Using this site in the United States

First, set the picker

Every page on this site has a country selector in the top bar. Setting it to United States does three things: it changes the currency symbol and number formatting, it loads the US starting figures into the jurisdiction-sensitive input boxes, and it shows a short note on any calculator that works differently here.

What it does not do is change the arithmetic. There is one engine underneath all twenty-six calculators and it is the same for everybody. The country layer only sets defaults — and every one of those defaults stays editable, because a national average is a starting point rather than your situation. Your choice is remembered on your device and sent nowhere.

The translation layer

The calculators use deliberately generic language so that one set of tools works everywhere. Here is what each generic term means in the US.

Social Security, and what calculator 03 is really asking

The pension deferral calculator is set up as Social Security when you pick the US. Full retirement age is 67 for anyone born in 1960 or later, the earliest you can claim is 62, and delaying past full retirement age earns delayed retirement credits of 8% a year up to 70.

One simplification worth knowing about. The reduction for claiming early is not a flat rate in real life — it is roughly 6.7% a year for the first three years before full retirement age and about 5% a year for years beyond that, which works out to a 30% cut if you claim at 62. The calculator uses a flat 6% a year as a blended approximation. That slightly understates the penalty for claiming at 62 and slightly overstates it at 65 or 66. If the decision is close, get your own figures from the SSA's estimator rather than relying on the flat rate here.

The other thing the calculator cannot see is that Social Security itself can be taxable — up to 85% of it, depending on your other income. That interacts with every withdrawal decision you might make, and none of it is modelled.

Required minimum distributions

This is the one place on the entire site where an actual government rule is implemented rather than accepted as a typed-in rate. From age 73, the IRS requires you to withdraw a prescribed fraction of your traditional 401(k) and IRA balances each year, using the Uniform Lifetime Table. At 73 that is 100 ÷ 26.5, or about 3.8% of the sheltered balance; by 90 it is 100 ÷ 12.2, about 8.2%.

Roth accounts are exempt during your lifetime — both Roth IRAs and designated Roth accounts inside a 401(k) or 403(b). That exemption is a large part of why the withdrawal-order comparison in calculator 02 can favour leaving Roth money until last.

How the site models it matters, so it is worth stating: a forced withdrawal does not destroy the money. It moves it out of the shelter, and you reinvest whatever you did not need to spend. The real cost is the tax on the surplus, not the withdrawal itself — and that is what the calculators charge you. Any model that treats the whole forced withdrawal as lost overstates the damage enormously.

The gap this site cannot help with: healthcare before 65

If you are thinking about stopping work before 65, the single largest uncertainty in your plan is probably not investment returns. It is what health coverage costs between your last day of employer insurance and the day Medicare starts.

This is a genuinely large number, it varies by state, by household income and by year, and nothing on this site models it. The practical workaround is to treat it as a line in your annual spending figure before you enter it — get a real quote for your situation, add it to the spending number you take into the numbers you'll need, and every calculator downstream will at least be working from an honest figure.

The same applies after 65: Medicare is not free, and the income-related premium adjustments mean a large withdrawal in one year can raise your premiums two years later. That feedback loop is not modelled anywhere here.

What this site deliberately does not model here

This is the important section, and it is deliberately blunt. The calculators contain no tax logic and no means-testing logic of any kind — not for the US, not for anywhere. Where a page asks for a tax rate, it is a number you type in and the calculator multiplies by it. That design decision means the site cannot be wrong about the law, because it never states any; but it also means the following are entirely absent from every answer you will get:

• Federal and state income tax brackets. A single flat rate stands in for a banded system, which overstates tax for lower-income retirees and understates it for higher-income ones.
• The taxation of Social Security benefits — up to 85% of the benefit can be taxable depending on your other income, which makes withdrawal sequencing more consequential than the site can show.
• Medicare premiums and the income-related adjustment, where a high-income year raises your premiums two years later.
• Health insurance before 65, and any marketplace subsidies, which for early retirees is frequently the largest single planning variable.
• Medicaid spend-down rules and the five-year look-back, which is what actually determines whether the care threshold in calculator 07 means anything for you.
• State estate and inheritance taxes, several of which begin well below the federal exemption.
• Roth conversion strategy, which is one of the more valuable levers available to an American retiree and needs bracket-level modelling the site does not do.

None of these are oversights — they are the price of one honest engine that works in four countries rather than four half-modelled ones. But they do mean that on any decision that turns on tax, the calculators here tell you the shape of the answer and not the size of it.

The the US defaults, and how far to trust them

These are the figures the picker loads. Confidence is recorded honestly: verified means checked against a current published source, indicative means a reasonable planning figure that varies enormously and should be replaced with yours, and n/a means the concept does not apply here.

Every one of these is audited in full, with the primary source and the date it was checked, in the tax assumptions audit. If a number here looks wrong to you, that is the document to check — and the one to tell us about.

Where to check the official figures

Nothing on this site should be the last word on a the US rule. These are the primary sources:

• Social Security Administration — benefit reduction for early retirement. Create a my Social Security account for your own benefit estimate rather than a maximum.
• IRS — required minimum distributions and Publication 590-B for the Uniform Lifetime Table.
• IRS — Topic 409 on capital gains rates.
• Medicare.gov for enrolment timing and current premiums, including the income-related adjustment.
• Your state Medicaid agency for the actual asset limits and look-back rules where you live.

Where to start

Americans tend to get the most out of the withdrawal strategy calculator, because the three-account structure maps so cleanly onto taxable, traditional and Roth, and the ordering question is genuinely worth money. After that, pension deferral — the Social Security claiming decision is one of the few irreversible ones you will make, and the break-even arithmetic is worth seeing before you commit.

If you have not used the site before, start here works out which calculators are worth your time, the numbers you'll need covers gathering your figures, and the plain-English list defines every term the site uses.