” link under Life Expectancy) reads the SSA 2022 survival curve for your age and suggests a horizon you're unlikely to outrun — roughly the age only about 1 in 7 people outlive — with your life expectancy shown alongside for contrast. Couples plan to the last survivor, meaningfully longer than either of you alone. Sex at birth is optional and never saved; one click writes the age to your plan. Affects: anyone choosing a life-expectancy input. No calculator math changed.
July 3, 2026
Deep Search — the best way for the two of you to claim Social Security. For couples, Deep Search tests all 81 combinations of claim ages (each spouse 62 to 70) against your real plan — survivor benefit included — and shows the pair that leaves your household the most, as a heatmap with the winner starred. Most tools optimize a single person or maximize lifetime benefits; this optimizes your actual plan outcome, and captures how claim timing reshapes your bridge-year withdrawals. In the Optimize tab, part of Navigator. Affects: household plans where both spouses have their own Social Security record. Opt-in behind a Run button; no calculator math changed.
July 3, 2026
Deep Search — see what your plan hinges on. Your plan rests on assumptions you can only estimate — investment return, inflation, spending, how long you live. Deep Search runs your plan through better and worse versions of each and ranks which one your outcome is most fragile to, as a tornado chart ("your success rate hinges most on investment return — 6% if it runs against you, 52% if it runs your way"). Pick the goal it measures against — success, legacy, earliest retirement, and more. In the Optimize tab, part of Navigator. Affects: everyone — it surfaces which uncertainty matters most for your specific plan. Opt-in behind a Run button; no calculator math changed.
July 3, 2026
Household plans now run to the longer-lived spouse. Household projections now run to whichever of you lives longer — set each spouse's life expectancy separately — and switch to survivor economics at the first death: spending drops to your survivor goal (default 75% of your monthly goal), the larger of the two Social Security checks is kept, tax filing becomes single, and half of the deceased spouse's pension continues. Previously the plan stopped at your life expectancy with both of you assumed alive throughout. Affects: household plans whose two life expectancies differ — results move (up for well-funded plans, down for tighter ones). Plans with equal ages and life expectancies are unchanged. A saved AI Plan Score will offer a refresh.
June 26, 2026
Qualified Charitable Distributions (QCD) — give from your IRA to charity, tax-free. Once you’re 70½, you can give directly from a Traditional IRA to charity. The gift is excluded from your income (it’s not a deduction — it never shows up as taxable income), satisfies your RMD tax-free, and keeps your MAGI lower — so less of your Social Security is taxed and you can stay under the Medicare IRMAA surcharge cliffs. The honest trade-off: the donated money leaves your legacy. Set a fixed annual amount or check “give my entire RMD to charity” in the Tax section. Affects any plan with a QCD set; plans without one are unchanged.
June 25, 2026
Social Security earnings test — claiming early while still working. Claim Social Security before your full retirement age (67) and keep earning a paycheck above ~$23,400/yr, and the SSA withholds part of your benefit, then restores it at 67. We now model this as an effective later claim age — capturing both the early cash-flow hit and the restored, higher benefit. Affects early claimers who keep working (the Barista FIRE case); other plans are unchanged.
June 25, 2026
10% early-withdrawal penalty modeled for pre-59½ retirement-account draws. Retire before 59½ and draw from a 401(k) or Traditional IRA, and the IRS charges a 10% penalty. We now model it, so early-retirement (FIRE) plans that lean on retirement accounts reflect the real cost. It only bites when taxable + brokerage savings run out before 59½; a toggle removes it if you’ll use a 72(t)/SEPP, the Rule of 55, or a Roth conversion ladder.
June 25, 2026
Survivor and divorce scenarios now use single tax filing. When one spouse passes (or in a gray-divorce scenario), the survivor files as a single taxpayer — compressed brackets, a lower standard deduction, and earlier IRMAA. The Stress Test Survivor and Gray Divorce cards now model this “widow’s penalty,” matching the Results-tab Survivor panel.
June 24, 2026
Medicare premiums are now modeled (post-65). The engine modeled your pre-65 health insurance and the IRMAA surcharge for higher incomes, but not the base Medicare premium itself — so for most retirees, modeled healthcare cost dropped to roughly zero at 65, making the most populous retirement years systematically rosy. Now a "Medicare Premium / mo" field (default ~$400/mo per person — Part B + Part D + a Medigap/supplement estimate) is added automatically from age 65, with IRMAA stacked on top. Tune it down to ~$185 for Medicare Advantage, up for a richer supplement, or to $0 if a retiree plan covers it. Affects: plans with post-65 retirement years — modeled healthcare cost goes up, so the most common retirement years are no longer flattered. Engine version bumped.
June 22, 2026
A still-working spouse's income now counts toward your expenses. When you and your spouse retire in different years — which is most couples — the projection had been treating the whole household as if it stopped earning the day the first of you retired. So if you retired but your spouse kept working a few more years, their paycheck wasn't counted at all: the engine drew down your portfolio (and your bridge cash reserve) to cover expenses their salary was actually paying. For staggered-retirement households this made plans look worse than reality. Now, for each year a spouse is still working, their take-home pay (salary net of their own retirement contributions, taxed as ordinary income) covers the spending need first — so the reserve and portfolio are only drawn when there's a genuine shortfall. We also corrected a related detail: a later-retiring spouse's accounts are valued at the start of the projection and grow forward naturally, instead of being counted at their future value and then grown again. Affects: household plans where the two of you retire in different years and the still-working spouse has a salary entered — success rates and end balances go up, often substantially (a typical case moved from ~95% to 100%). Plans where both retire the same year, or where the still-working spouse has no salary entered, are unchanged. Engine-version tag bumps cached AI Plan Score prose to regenerate against the corrected projection.
