Questions people ask

Retire Plan is a retirement planner. Build your plan and see how it holds up in every market in history, with your taxes worked out. It runs in the browser on a phone or a computer, and a short interview builds the plan with you.

Yes. The demo needs no account and no email, and you pick one of four sample plans. The details that describe a person are locked and every other setting is open. Nothing you change there is kept after you close the tab.

Yes. Answer Retired when the interview asks whether you are working, and the plan has no working years. The questions about pay drop away, and the plan shows how long your spending lasts, with Social Security and any pension counted.

It is built for the US. The taxes come from the 2026 US federal and state tables, and the market history is the US stock market and US Treasury bonds. If you pay tax in another country, the tax figures will not be yours.

Add it as another account. On the savings step of the interview, or under your savings in the plan, pick “Add another account”, choose what kind it is and type the balance. It is counted with the rest of your money of the same kind, so an old traditional 401K is taxed when it comes out, like the one you have now.

The plan has one retirement age for the household. If one of you has already retired, say so in the interview and the plan follows the one still working. If one of you will keep working after the other stops, add that later pay as other regular income, “Pay from another job”, from the age it starts to the age it stops. It is taxed as wages and goes toward your spending, but none of it is saved into a 401K.

There are two ways to add it. Semi-retirement adds part-time years between full-time work and full retirement, and its Coast FIRE and Barista FIRE presets work out the part-time pay you would need. Any other regular income, such as side work, royalties or an annuity, goes in as other income with the ages it starts and stops, and it is taxed by its kind.

Yes. Social Security is estimated from your pay, or you can type the benefit from your statement at ssa.gov, and you choose the age you claim it. A pension goes in with the age it starts and how much it rises each year. A rental goes in as the rent left after costs, less the mortgage, and is taxed as ordinary income.

The What-if add-on has a change called “Sell the rental”. You give the age you sell and what the property is worth today, and if you know them, what you paid, the year you bought it and the mortgage left. It works out the tax on the sale, pays off the loan, puts the rest in your brokerage account and shows your plan with and without the sale.

Health insurance and other healthcare costs before Medicare, Medicare premiums, long-term care, the years after a spouse dies, Roth conversions, the alternative minimum tax, health savings accounts, 457(b) plans, the 403(b) 15-year catch-up, and city and county income taxes. If one of these is large for you, the plan will not show it.

Net worth is a good number to know, but it is a total before tax, and a plan is about what you can spend. Each kind of account is taxed in its own way. Money from a 401K is taxed as income when you take it out, a brokerage account is taxed only on its gains, and a Roth is not taxed at all. Added into one number, they can look like more than you can spend. Retire Plan keeps each account apart and works out the tax on every withdrawal.

Net worth also takes away your debts. Retire Plan does not plan debt payments, such as paying a loan off early or saving first. It looks at what you save and what you can spend.

Many people also count the equity in a rental. If you live on the rent, you cannot also spend that equity unless you sell. Retire Plan counts the rent, and the What-if add-on can show a sale.

A case is one run of your plan through the real markets of the past. The first case starts your plan in 1871 and uses the returns and inflation of the years after it, the next starts in 1872, and so on, up to the last year with enough history after it to cover your whole plan.

For a set amount of spending, it is the share of cases that never ran out of money. A withdrawal set as a percentage of the balance can never run out, so for that the plan shows the share of retired years that paid your target in full, and how far the other years fell short on average.

Spending times 25 is the 4 percent rule turned around. It comes from 30-year retirements and leaves out tax. Retire Plan works out the tax on every withdrawal, applies the contribution limits and the penalty before 59 and a half, and runs your plan through every case since 1871 for the length of retirement you set.

From the 2026 tables: federal income tax brackets and deductions, Social Security and Medicare tax, the capital gains rates, and your state’s brackets and rules for retirement income. You pick your state and never type a tax rate. City and county taxes and the alternative minimum tax are left out.

The backtest runs your plan once from each year in history, so every case actually happened. Monte Carlo makes a thousand futures out of five-year blocks of that same history, picked at random, so it also tests orders of returns that never happened.

We check it against worked examples published by the IRS, Social Security and the states, against an outside tax calculator, and against the Trinity study. The accuracy page shows each check, and works some of the sums out by hand.

No. You pay once for the planner and once for each add-on you want, and nothing renews. Updates to the parts you own are included. What it costs is on the home page.

Yes. If the product does not work as described, ask for a refund within 14 days of your purchase and we will give it. Write to support@retire-plan.app. The terms set this out in full.

Your saved plans are encrypted on the way to our server and encrypted again before they are stored, on an encrypted disk. There are no ads, and no advertising or analytics cookies. The demo stores nothing at all. The privacy policy has the detail.

No. Retire Plan never connects to a bank or a brokerage. You type in your balances yourself.

Yes. Export any plan as a file, or its year-by-year figures as a CSV, from the planner at any time. Delete a plan, or your whole account, from the account page. Deleting the account removes your plans from the live database straight away, and copies in backups age out within six months.