Retirement templates

Which account to draw first, priced rather than asserted: what the next thousand dollars costs from a taxable account, a traditional one, a Roth and an HSA, side by side on your own rates. Names the three cliffs a withdrawal can push you over without warning — the IRMAA Medicare surcharge assessed on your income from two years ago, the provisional-income threshold that makes Social Security taxable, and the capital-gains 0% ceiling — and deliberately leaves their figures blank rather than hardcoding thresholds that change annually. Counts the years between now and your RMD start age, because that window is where the largest decision in the whole worksheet lives.

Four states against one retiree's actual income mix rather than against a headline rate, because a headline rate is almost never what a retiree pays. Social Security, 401(k) withdrawals, and private, public and military pensions each get their own row — states treat them very differently, and several exempt a government or military pension in full while taxing a private one. Age is an input because a large number of state exclusions are age-triggered. Then the part most comparisons omit: a state with no income tax raises the money somewhere, and for someone who owns a home outright the property tax line is frequently larger.

Every traditional, SEP and SIMPLE IRA you own, in one place, because the IRS aggregates them into a single number and a forgotten rollover account at an old provider counts exactly as much as the one you use. Works out what a conversion actually costs and states plainly whether it is clean. Built around the two things people get wrong: the measurement date is 31 December rather than the day you converted — which means a rollover completed in December still rescues the year — and the after-tax basis is tracked by you rather than by your custodian, so a missing Form 8606 means paying tax twice on the same money.