June 20, 2026
Roth conversion strategy now reflects both spouses' pre-tax savings. On the Roth Strategies card, the conversion capacity, the recommended sweet-spot amount, and the bracket-fill math were computed from your own pre-tax (401k/IRA) balance only — your spouse's pre-tax was ignored, even though the engine actually converts from your combined household pre-tax (which is why the Projection correctly showed both spouses' funds converting). For couples, this understated how much you could convert — a card capped near $44k/yr that should have read closer to $111k/yr — and where the pre-tax was entirely your spouse's, the card showed no recommendation at all. The card now uses your combined household pre-tax everywhere, so its capacity and recommendation match what the Projection has been doing all along. Affects: household plans with bridge years considering Roth conversions. This corrected a recommendation/display calc; projections, success rate, and end balances are unchanged. Engine-version tag bumps cached AI Plan Score prose that quoted the old conversion figure.
June 20, 2026
Pre-Medicare (ACA) cost and cliff status corrected. The Healthcare Bridge card estimates your pre-Medicare insurance cost and whether your bridge-year income (MAGI) clears the ACA subsidy cliff. Two corrections: the MAGI estimate had treated your whole portfolio withdrawal as taxable income — but the engine draws taxable accounts first, where only the realized gain counts toward MAGI — so it could overstate MAGI two- to three-fold and wrongly flag you as "over the cliff"; and the bridge window had been including post-65 (Medicare) years where the ACA cliff doesn't apply. The card now reads MAGI from the engine's actual draws, ends the ACA window at Medicare eligibility (household-aware), and compares against each year's inflation-adjusted cliff. For many early retirees this flips the verdict from "over the cliff" back to "qualifies for subsidies." Affects: anyone retiring before 65 with bridge years on the Healthcare Bridge card. This corrected a display/analysis calc; projections, success rate, and the engine's actual healthcare modeling are unchanged.
June 8, 2026
Projected legacy now matches the Monte Carlo median exactly. The Leave-a-Legacy projection (Smart Moves) was computed from 750 simulated futures, while the headline "How Your Plan Performs Across 1,000 Futures" chart uses 1,000. Both are the median ending balance — but the different sample sizes produced a small (~5%) gap between the two surfaces, which read as an inconsistency when comparing the same plan. The legacy projection now runs at 1,000 simulations too, so its number lines up with the fan-chart median. Affects: anyone using the Leave-a-Legacy lens. A precision improvement; your projected legacy may shift slightly. Engine math unchanged — same median, larger sample.
June 5, 2026
Earliest retirement age corrected for household plans. The engine's earliest-retirement-age scanner — used by the Smart Moves Retire Earlier lens, the embeddable When-Can-I-Retire calculator, and any surface asking "what's the earliest age my plan hits 85% confidence?" — was scanning candidate user retirement ages but never syncing the spouse's retirement age to each probe. For household plans, this silently kept the spouse's contribution window fixed at whatever the input value was during the scan, biasing results. The scan now syncs both spouses to the probe age while preserving any user-configured stagger (if you set yourself to retire at 62 and your spouse at 67, the 5-year delta is preserved as the scan iterates user retirement age). Single plans are unaffected. Most household plans (where you and your spouse already share the same retirement age in your inputs) see materially the same number; staggered households see a more honest answer aligned with your stated stagger. Affects: household plans on any surface that scans retirement age (Retire Earlier lens, the When-Can-I-Retire embed, AI Advisor questions about earliest age). Engine math at calcRetirement and Monte Carlo level UNCHANGED — the fix is in the scanner only. Engine-version tag bumps cached AI Plan Score prose to regenerate against the corrected scan.
June 5, 2026
Cliff Proximity Gauge corrected: MAGI now shown in today's dollars. The Cliff Proximity Gauge on the Roth Strategies card compares your projected bridge-year income (MAGI) against the ACA subsidy cliff and the five Medicare IRMAA tiers. It had been comparing your future-dollar MAGI — your spending inflated forward to each bridge year — against today's-dollar thresholds, so plans with a long runway to retirement could look like they were over a cliff when, in real terms, they weren't. The gauge now shows MAGI in today's dollars, matching the thresholds, so the comparison is apples-to-apples. The same correction flows to the AI Advisor's read and the PDF/HTML export. Affects: anyone using the Cliff Proximity gauge with bridge years, especially those many years from retirement — the gauge now shows lower MAGI and a more accurate cliff position. This corrected a display only; projections, success rates, and the engine's actual IRMAA tax modeling (which already inflation-adjusts) are unchanged.
June 1, 2026
Future Expenses — plan for weddings, college, car replacement, home repair. Your monthly goal handles ongoing living costs, but retirement also has lumpier outflows — a daughter's wedding, a new car, a kitchen remodel, grandkid college help — that hit your portfolio at specific ages, not every month. There's now a dedicated panel for them in Inputs → Life Events. Add up to 10 entries; each gets a label (optional), an amount in today's dollars, and the age it hits. The engine inflates each amount to its expense year via CPI, then draws from your buckets in the optimal order (Savings → Brokerage → Roth → 401k) — the same waterfall used for home purchases. The amounts surface as a conditional column in the year-by-year projection table with hover-tooltip showing the label, plus a destination block in the cash flow Sankey. Recurring costs (annual vacations, ongoing parental support) belong in your monthly goal — Future Expenses is just for the one-time stuff. The AI Advisor has read access to your list (it can reference "your $30k wedding at 68" in narrative) but can't add or change entries on your behalf — you stay in control. Affects: anyone with planned one-time expenses in retirement. Engine math UNCHANGED for users who leave the list empty — the cascade only fires when a matching age is reached and amount > 0.
