Retirement Planning Shouldn’t Cost More Than a Car Payment

There are 59 million Americans over 65. Eleven thousand more turn 65 every single day.

Most of them will figure out retirement on their own.

Not because they want to — because the alternative is expensive, invasive, or both. A financial advisor running a comprehensive retirement plan costs between $6,000 and $10,000 a year. For the median retiree household earning $56,680, that’s 10 to 18 percent of pre-tax income handed to someone else to answer questions you could answer yourself, if you had the right tool.

Most people don’t need a financial advisor. They need a model. They need to see what happens to their money year by year — when Social Security kicks in, when RMDs force withdrawals they didn’t plan for, whether a Roth conversion makes sense in the years before Medicare starts. These are not mysteries. They’re math. And math doesn’t require a retainer.

RetirementIQ exists to make that math accessible.

What the tool actually does

RetirementIQ models retirement the way it actually works: multiple account types with different tax treatments, four-bucket withdrawal sequencing, Social Security optimization including spousal and survivor benefits, Roth conversion ladders ranked by lifetime tax impact, RMDs from the IRS Uniform Lifetime Table, IRMAA Medicare surcharges, ACA premium estimates, Monte Carlo simulation with three methods including historical market data back to 1928.

Year by year, in your browser, with your numbers.

It also handles the situations that most tools quietly skip — SSDI recipients transitioning to retirement benefits, widowed spouses recalculating their plan, households with pensions or annuities alongside investment accounts, state income taxes across all 50 states.

Privacy is not a feature. It’s the architecture.

When you enter your retirement numbers into most planning tools, those numbers leave your device. They go to a server. They sit in a database. They may inform a product recommendation, a targeted ad, or an acquisition target’s data room someday.

RetirementIQ works differently. Your plan never leaves your device. There is no account to create. There is no cloud sync. There is no server that receives your financial data — not because we promise not to look, but because there is no mechanism by which we could. You can verify this yourself in browser devtools: there is no outbound data traffic when you’re planning.

Retirement data is among the most complete financial pictures a person produces in their life. The only person who should have access to it is you.

One price. No subscription. No catch.

RetirementIQ is a one-time purchase. You pay once and the tool is yours — including all future updates to tax tables, RMD rules, Medicare thresholds, and Social Security bend points. When the IRS adjusts brackets, the update reaches you automatically at no additional cost.

The subscription model creates a quiet misalignment: the company needs you to keep paying, which means they need you to keep needing them. We’d rather build something genuinely useful, charge you once, and stay out of your way.

Take the math to your CPA

RetirementIQ isn’t a replacement for professional judgment when you need it. It’s what you bring to that conversation.

A good CPA or fee-only advisor can do a lot with a well-structured plan in front of them — but most of the billable time in those engagements is spent gathering data, building the base model, and running scenarios that a tool like this handles automatically. When you arrive with year-by-year projections, a Roth conversion analysis, and a clear picture of your tax exposure through RMD age, you’re not starting from zero. You’re asking sharper questions and getting more useful answers.

The math is transparent. Every calculation is tested against IRS, SSA, CMS, and HHS published data — 282 automated tests with source links that anyone can read in the Validation Report. If something is wrong, it’s findable. That’s the standard we hold ourselves to, and it’s the standard you should hold any planning tool to.

Who this is for

If you are within ten years of retirement or already there, if you have savings spread across pre-tax and Roth accounts and aren’t sure about the optimal withdrawal sequence, if you’re weighing Social Security claiming ages or thinking about Roth conversions before RMDs begin — RetirementIQ was built for you.

Not for your advisor. Not as a lead generator for financial products. For you, directly, on your schedule, with your data staying where it belongs.