What's New
New features, improvements, and fixes — newest first.
August 22, 2026
🐛 Single filers were being taxed on gains using married thresholds
- The plan only carried the married-filing-jointly capital-gains brackets. Every single filer was measured against them — a 0% band running to $96,700 instead of $48,350, and a 15% band to $600,050 instead of $533,400.
- This under-taxed single filers on every property sale, home sale and stock sale. Single filers now have their own bracket table.
- It also fixes a gap in the survivor scenario. When a plan models one spouse outliving the other, the survivor already switched to single tax brackets, the single standard deduction, and single Medicare and surtax thresholds — but their capital gains kept using the married table, because there was no single table to switch to. Survivor years are now taxed correctly, which makes that scenario more expensive and more realistic than it looked before.
- Head of household continues to be treated as a single filer, as it is everywhere else in the plan. Married-filing-separately is not modelled.
August 22, 2026
🐛 Retirement accounts weren't earning their dividends
- Your stock growth rate is price appreciation — dividends are a separate figure. When account growth started following your stock/bond mix, retirement accounts ended up growing at the price rate alone, and the dividend went missing entirely.
- The result: an identical $1,000,000 of stock earned 8.8% a year in a taxable brokerage but only 7.0% in an IRA. Over a long plan that compounds to roughly half.
- Inside an IRA, Roth, 401(k) or HSA a dividend is simply reinvested with no tax due, so it now compounds there as it should. In a taxable brokerage it is still paid out to cash and taxed as ordinary income that year — the same asset, the same total return, only a difference in where the dividend lands.
- This moves in your favour: retirement balances and projected net worth both rise. On one test plan, ending net worth recovered from $40.4M to $42.8M. Part of the drop reported in the last release was this, not the intended de-risking change.
- Historical backtests are unchanged — their market data already includes dividends, so nothing is double-counted.
- The stock dividend yield is now an editable setting in the Portfolio step, next to the growth rates. It had been fixed at 1.8% with no way to change it, which matters because dividends in a taxable account count as ordinary income and can affect your Medicare premiums and how much of your Social Security is taxed.
August 22, 2026
🐛 Your carried-forward capital losses now actually reduce your tax
- If you entered capital losses carried forward from a previous tax year, they were only half working. They were being applied to property sales and to the $3,000 a year the IRS lets you deduct against ordinary income — but not against gains from selling stocks, which is where most people actually realise them.
- A household carrying $500,000 of losses was paying full capital-gains tax on every stock sale while the balance drained away at $3,000 a year. At that rate it would take 167 years to use up.
- Losses now offset stock-sale gains too, in the order the IRS applies them: short-term first, then long-term, then up to $3,000 against ordinary income, with the rest carrying forward.
- This one moves in your favour — lower tax and a higher projected net worth for anyone carrying a balance. On a test plan with $500k of losses, lifetime tax fell about $104,000 and ending net worth rose about $260,000. You'll also see the balance actually draw down year by year now, instead of sitting nearly untouched.
August 21, 2026
⚠️ Important: how your accounts grow has changed — your numbers may have moved
- Every account now grows at its own stock/bond mix. Previously each retirement account grew at a fixed rate that had nothing to do with how you invest — only the taxable brokerage paid any attention to your allocation. Set 60/40 and your IRA is now projected as a 60/40 account, not as though it were entirely in stocks.
- If you hold bonds, expect a somewhat lower projection than before. The old figures were optimistic, because most retirement money sits in exactly the accounts that were ignoring your allocation.
- Traditional and Roth balances now grow at the same rate when they share an allocation. They previously defaulted to 6% and 7% — a leftover default, not a fact about Roth accounts — which quietly made converting look better than it was. If you have run the Optimizer, its Roth conversion recommendation may now be smaller. Conversions are ranked on tax alone.
- If you had entered per-account growth rates, those fields are gone. Allocation now does that job.