June 1, 2026
AI Plan Score credit consumption + Projected Nest Egg HSA + Smart Moves empty-state + stale-export invalidation. Bundle of customer-feedback-driven fixes. (1) The AI Plan Score button could consume 3 credits per click in rare scenarios — server now skips the second increment when the client signals a JSON-parse retry (the original call already charged), a synchronous ref guard at function entry blocks the double-click race that fired the third charge, and the error copy now honestly acknowledges the credit consumed on the first attempt rather than the misleading "No credit was used" message. (2) The Projected Nest Egg donut now includes your HSA balance — it was tracked by the engine since 2026 but only showed up in the spouse-bundled total. Now appears as its own slice with a stage "H" badge (pre-65 it funds healthcare costs first, post-65 it joins supplemental drawdown). (3) For users already retired, the Smart Moves retire-earlier lens now shows a friend-voice empty-state pointing to Weather a Downturn or Leave a Legacy where moves actually apply, rather than rendering an empty workshop block. (4) PDF exports no longer surface stale AI analysis prose (e.g., showing "85%" when current calculator shows different) — the fingerprint that gates cached analyses now includes an engine-version tag that invalidates everything when underlying engine math has been updated. You'll regenerate any analysis that was created before today's update, but you won't be misled by a frozen number that no longer matches your current plan. Affects: anyone using the AI Advisor / PDF Export / Smart Moves card / Projected Nest Egg breakdown. Engine math at calcRetirement / Monte Carlo level UNCHANGED. Engine-version tag bumps cached analyses to regenerate against current numbers.
May 30, 2026
Engine fix: Initial WR field is now load-bearing for the guardrails math. Discovered while smoke-testing the new explore slider: the engine had been auto-deriving the Guyton-Klinger initial WR baseline from year-0 portfolio state every Monte Carlo run, ignoring the value stored in the "Initial WR" field in Inputs. So if a user had manually tuned the field above or below the auto-derived value, it had no effect on engine math — the Inputs panel readout (upper/lower guard thresholds) would compute from the edited value while the engine quietly used a different one. Now the engine honors the stored field: the user CHOOSES the baseline (per the Guyton-Klinger 2006 paper's intent) and the rules calibrate around it. Falls back to auto-derive only when the field is truly absent. The new explore slider on the Lived Experience card now does what it advertises — dragging it to a different value really changes the simulation. Affects: only users with Dynamic Spending Strategy enabled whose Initial WR field differs from the auto-derived year-0 implied WR. For most users (who took the default auto-derived value at Enable), engine output is unchanged. For users who deliberately tuned the field, their plan numbers now reflect the value they actually set.
May 30, 2026
Bug pack: guardrails toggle persists across refresh + Plan Robustness pill auto-opens the GK card. Two user-visible fixes after the new Guardrails card landed. (1) If you'd enabled Dynamic Spending Strategy in Inputs, the toggle was silently reverting on page refresh — the setting was updating React state but never writing to localStorage. Latent slice 19xx-era bug that became visible once the new Results card put a spotlight on whether guardrails were on or off. The toggle, initial WR, band, and adjustment params now all persist correctly across page loads. (2) The "🛡️ G-K active" pill in the Plan Robustness panel header now actually opens the Lived Experience card when clicked. Previously it just scrolled — if you hadn't already clicked the Dynamic Spending tile to expand the card, the scroll target didn't exist yet and the pill silently no-op'd. Also added a behavioral assertion to the GK mechanics verifier (the gk-aggressive-fire persona must produce non-zero median cuts AND raises — guards against the regression class where the engine looks correct shape-wise but produces baseline-only signals). Affects: anyone who has enabled Dynamic Spending Strategy. Engine math unchanged.
May 26, 2026
Historical back-test cash-bucket calibration (closes methodology seam). When your plan runs against a past retirement-stress era, the cash buckets (HYSA / savings, bridge reserve) now grow at the actual historical inflation rate instead of the modern HYSA assumption. Real cash return ~0% matches Shiller's long-run T-bill empirical regularity; floored at 0% nominal to prevent shrinkage during deflation. Slightly conservative in 1980s when T-bills genuinely paid above inflation; unbiased on average. Closes the previously-documented seam. Affects: only the Historical Back-Test card + Workshop. Plans with <10% in cash see minimal impact. Engine math at the standard Monte Carlo / deterministic level unchanged.
May 26, 2026
Historical Robustness Workshop (Stress Test tab). Exploration surface beneath the 24-card scenario grid. Two-knob (start year + stock allocation) running your plan against every eligible historical retirement-start year from 1928 onward. Outcome strip visualizes survival year-by-year; selected-year detail surfaces verdict + end balance + lowest balance year; collapsible balance trajectory chart. Three quick-compare pills (30/70, 60/40, 90/10 stocks) for instant-flip between famous portfolio constructions. The Bengen / Trinity Study methodology, exposed as a proactive optimization tool — not a FIRE litmus test. Affects: new view into existing engine math. Projected numbers don't change.
May 26, 2026
Historical Back-Test scenario card (Stress Test tab). New card adds historical replay to the Stress Test grid. Pick from five canonical retirement-stress eras (Great Depression, 1966 bear, stagflation, dot-com, financial crisis); the ring shows cohort survival rate across the era's rolling window. Detail block names the canonical year's specific outcome. Affects: new card on Stress Test. Projected numbers don't change.
May 23, 2026
2026 IRS limits refresh (contribution caps, tax brackets, IRMAA, ACA). 401(k) deferral $24,500 (catch-up $8K, super catch-up $11,250). Standard deduction $32,200 MFJ / $16,100 single. Federal brackets, LTCG thresholds, IRMAA Medicare-surcharge tiers, ACA premium-credit cliffs all refreshed. Affects: every plan. Most balances drift UP modestly: +$22K–$219K across persona corpus.
May 22, 2026
Coast FIRE workflow support. The FIRE variant where you save aggressively until balances will compound to retirement target, then stop contributing and keep working. Opt-in via Inputs → My Portfolio → "Stop contributing at age." Affects: nothing for existing plans (default 0 = no Coast).
