What's New

New features, improvements, and fixes — newest first.

August 27, 2026

🎉 New: retire before 59½ with a §72(t) SEPP

  • Draw from a traditional IRA before 59½ without the 10% early-withdrawal penalty, using any of the three IRS methods.
  • Size the commitment from the gap you actually need to bridge, instead of locking up the whole account.
  • A panel weighs the penalty you avoid against the health-insurance subsidy you lose and the extra tax you owe, so you can see what it really costs.
  • Guardrails warn you if the series would leave you short, and tell you when the rule of 55 would do the same job without committing anything.
  • Both of you can run your own series, each drawn only from that person's own IRAs.
  • Already filed a 72(t)? Record it on your plan and its payments, tax and subsidy effects flow through every projection.

August 26, 2026

Cash buffer no longer funded by early withdrawals

  • The projection could take money out of a Traditional IRA — and pay the 10% early-withdrawal penalty — purely to build up your target cash buffer, even in years where your income already covered your spending.
  • It now only reaches into a penalized retirement account to cover a genuine shortfall, and otherwise lets cash sit below the target. Accounts that carry no penalty are unaffected.
  • Plans that were affected will show lower taxes, fewer penalties and a higher final estate. If you keep a cash buffer of two years or more and entered little or no cash on hand, this is likely to change your numbers.

August 26, 2026

Inheritances, gifts and other non-taxable income

  • Other Income entries now have a Tax treatment setting: "Taxable — ordinary income" or "Not taxable". Choosing "Not taxable" keeps the amount out of your taxable income, so it no longer raises your tax bracket.
  • This replaces the old Tax rate box, which was not connected to the tax calculation — setting it to 0% had no effect.
  • Existing entries stay taxable until you change them. If you have an inheritance, a gift or a settlement entered as Other Income, open it and set the tax treatment.
  • Life insurance payouts were affected by the same problem and are now correctly untaxed. If your plan models the death of a partner, expect a noticeably lower tax bill in that year.

August 26, 2026

Required Minimum Distributions are now reported per person

  • On plans where one partner is older, the "RMDs begin" note could appear under the wrong person's name — showing the older partner's first withdrawal year and amount, alongside the other partner's age.
  • Each person's RMD start year and first-year amount are now reported separately and correctly.
  • If you use the Actionable Insights panel to time Roth conversions before RMDs start, it's worth re-checking that date — for some couples it moves by several years.

August 26, 2026

⚠️ Social Security now models the survivor properly — your recommendation may have moved

  • A survivor receives whichever benefit is larger — their own or the deceased's, never both. We only applied that when the higher earner happened to be the first person entered in the wizard. For every other household the survivor benefit was worth nothing in our numbers.
  • Delayed-retirement credits stopped being credited before they were earned. Someone planning to claim at 70 who dies at 68 leaves a survivor about 108% of their full benefit, not 124%.
  • A survivor of someone who claimed early is now floored at 82.5% of their full benefit, as the rules require. That floor was in the code but could never take effect.
  • Claiming ages are now ranked on what your estate is expected to be worth once the chance that one of you dies first is priced in. Previously they were ranked on a projection where nobody dies, which quietly favoured claiming early.
  • Expect your Social Security recommendation to change, most often toward delaying the higher earner.

August 26, 2026

🎉 New: choose your own Social Security claiming ages

  • The optimizer's answer is often a near-tie. Every claiming age can sit within a couple of percent of every other, and the winner can move when you change something unrelated, like your stock allocation.
  • The recommendation now comes with the alternatives, priced the same way, and you pick the one you want. Picking one re-runs the optimizer around it, so your Roth conversions and property-sale timing are tuned to your choice.
  • When the answer is close or unstable, it says so instead of presenting one age with confidence it hasn't earned.

August 26, 2026

🎉 New: estimate Social Security without an SSA account

  • Setting up a my Social Security account takes identity verification, and a lot of people put it off — leaving the largest guaranteed income in their plan blank.
  • The Income step can now estimate it from your pay, using the real SSA formula and showing its working. Replace it with your real figure whenever you have one.
  • It only appears while the field is empty, so it never invites you to overwrite a real number with an estimate.

August 26, 2026

✨ Plan through a different age for each of you

  • "Plan through age" was your age, not your spouse's. A couple five years apart planning through 100 had the younger partner cut off at 95 — the years a survivor is most likely to be alone.
  • Both ages are now set separately, and the projection runs to whichever is later.
  • Your spouse can also be set to retire at the same time as you, in one click.

August 26, 2026

✨ Tax-exempt (municipal) bonds

  • Tell us what share of your bonds are municipal and whether they're issued by your state, and their interest is no longer taxed as ordinary income.
  • In-state bonds skip state tax too. Municipal interest still counts toward Medicare (IRMAA) and ACA subsidy calculations, as it should.
  • Selling a muni fund still realises a normal capital gain — only the interest is exempt.

August 22, 2026

⚠️ Capital gains on stock sales are now taxed at your real rate

  • Selling stocks from a taxable account was charged a flat 23.8% — the top federal capital-gains bracket plus the 3.8% investment-income surtax — no matter what you earned. Every other tax in your plan is worked out year by year from real brackets; this was the last one that wasn't.
  • Now the gain is stacked on top of your ordinary income and taxed at the bracket it actually lands in (0%, 15% or 20%), the 3.8% surtax applies only to the part above the income threshold, and your state's capital-gains rate is added on top.
  • Which way your number moves depends on where you live and what you earn. The old flat rate was meant to bundle federal, surtax and state together, so it overcharged some households badly and undercharged others. On one test plan, lifetime capital-gains tax came to $146,748 in Texas but $292,325 in California, where a 9.3% state rate had been badly understated.
  • The clearest case: a retiree living mostly on Roth withdrawals and cash, with little ordinary income, can now realise stock gains at 0% — as they would in reality. Previously they were charged 23.8%.
  • Carried-forward capital losses are applied to the gain before the rate, so a household with losses may pay nothing at all.
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