August 21, 2026
⚠️ Withdrawals now actually de-risk — this can move your ending number a lot
- When you needed cash, the plan always sold bonds first. That's tax-smart in isolation, and it's still what happens when you're at or below your stock target. But it meant every withdrawal left you holding a higher share of stocks — the opposite of a glide path meant to wind risk down. Because withdrawals dwarf the cash reinvested each year, bonds-first always won: a plan set to glide from 85% stocks down to 45% was finishing at 89%. It never de-risked at all.
- Now, while your portfolio is above its stock target, withdrawals come out of stocks first — only up to the amount that brings you back to target. Nothing extra is sold. It's the same withdrawal you were always making; only which asset funds it has changed.
- Expect a lower ending number if your plan draws down — on a long plan the drop can reach low double digits. That isn't a downgrade: it's what de-risking costs. More of your money sits in bonds and gains are realised sooner. The old figure was a 45%-stocks label on a portfolio that was really 89% stocks.
August 21, 2026
🐛 Bonds can now lose value in a bad year
- In Monte Carlo runs and historical backtests, your bonds were untouchable — their value never moved no matter what the market did. A bond-heavy plan sailed through 1994 and 2022 without a scratch, which are precisely the years bonds should be tested against.
- Bond prices now move with the market, so those stress tests may come back less rosy. They were never really that safe; the model just said so.
- Selling bonds is also no longer treated as tax-free. Bond funds realise capital gains or losses on sale just like stocks — only an individual bond held to maturity redeems at par. (This corrects the August 2 note that said Ask AI could explain "why selling bonds doesn't trigger capital gains.")
August 21, 2026
🐛 Your tax numbers will go up. You are not paying more tax.
- Selling stocks from a taxable account owes capital-gains tax on the growth. NestEdge has always charged it — it comes out of the sale itself, so your projection has always been right. But it appeared in no tax figure we showed you. Lifetime tax and effective tax rate were understated in every year you sold stock.
- It was possible to pay more capital-gains tax and see a smaller reported tax bill. That's now fixed.
- Nothing about your plan changed — only what we tell you about it. Your net worth, projection, and actual tax are exactly as they were.
- New Stock Cap. Gains column in the Taxes & IRMAA table, a matching band on the Taxes & IRMAA chart, and a column in the CSV export. Lifetime tax on your dashboard will be higher than you remember.
August 21, 2026
🎉 New: Assumptions panel — test a change without editing your plan
- A slide-out panel on the dashboard with the handful of settings that actually move your net worth: stock and bond returns, inflation, allocation, cash buffer, retirement year, Social Security claiming age, spending, and Roth conversion pace.
- Every change re-runs the full projection on the server, taxes included — not an estimate. The dashboard updates as you drag.
- Controls appear only when they apply to your plan, so a single filer or a household with no pre-tax balance doesn't see settings that would do nothing.
- Nothing is saved until you press Apply. Closing the panel discards everything and returns you to your plan as entered.
August 21, 2026
🎉 New: Allocation Drift chart — does your target ever actually happen?
- New chart tab plotting your target allocation against what you actually hold, year by year, with the gap shaded.
- You could always set a glide path, but nothing showed whether it was ever reached — and often it isn't. NestEdge never force-sells purely to rebalance, because that would hand you a capital-gains bill you didn't ask for. It moves toward the target using flows instead: surplus cash buys the under-weight asset, withdrawals come from the over-weight one.
- When an existing position grows faster than you withdraw, the target can stay out of reach. Now you can see when that's happening instead of assuming it isn't.
August 21, 2026
✨ Set a different stock/bond mix per account
- Each account can now carry its own allocation, overriding the household target. Most people should leave every account inheriting the household number.
- It's there because holding bonds in a Traditional IRA and stocks in a taxable account is a genuine tax advantage — bond interest compounds untaxed inside an IRA, while stocks get favourable treatment in a taxable account. Some people do this deliberately.
- The Portfolio step now shows each account's implied return as you set its mix, and the bond return is an editable field rather than a hidden default.
- Asset allocation moved out of "Drawdown Strategy" into its own section — it governs how everything grows, not just how cash is swept.
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