May 21, 2026
Dynamic spending strategy: Guyton-Klinger guardrails. Opt-in academic best-practice. Adjusts annual spending ±10% based on portfolio performance. Historically supported 5–5.5% sustainable withdrawal rates vs the 4% rule. Affects: nothing unless enabled. When enabled, plan robustness typically improves.
May 20, 2026
Basis-adjusted LTCG calculation. Brokerage withdrawals now properly track cost basis. The LTCG over-charge that was present since engine inception is corrected. Affects: brokerage-heavy plans drift UP $38K–$552K at life expectancy.
May 16, 2026
Calculator now supports retiring this year. Lifted the previous gate that required retirement age > current age. Single-year scenarios (retirement age = current age) produce a full projection. Affects: users retiring in their current year now get a projection instead of an error.
May 9, 2026
Monte Carlo determinism via seeded RNG. MC simulations now produce byte-identical trajectories for the same inputs across reloads. Closed the success-rate flicker class. Affects: SR stability across reloads.
May 7, 2026
IRMAA Medicare surcharges modeled. Medicare-eligible (65+) household members above MAGI thresholds get Part B + Part D tier-table surcharges applied. Affects: post-65 healthcare costs in plans crossing the IRMAA thresholds.
May 7, 2026
Pension flat-nominal default. Pensions no longer assume implicit COLA. Most private/corporate pensions are flat-nominal in reality; opt in to COLA via Plan Details checkbox. Affects: pension-bearing plans see lower projected pension value in later years (more accurate).
May 6, 2026
SECURE 2.0 birth-year-aware RMD ages. RMD age 75 for births 1960+, 73 for births 1951-1959 per the SECURE 2.0 Act. Previous static-age behavior corrected. Affects: any plan with pre-tax 401(k) balance; RMD-driven forced withdrawals shift by 2 years for younger cohort.
May 6, 2026
Pre-Medicare healthcare runway fix. Year-0 retirement healthcare cost now properly inflated from today through retirement (not just one year forward). Pre-fix understated long-runway plans by 50%+. Affects: pre-Medicare-retirement plans with long timelines drift UP modest amounts.
May 5, 2026
51-state tax modeling (50 states + DC). Replaced single state-tax percentage with full per-state structure: brackets, deductions, LTCG treatment, retirement income exclusions. Affects: any plan in a non-trivial state. State-impact range can exceed $1M at life expectancy for $1.5M nest egg plans.
Product updates
The last 90 days. Older cosmetic changes are summarised by month.
September 9, 2026
New: restore your plan from a backup file, right on the opening screen. Your plan lives in your browser — that’s the privacy promise — so a cleared cache or a different browser means starting at the welcome screen. Until now the only way back to your own backup file was at the bottom of the Inputs tab, behind loading an example plan first. The opening screens now offer it directly: pick your exported file and you land straight in your plan. It accepts a full backup or a single exported scenario, same as the Inputs tab. Suggested by a user who hit exactly this every time they switched browsers — thank you; this one’s yours.
September 7, 2026
Improved: every control in the app now announces its name to assistive technology. Screen-reader and voice-control users previously met unnamed sliders, dropdowns, and inputs — most fields on the Inputs tab among them. Every control now carries the same name its visible label shows. Fixed in the same pass: asking the AI Advisor to change your plan goal or a contribution escalation setting looked accepted but silently didn’t apply — those changes now take effect.
August 22, 2026
Fixed: the contact form keeps what you typed. Closing the Contact form discarded whatever you had written, so going back to check a figure mid-message meant retyping it — and because clicking outside the box also closes it, a stray click could clear a long message with no warning. Your draft now survives closing and reopening the form. It stays in the browser tab only: it is never saved to your device, and it clears when you send the message or close the tab.
August 13, 2026
You now get a confirmation when you buy. Coming back from the payment page, the app used to say nothing at all — your access arrived quietly a moment later and that was it. It now tells you what you bought and what it opens. The more useful half is underneath: access is granted by a message from the payment provider that arrives separately from your browser being sent back, and if your browser got back first, the app could briefly read you as not having paid — and show the free version, upgrade prompts and all. It now waits for the confirmation to arrive rather than concluding anything, never takes access away while it waits, and if nothing has arrived after fifteen seconds it says plainly that your payment went through and points you at us — rather than leaving you to guess whether to buy again. Affects: anyone buying Navigator, Advisor Plus or Advisor 365. Nothing about pricing, credits or existing access changed.
August 12, 2026
Fixed: the AI Advisor could go blank mid-conversation. When the Advisor offered to make a change for you, it drew a short preview of what would change before you pressed Apply. If the Advisor described that change in a slightly different shape than the preview expected, the panel stopped drawing and went blank. Reopening it or starting a new chat brought it back, and nothing in your plan was altered — but the answer you were reading was gone. It now ignores a change it cannot read rather than stopping, so the reply and its buttons stay on screen; the preview is unchanged when the change is well-formed. Affects: anyone who used the Advisor, most often on the Projection tab. Nothing was applied to a plan by mistake, and no projected number changes.
August 10, 2026
Your Results page now tells you what we noticed. Results used to open on six cards we picked for you, and the picking was thinner than it looked: when a plan did not have six things worth raising, we filled the gaps from the top of the card list. It now opens with what we actually found in your plan, in the order it happens — the year a spouse’s paycheck stops and the portfolio takes over, the year required withdrawals start pulling out more than you need, the year your tax bill jumps and why, the years before Medicare you are buying your own cover. Each one says what it means and links to the tool that acts on it. The cards are all still there, under the filters below. Most of these sit between two cards rather than inside either one — a mortgage running past your retirement date is a housing fact, a spending fact and a sequence-of-returns fact at once — which is the point: none of it needs you to know what to look for. If nothing applies to your plan, it says so plainly rather than inventing something. Who is affected: everyone, on the Results tab. No projected balance, success rate or input changed.
