This tool has changed a lot since it first launched, and rather than listing the changes in the order they were made, I’ve organized them here by area. I’m sure there will be more, but I think the tool is getting to a pretty good place. Please let me know if you find something that concerns you.
Married couple enhancements
In the Quick Check, married couples can now model two individual spouses, not as one household. The Quick Retirement Check lets you add a second spouse with their own age, Social Security amount, and claiming age, independent of Spouse #1. This matters because Required Minimum Distributions are based on each person’s age, not a household average, so a younger second spouse can meaningfully reduce how much must come out of the portfolio in the early years. The Quick Check still leaves out more granular controls, like splitting the account balance by percentage or modeling one spouse predeceasing the other, but it includes the essentials for anyone who wants a faster answer without the full input form.
When one spouse dies before the other, the results tables now display that more clearly. Every table stops showing an age for the deceased spouse the year after their death and replaces it with a dash, rather than letting a number keep climbing for someone no longer in the picture. The two age columns were also renamed to “Age 1” and “Age 2” (to correspond to Spouse 1 and Spouse 2) throughout every table, a consistent label wherever the tool shows both spouses side by side.
Social Security can now start at a different age for each spouse, and independent of when the retirement income plan itself begins. This matters most for anyone planning to delay a claim past retirement to grow the benefit; every year before that claiming age shows zero from Social Security, so the portfolio has to cover the gap until it kicks in. The tool is explicit, in both the results and the instructions, that it doesn’t calculate benefits itself. It takes whatever amount and start age you enter at face value, with no knowledge of your actual earnings record or claiming-strategy math, so the benefit amount for whatever strategy you’re considering needs to come from Social Security’s own estimator or a financial professional first.
Support for a “still working” scenario
A new Retirement age field lets the tool represent someone who’s still working, not just someone who’s already retired. If you’re 60 today but not retiring until 66, the tool previously assumed you needed portfolio income starting immediately. Now, every year between Current age and Retirement age, ordinary living-expense spending is skipped entirely, since a paycheck is assumed to cover it and the portfolio simply grows. The year- by-year table shows a dash for those working years rather than a number that was never actually spent.
The income figure you enter is treated as what you’ll need starting in the year you actually retire, not today’s dollars adjusted each year for inflation while you’re still working. Some things can start before your retirement age (such as Social Security, charitable giving, pension income, etc.). Required Minimum Distributions remain mandatory based on your age; if one comes due before you’ve actually retired, it’s still withdrawn as required, and anything beyond what you need that year simply becomes extra income, the same way any other surplus already works in this tool.
A more complete tax picture
State income tax is now part of the calculation. You can select “No state income tax” if you live in one of the nine states that don’t tax income at all (lucky you), or enter your own rough effective rate for anywhere else, applied to the same taxable-income figure the federal calculation already uses. Because every state’s rules differ, especially around Social Security and retirement-account withdrawals, it’s an approximation you provide rather than a state-by- state calculation. Still, it accounts for anyone whose real after-tax picture depends on both federal and state tax, not federal alone.
Two new account types, Savings & CDs and Taxable Brokerage, let the tool model money held entirely outside your retirement accounts. Savings & CDs work the way bank and CD interest actually does: taxed as ordinary income every year it’s earned, whether or not you touch the account, with the withdrawal itself untaxed since that money’s already been through the IRS once. Taxable Brokerage is handled differently: only the gain portion of a withdrawal is taxable, at federal long-term capital gains rates (0%, 15%, or 20%, depending on your total income), not the ordinary brackets everything else uses, and you give it a cost basis so the tool knows exactly how much of each withdrawal is real gain versus already- taxed principal. Both accounts have the option for two ways of drawing them down: as-needed, first in line ahead of every other holding, or on a fixed schedule regardless of whether the full amount is strictly needed that year, and “available starting at age” has no expiration once reached, so the same mechanism can model either a Social Security bridge or a later-life reserve, just by changing the age.
Stress-testing your plan
A new Historical Simulation mode replays your plan against every real stretch of market history that matches its length, not a statistical probability about what markets typically do. Instead of generating randomized returns from an assumed average and volatility, it uses actual S&P 500 and 10-year Treasury total returns and real inflation, one full run for every possible starting year from 1928 through 2018. A thirty-year plan gets tested against sixty- two distinct historical starting points, and the results name the specific worst and best starting years your plan was actually tested against, not just a percentile, so you can see what a stretch like 1929 would have done to your own numbers.
The Monte Carlo results were redesigned so every statistic reported is a true median computed independently across every trial, not based on whichever single run happened to land closest to the median ending balance. The result now moves to the top of the page once you run it, since it’s the more decision-relevant answer once it exists: a probability and a range of outcomes rather than one single projection. It’s paired with a fuller set of numbers too: median equity sold, median total tax paid, and the age each account bucket gets tapped, expressed as “Age X, in Y% of trials,” so it’s clear at a glance this is a summary across every run and not one arbitrary path.
