About Smart Financial Place
Retirement rules explained in plain language, with calculators that show their work and figures read straight from the agencies that publish them.
Why this site exists
The rules that decide how much money you actually keep in retirement — when to claim Social Security, how much the IRS forces out of your IRA each year, what pushes your Medicare premiums up — are not complicated so much as badly explained. The official sources are accurate and unreadable. Most of what fills the gap is written to collect an email address.
So these are the calculators built to answer the questions directly: enter your numbers, see the arithmetic, read why it comes out that way, and leave without an account. There is nothing to sign up for and nothing to buy.
Where the numbers come from
- Required minimum distributions
- The Uniform Lifetime Table is read live from 26 CFR §1.401(a)(9)-9 on eCFR.gov — the regulation itself, not a transcription of it — along with the date the section was last amended. Start ages follow SECURE 2.0.
- Medicare IRMAA brackets
- Parsed from the current CMS premiums fact sheet each time the page loads, so the brackets update when Medicare announces them each fall.
- Federal tax brackets and deductions
- From the IRS inflation-adjustment release for 2026. The taxable share of Social Security follows the worksheet in IRS Publication 915.
- Social Security
- Reduction and delayed-credit rules follow SSA's published schedule. The benefit amounts are yours to enter, from your statement at ssa.gov/myaccount, because only your own earnings record can produce them.
Your numbers stay on your device
Every calculation runs in your browser. Nothing you type is transmitted anywhere, because there is no server to transmit it to — the whole site is static files. Your inputs are saved in your own browser's local storage so they are still there when you come back, and clearing your browser data erases them permanently. There are no accounts and no email collection.
The site uses Google Analytics to count visits and see which calculators get used. It records which controls were interacted with, never the values entered in them.
Educational, not advice
These are tools for building intuition about how the rules work, not personalized tax, legal, or financial advice. They make simplifying assumptions, each page's footnote spells out the ones that matter, and they cannot account for your full situation. Decisions of this size are worth checking with a professional who can see all of it. The rules also change — SECURE 2.0 moved the RMD age twice in three years — so figures here reflect the law as currently published.
United States only
Everything here is built on U.S. federal rules from the IRS, the Social Security Administration, and Medicare. None of it transfers to other countries' systems.