August 6, 2026
The AI Advisor interrupts less. Inside the app, the advisor used to ask for your attention whenever it had something it could say about the tab you had just opened, or whenever your success rate crossed a band — both of which were telling you things already on the screen in front of you. It now speaks up for two things only: a paid analysis that no longer matches your plan, and a change of yours that quietly did something you would not have spotted. Nothing was taken away from what it can tell you; opening the advisor still starts on whatever you were looking at. On a phone it is now a small icon in the bottom corner instead of a tall tab down the side, and it no longer opens a speech bubble beside itself. No numbers changed.
August 6, 2026
Success rate colours now mean the same thing everywhere. Inside the app, the footer on the Inputs tab used a different colour scale from the Results banner, so the same plan could read red in one place and orange in the other. There is one scale now. No numbers changed. The free standalone calculators on this site also pick up the same header as the rest of the site.
August 5, 2026
Smaller fixes. The app’s Inputs summary cards said “Add” for an account that exists but has no balance yet — a new 401(k) you are contributing to now reads $0. The Deep Search greeting retires once you have run something.
August 5, 2026
Readable chart scales, and a tidier Inputs tab. No numbers changed. The Projection chart’s dollar scale was painted over by the bars, so it only appeared while you hovered — it is readable at rest now, and the Monte Carlo scale on the Stress Test tab matches it. “Balance Percentiles by Age” has moved from the bottom of the Stress Test tab into the Monte Carlo card it describes. On the Inputs tab, section headers no longer clip under the tab bar, and doubled borders, short columns and overlapping corners are fixed; adding spending guardrails now takes one step instead of three. Three summary cards sit at the top of Inputs — Household, What you own, The plan — and any row you have not filled in asks for the number rather than showing a zero. Saving a scenario, exporting one, backing up everything and restoring from a file are now one set of controls. Affects: everyone, visually. No numbers changed — verified against all 38 saved test plans.
August 5, 2026
Your home moved to Results. The Home Equity Workbench — the free tool that compares keeping your home, downsizing, and selling and renting, each run through your real plan — used to sit on the Stress Test tab. It is now on Results, under Income, as a card called “Your Home.” The Stress Test tab is where you make one change and watch your number move; your house is not something that happens to you, it is a decision you make, and it belongs beside the rest of what you own. The card shows your equity and the housing plan you have already set, so you can see where you stand without opening anything; open it and the full comparison is exactly as it was. “Sell in a Down Market” stays a Stress Test card, because a soft market when you need to sell is something that happens to you. Affects: anyone with a home in their plan. Nothing about your numbers changed — only where the tool lives.
August 2, 2026
The AI Advisor can now see your home. Asked whether selling and renting beats buying somewhere smaller, the advisor answered with a general principle — that renting loses over a long retirement — which was the opposite of what the app had already calculated for that person’s plan. The cause was that it could not see the house at all: not the value, not the mortgage, not what you plan to do with it, and not a reverse mortgage if you have one. It now sees all of it, including the figures the Home Equity Workbench works out for your three paths once you have run it, and it answers from those rather than from a rule of thumb. Where it has no figures it says so and sends you to the tool instead of guessing. It also knows the Employment Pause solver exists, which it previously did not, and it can see whether each pension carries over to a surviving spouse — a 0% election is a real hole in a survivor plan that it was reasoning past. A new automated check now runs on every release: any figure the engine reads must be visible to the advisor, so it can never again discuss a plan it cannot fully see. Affects: what the AI Advisor knows. No projection or number changed.
August 1, 2026
Fixed: the app’s tools now open on the priority you set. The Social Security claiming explorer always opened on “Legacy” regardless of what mattered most to you; it now opens on your stated priority and tells you it did. And when you haven’t told us what matters most, Smart Moves, the Progress lens grid and the AI Advisor no longer assume it is retiring earlier — they start from safety, the honest default for a priority you declined to give. Four goal colours also gained proper light-mode values; one had been rendering close to invisible on the Stress Test tab in light mode.
July 31, 2026
The AI Advisor handles personal news more carefully. If you tell the advisor something difficult — an illness, a diagnosis, a death in the family — it now acknowledges what you’ve said before it shows you anything, rather than answering with a card or a number. It won’t make assumptions about anyone’s health or how long they have, it won’t turn a passing mention into an analysis you didn’t ask for, and it never raises the subject on its own. Ordinary planning questions are unchanged: ask what happens to your spouse if you die first and you’ll get the same direct answer, and the same card, as before.
July 30, 2026
Fixed: some figures in the app were unreadable in light mode. Verdict colours — green, gold, orange, red — were written for the dark theme and used unchanged in the light one, leaving some text nearly the same shade as the background behind it. Twenty-seven pieces of text on the Results tab measured below the readable-contrast floor. Every verdict colour now has a light-theme counterpart, the grey used for secondary text is darker in light mode and lighter in dark, and two selected-state buttons that drew black text on a filled background now flip with the theme. Two small labels remain marginal. Dark mode was audited the same way and came back clean. A check measuring every piece of text against its actual background, in both themes, at the full 4.5:1 standard now runs on every release. Affects: anyone using the light theme, and only what was displayed — no projection, saved plan, or number changed.