A gap in the Monte Carlo and Historical Simulation was that they were missing bond, cash, and TIPS interest income under the bucket withdrawal approach, and I’ve fixed this. The randomized and historical return paths weren’t correctly splitting a bond’s return into the interest that funds spending versus the price movement that stays invested, as the tool’s ordinary fixed-rate mode already did. Both paths now behave consistently with the rest of the tool.
Comparing scenarios and withdrawal strategies
The tool can now hold onto up to three scenarios and lay them out side by side, instead of asking you to remember or write down the numbers between runs. A “Save This Scenario” button on the results page lets you name and store whatever you’re looking at, a plain run, a Monte Carlo run, or a Historical Simulation run, and a new Compare page shows ending balance, whether the plan lasted, total tax paid, after-tax income, and the mode-specific numbers each type of analysis produces. Every saved scenario re-runs fresh against the live tool each time you view the comparison, so it never goes stale the way a screenshot would.
A new Rebalancing option gives total-return investors an alternative to proportional selling, avoiding forced equity sales in a down year. The original approach sold from every holding by its current share of the portfolio, a method that never corrects for drift and can still sell equity even in a bad year. Rebalancing instead sells preferentially from whatever’s grown above its share of your starting balances, funding withdrawals by trimming winners rather than a flat percentage of everything. In practice, this means that in a year equity has fallen and is now underweight, Rebalancing avoids selling it at all, funding spending from the rest of the portfolio instead, protection the older method never had.
The withdrawal-approach section was rebuilt to avoid favoring one strategy over the others. It previously framed the bucket strategy as the safe, “off” default and total-return investing as something you had to deliberately turn on, with language that told an undecided user to “leave it off” as the more conservative choice. Now all three approaches, Bucket Strategy, Total-Return: Proportional, and Total-Return: Rebalancing, appear as equally viable options with none positioned as the safer or recommended one.
An improved input screen
The two new account types, Savings & CDs and Taxable Brokerage, now appear in a dedicated section right after your Traditional and Roth balances, instead of tacked onto the end of the form. The new section, “Starting Non-Retirement Balances,” sits exactly where you’d expect it, before spending and income are even asked about, so the form now reads in the order it should have all along: what you have in retirement accounts, then what you have outside them, then what you need to spend. Every section number downstream shifted accordingly to keep the numbering consistent. Building and testing this move also turned up an unrelated bug: a balance sitting untouched in one of these accounts could silently disappear from the tool’s own headline ”ending balance” figure, which we caught and fixed before anything shipped.
Add Spouse 2 and state income tax are now separate sections, like QLAC, pensions, and everything else in the tool. They were buried inside the Spending & Income section, one as a secondary toggle, the other as a plain dropdown with no on/off switch at all. Both now have their own switch, their own explanation, and fields that only appear once turned on, with state income tax sitting right after Add Spouse 2. The tool now runs nineteen sections in total, kept consistent between the input screen itself and the full instructions manual.
A ”bug” that could automatically inflate a typed or pasted dollar amount by one hundred times has been fixed. Entering a decimal value, say $30,000.82, into any dollar field could previously produce a wrong number—a much larger one. It’s fixed now, tested against both typing and pasting a decimal value directly into the field. Also, a handful of input fields that awkwardly spanned the full width of the form, when they should have sat at half-width alongside the fields above them, now line up properly too, and the “Full explanation in the Instructions” links throughout every popover are highlighted in amber, easier to spot at a glance.
Results page table enhancements
The wide year-by-year tables now make it obvious there’s more to see, instead of a thin scrollbar at the bottom that was easy to miss entirely. Each table, detail, bucket balances, interest income, and tax now has a small pair of arrow buttons at the top, along with a “scroll to see more columns” hint. The bottom scrollbar itself is also more visible now, thicker and always present rather than the faint, hover-only default. Both appear only on tables that need them; a table that already fits your screen looks the same as before.
The year-by-year tables now show a proper QLAC column, and a corrected view of what actually leaves the portfolio. What’s actually withdrawn is now shown distinctly from the theoretical amount the plan called for, so the two numbers can genuinely differ once an account runs dry. Rows where that happens are flagged so a real shortfall is visible in the table itself, rather than silently absorbed into the numbers as if nothing went wrong.
Homepage updates
The homepage headline and opening description were rewritten to more precisely describe what this tool actually is, and isn’t. It’s not a full-featured retirement planner; it’s primarily a retirement income distribution-phase scenario calculator you feed starting balances and income, then test specific what-ifs from there. The feature cards below it got a matching refresh to reflect everything above: three ways to draw down instead of two, a new card for the Savings, CDs, and Taxable Brokerage account types, and another for the scenario comparison tool.
Future changes
I’ll keep you informed of future changes in a similar format. If you have questions about how to use the tool, see something that concerns you, or have a suggestion for a missing feature or function, please let me know.