July 30, 2026
A new chart in the app’s Progress tab, and the visual refresh reaches the rest of it. Progress now opens with your plan drawn as a line across every check-in you have saved — success rate, nest egg, monthly income or gap to your goal, whichever you pick. It reads only the figures each check-in already stored, so it works on the history you have and collects nothing new. Where the line falls, it names a cause only when exactly one of your tracked inputs changed between those two check-ins; if several moved, it shows the dip and stays quiet rather than guess. Alongside it, the refresh described below reached the rest of the app: cards, panels, charts and callouts across Results, Projection, Stress Test, Compare and Progress now share one visual language; every chart was redrawn at full resolution so its labels are crisp rather than blurred; the explore sliders inside cards rest behind a labelled control until you open them, and close again when you are done; and the light–dark switch is a single day–night chip. Three fixes ride along: “How we calculate this” on the results banner now lands on the Monte Carlo section that computes your success rate instead of the top of the document (this had been affecting every link into the methodology, including the ones the AI Advisor offers); the Social Security Income Gap card no longer shows a permanent “Review and apply 1 change” for a change you never made; and this changelog was printing raw formatting marks around the “Affects” line of eight past entries. A follow-up pass corrected spacing throughout: several panels and controls were sitting flush against the divider line above them (an inline style was holding their top margin at zero, which no amount of styling elsewhere could override), on the Pre-Medicare card the spouse-coverage note was being drawn inside the age row itself — which pushed the ages into a stack against the right edge — and on Progress the income-makeup donut’s centre total was wider than the ring it sits inside. An automated check now runs on every release for both of those layout faults, so they cannot quietly return. Affects: how the app looks, plus one new chart on Progress. No projection, saved plan, or number changed.
July 30, 2026
A cleaner look for the app — same numbers, same math. The app got the first of several visual refreshes bringing it in line with this website's design: quieter panel headers without emoji icons, headline numbers set in the site's serif style with color reserved for figures that carry a judgment, softer open layouts inside expanded cards with longer explanations behind a "show more" toggle (nothing was removed — every explanation is one tap away), and charts redrawn at full resolution so text in them renders crisp. Affects: visual styling only, in both dark and light mode. No projection, plan, or number changed — the engine's math is verified unchanged against all 32 saved test plans on every release.
July 29, 2026
Arriving from a calculator now takes you to a real result, or to the questions that get you one. Arriving in the app from one of the free standalone calculators on our website now routes on what you actually entered, not which calculator you used. Every arrival gets a short introduction naming the calculator and the question that brought you. If the figures behind a real answer are genuinely yours, you go straight into the app with your result. If not, you get the same five-minute setup any new visitor gets, pre-filled with the numbers you did give and asking only for what's missing. Three smaller changes shipped with it: the setup no longer offers example plans on calculator arrivals; finishing the setup clears the arrival link, so a refresh keeps your answers; and the Retirement Tax calculator now passes along the Social Security figure you type into it. Affects: only visitors arriving from a free calculator. No saved plan, projection or number changed. If you already have a plan saved, none of this applies — a plan arriving in a link is still borrowed, and yours stays untouched.
July 29, 2026
Fixed: the AI Advisor didn't know what today's date was. The advisor's instructions never included the current date, so it fell back on the date its training ended — and computed ages from birthdates a year low. Every conversation now starts with today's date, and when you give a birthdate the advisor reads the computed age back to you, so a typo or a near birthday gets caught in conversation. This never touched the projection: the engine works from the ages stored in your plan, not the advisor's arithmetic, and is checked against saved test plans on every release. Affects: anyone who described their situation to the advisor using dates rather than ages — worth checking your ages in Inputs.
July 29, 2026
Where your plan lives, said plainly. A new note at the bottom of the Inputs tab explains how your plan is stored: it saves itself in this browser as you type, so there's nothing to press; bookmarking the page is how you come back to it; and “Save this scenario” is for keeping versions side by side to compare, not for keeping your work safe. It also names the one thing that loses a plan — clearing your browser's site data — and that we keep no copy, so there's nothing we can restore. Affects: nobody's numbers — nothing about how your plan is stored changed; it just wasn't explained anywhere.
July 26, 2026
Deep Search, more readable: every choice visible, and results that lead with the answer. Two Deep Search tools traded cramped dropdowns for visible pill controls: Solve for Goal shows all seven levers at once, each tagged by kind, and Spending Shape lays out its success-floor and leave-behind choices the same way. The break-planning results were also re-ordered — verdict, headline number, chart and next step first, with the dollar receipts always visible below and the assumptions one tap away under “what this assumes”. Settings now stay put while you move between the free workshop and the paid solver for the session, and reset on reload. Affects: nobody's numbers — presentation only.
Show all 19 earlier entries
July 22, 2026
The Inputs tab, rebuilt: only what's in your plan, and one timeline for your life events. The Inputs tab now shows only what you actually use. Each portfolio opens with the person — age, salary, timeline — then one card per account you hold; unused accounts wait behind a “＋ Add” button. Spending rests as one line stating the shape your plan actually models, with the phase editor and guardrails a tap away. The accordions are gone — every section is simply open (your browser's own Find works across the whole plan again), with a strip at the top naming the plan you're looking at. Life Events reads as a timeline, one-time expenses included, saved as you type. Pensions and inheritances live with their owner, and Healthcare has its own section. Affects: nobody's numbers — no math changed, and every saved plan shows its accounts automatically, with no re-entry.
July 16, 2026
Your plan is yours to keep: export, back up, and import. Everything lives in your browser — no account, no server copy — so your data is now portable: export your current plan, back up everything (every scenario plus your check-in history) to one file, and import any of it on another machine. Progress history exports and imports free; full backup and plan export are on the paid tier; importing is always free, because restoring your own data should never be gated. Backups leave out identity and paid-unlock, so a file can't clone access. In the Inputs toolbar and the Progress tab. Affects: nobody's numbers — no calculator math changed.
June 2, 2026
CAPE blend disclaimer added to Guyton-Klinger methodology + glossary. The methodology section on Guyton-Klinger guardrails and the glossary entry now include a dedicated disclaimer explaining what the engine does and doesn't do with start-year CAPE (Shiller's cyclically-adjusted P/E ratio). The Pfau (2010+) and Karsten Jeske's "Big ERN" SWR series (2017+) bodies of work argue that high-CAPE start years materially compress safe withdrawal rates. The engine does NOT read your start-year CAPE; the 5.0% Smart Moves cap is the conservative-end anchor that hedges against this uncertainty. The disclaimer stays neutral on whether today is a high-CAPE environment (changes year-over-year, requires citing a specific source, and the conservative anchor's defensibility doesn't depend on the answer). Affects: anyone reading the Guyton-Klinger methodology or glossary entry. No engine impact.
June 2, 2026
Future Expenses surfaced in the cash flow Sankey. When a future expense fires in a given year, the Sankey now shows it as a destination block on the right (warm orange — distinct from red taxes and bridge-amber sources) with the expense label inline. The source side (savings / brokerage / Roth / 401k withdrawal blocks) reflects the cascade draws that actually funded the expense, so the Sankey's year-flow accounting reconciles. The narrative caption beneath the Sankey names the expense by name when one fires that year. Affects: anyone using Future Expenses. Engine endBalance byte-identical — only per-bucket record fields surface the cascade draws that the engine was already making.
June 1, 2026
Bad-sim narratives on the Guardrails card: see the actual cut-fire sequence. If you have Dynamic Spending Strategy active, the GK Results card now surfaces a concrete bad-sequence story above the spending trajectory chart. Instead of just aggregate counts ("median 6 cuts"), you see the actual ages where cuts fired in your worst-lived-experience simulation: "In a tough sequence, cuts fired at ages 61, 62, 63, 64, and 68 — 7 years below your stated goal across this retirement, with 4 of those consecutive." When prosperity boosts also fired in that same sequence, those ages are surfaced too. The selection picks the surviving simulation with the most below-target years — the worst-lived experience among plans that ultimately succeeded — so you're reading a real story that the engine's math actually produced for your inputs, not a worst-case hypothetical. Affects: only users with Dynamic Spending Strategy enabled. The narrative section hides itself when no surviving sim has any below-target years (clean plan, GK rarely fires).
June 1, 2026
Lived Experience Under Guardrails card responsiveness to user feedback. Three updates to the GK Results card driven by careful-tester feedback. (1) The "Years below target" tile now uses three-tier severity coloring: default text under 30%, amber 30–50%, red 50%+. The previous binary amber-only threshold underweighted the lived-experience cost when 80–90% of retirement years fall below stated goal — that's a red-severity outcome, not amber. (2) The "Worst-10% spending floor" tile now surfaces a concrete context line below the value: the dollar gap and percentage below your stated monthly goal, instead of the abstract "sustained low" label. Makes the floor's lived meaning legible at a glance. (3) The methodology section on Guyton-Klinger and its glossary entry now explicitly name the post-2008 research-community critique (Pfau 2010+, Karsten Jeske's "Big ERN" Safe Withdrawal Rate series 2017+) acknowledging that the 2006 paper's safe-start range was calibrated against pre-2008 market valuations. The 5.0% Smart Moves cap respects this critique; users at 4–5% effective WR should know they're operating in the contested research window. Affects: only users with Dynamic Spending Strategy enabled (for tiles 1+2), plus anyone reading the methodology / glossary for the GK strategy (for the critique disclaimer). Engine math unchanged.
May 31, 2026
Review and apply your SS Income Gap exploration in-card. The SS Income Gap toolkit on the Results tab has 11 sliders and toggles spanning part-time income, home sale earmark, cash reserve, and inheritance / other-lump-sum bridge routing. Users can now review and commit all in-card changes from inside the panel — no need to navigate to Inputs and re-find each field. As sliders move, a "Review and apply N changes →" button appears at the bottom. Clicking opens a summary listing each modified field with the current → preview value and a checkbox per row. Uncheck any rows you don't want to commit, then Apply — only the checked changes write to plan inputs. The panel is still a workspace for exploration; the review summary is a single commit moment when you're ready. Affects: anyone with a Social Security bridge period using the SS Income Gap toolkit. Engine math unchanged. The Inputs tab still works as before for direct field editing.
May 30, 2026
Initial WR explore slider on the Guardrails card. The Lived Experience Under Guardrails card now has an in-card slider for Initial WR (the baseline withdrawal rate the rules are calibrated against). Drag the slider to a different value — the app runs a fresh Monte Carlo at that baseline and shows preview tiles: years below target, median cuts, success rate, each with a delta vs your saved plan. Click "Apply to inputs →" to commit, or leave it as exploration without commitment. Replaces the prior "Tune guardrails settings →" link that broke the explore-without-commitment pattern every other Results card uses (Plan Robustness cash reserve, Income Picture monthly goal, SS Claiming Strategy, etc.) — users had to make a settings commitment just to see what a different baseline would do. A smaller "Open full settings in Inputs →" link is preserved at the bottom for tuning the band (±%) or adjustment (cut/raise size), which the in-card slider doesn't expose. Affects: only users with Dynamic Spending Strategy enabled. Engine math unchanged. AI Advisor knows about the slider and can suggest specific Initial WR values to explore.
May 30, 2026
Lived-experience metrics on the Guardrails card: years below target + clustering. The Lived Experience Under Guardrails card now leads with a lived-years metric instead of a rule-fire count. Where the headline tile previously said "Median cuts: 6 over 21 yrs" (mechanism — how often the rule fires), it now says "Years below target: 5 of 21 yrs" (consequence — how often spending falls below your stated goal). Same underlying simulation data, different cognitive load. The original cut/raise counts stay surfaced as supporting mechanism stats below. Plus a new "Median below-target stretch" stat captures clustering — whether your lean years run consecutively (sequence risk in action) or spread out across retirement. Reframe came from a contact who pointed out retirees think in lived years, not simulation events. Affects: only users with Dynamic Spending Strategy enabled. Same Monte Carlo data, just aggregated differently. Output unchanged when guardrails are off.
May 30, 2026
AI Advisor coordinates the projection tab across surfaces. When the AI Advisor highlights a specific year in your projection (e.g., "let's look at age 75 when RMDs start"), three surfaces now align to that year together: the table cells highlight + auto-scroll to the row, the row's detail panel auto-expands to show income / bucket sources / draw breakdown, AND the cash flow Sankey above the table snaps to the same year so its sources, destinations, and narrative caption all reflect what the AI is pointing at. Particularly useful for conversations like "walk me through my bridge years" or "what does my RMD year look like?" — you see the full year's story (table → detail → Sankey flow) without having to navigate to each surface manually. Affects: anyone using the AI Advisor on the Projection tab. The buttons paired with year-highlights also now work correctly when you're already on the Projection tab (previously they could be silent no-ops in that specific state). You retain manual Sankey control — prev/next/slider clicks still work; AI sync only fires on new highlights.
May 30, 2026
Lived Experience Under Guardrails (Results tab). If you've enabled the Guyton-Klinger dynamic spending strategy (shipped May 21), a new card on the Results tab shows what your retirement would actually feel like under the rules. The strategy's existing surfaces (Smart Moves entry, Inputs toggle, Stress Test card, projection Strategy column, Plan Robustness pill) all announce that guardrails exist and let you toggle them — this card surfaces the lived tradeoff in three layers: your lived spending across simulated retirements with bands and your stated monthly goal as reference; per-year frequency of cut / baseline / raise rule fires (so you can see when cuts cluster — sequence risk in action); and side-by-side comparison of your plan running with vs without guardrails. Makes the strategy interpretable, not just optional. Affects: only users with Dynamic Spending Strategy enabled. The Monte Carlo engine was extended to track per-year spending and rule-fire frequency across sims when guardrails are active; output unchanged when off.
May 28, 2026
"Why this isn't a subscription" — new four-promises modal documenting the anti-SaaS posture. A self-contained modal accessible from a callout in the marketing-page differentiator section, spelling out the four commitments behind the pricing and data architecture: one-time purchase, local-only data, no account required, open math. Deep-linkable at /#promises and via the /promises short URL. Affects: marketing-page content surface. No changes to operational behavior, pricing, or data handling — this documents the existing posture explicitly.
May 28, 2026
Add-on products renamed and repriced. Top-up renamed to Advisor Plus and repriced from $9.99 to $29 (still +10 deep analyses and +25 AI Advisor conversations, still stacks with no expiry). Navigator Annual renamed to Advisor 365 and repriced from $49 to $79 (still 365 days of unrestricted AI Advisor use, still no auto-renew). Names now tie to the AI Advisor surface they extend; new prices reflect the actual cost basis of the AI Advisor capacity over time. Affects: Top-up modal copy, Terms of Use, FAQ, About page, and post-purchase emails.
May 27, 2026
Navigator Annual: "unrestricted use" framing restored; Terms made explicit about background bounds. Marketing copy now describes Navigator Annual as unrestricted use — matching what normal users experience under the bounded mechanics shipped earlier today. The Terms now spell out the specific background bounds (per-conversation exchange caps, context resets, per-IP rate limits, output length caps, system spending alerts) and reserve a right to contact subscribers whose usage patterns suggest abuse. Affects: Navigator Annual marketing copy and Terms of Use. Operational behavior unchanged from the earlier ship today.
May 27, 2026
AI Advisor conversations now start with fresh context. When a conversation reaches its per-session exchange cap, the message history is cleared as the next conversation begins — aligning behavior with the per-conversation structure described in the Terms. A short toast surfaces the rotation; the server enforces a 50-message ceiling as a safety net. Affects: every AI Advisor conversation across all tiers. Implementation now matches what the Terms imply.
May 24, 2026
AI Advisor responses now more consistent across sessions. Internally pins the model's temperature parameter to a lower value — same trust-grounded reasoning, less per-session randomness in phrasing. Affects: every AI Advisor conversation. Substance unchanged; phrasing more stable.
May 23, 2026
New visual: Cliff Proximity Gauge on Roth Strategies card. For plans with bridge years, shows live MAGI position vs ACA cliff + 5 IRMAA Medicare-premium tiers. Drag the Roth conversion slider and watch the marker. Affects: visualization addition for plans with bridge years. Numbers unchanged.
May 14, 2026
Web Worker migration complete. All heavy Monte Carlo computations now run off the main thread. Heavy lenses, cohort comparisons, and snapshot saves no longer freeze the UI. Affects: UI responsiveness; no projection number changes.
May 11, 2026
Intent-driven Smart Moves — four lens system. Retire Earlier / Spend More / Leave a Legacy / Weather a Downturn. Each lens optimizes through its own currency; you pick the lens that matches your goal. Affects: Smart Moves card on Results tab — replaces prior pattern-grid with lens-aware optimization.
Your benefit is calculated from your Full Retirement Age (FRA) benefit and adjusted for when you claim. Claiming before FRA permanently reduces it; delaying past FRA increases it up to age 70.
SSA factors: ~0.70 at 62, 1.00 at FRA (67 for most), 1.24 at 70. This tool assumes a Full Retirement Age of 67, which applies to anyone born in 1960 or later. If you were born before 1960, your FRA is slightly lower (66 for born 1943–1954, graduating to 67 by 1960) — enter your actual FRA benefit to keep the math accurate regardless. Spousal benefit is the higher of their own record or 50% of your FRA benefit. Benefits are inflation-adjusted to retirement-year dollars. Stress-testing for legislative shortfall: the SSA Trustees project the trust fund hitting depletion in 2033, after which scheduled benefits would be reduced by ~20-23% absent congressional action. To stress-test your plan against this, set the "SS Benefit Confidence" slider to 80% (or another haircut you find plausible) — the engine will scale all SS benefits accordingly.