Optimize Your Financial Future

Tax optimization is one of the biggest levers in any long-term financial plan. Strategic Roth conversions. Drawing down accounts in the right order. Harvesting capital gains in low-tax years. Managing income to avoid triggering IRMAA surcharges or losing ACA subsidies.

These are strategies that can save six or even seven figures over a retirement. They can also be complicated, easy to get wrong, or cost thousands of dollars when done with a professional.

ProjectionLab now handles all of these advanced strategies for you.

Tax Strategy

Simply set a target tax bracket or income ceiling and ProjectionLab optimizes your plan around it: federal brackets, IRMAA thresholds, ACA subsidy limits, the NIIT cliff, and even income splitting across spouses for joint filers.

You decide your strategy and the Optimizer does the rest.

Roth Conversions

Automatically convert pre-tax savings to fill your target bracket each year. The engine is IRMAA-aware, so it won’t push you into a Medicare surcharge two years down the road. You can quickly see the projected impact on net worth, lifetime taxes, legacy value, and more.

Drawdown

Draw from accounts in optimal order up to your bracket cap, splitting withdrawals across ordinary income and capital gains sources automatically. No more guessing which accounts to tap first.

Gain Harvesting

Realize capital gains in years where you’ll pay little or nothing on them. This includes filling the 0% long-term capital gains bracket, a powerful and commonly overlooked move available to early retirees.

Flexible Spending

Most online retirement calculators assume you spend the same amount every year forever. That’s not how it works in real life. When markets drop, you cut back. When things recover, you loosen up.

Flex Spending lets you set rules like: “If the market drops 30% from its all-time high, reduce discretionary spending by 60%.” Tag expenses as Essential or Discretionary and ProjectionLab adjusts automatically. This can dramatically improve your chance of success without requiring you to save more.

Strategies That Work Together

Most planning tools treat Roth conversions, drawdown order, and gain harvesting as separate features with their own settings to tweak.

Now in ProjectionLab, they all work from a shared objective. When you set a target like “stay in the 12% bracket” or “keep income under the ACA cliff,” every strategy coordinates around it. Your Roth conversions and gain harvesting work opportunistically with a shared tax strategy. Your drawdown order accounts for the conversions you’re running. IRMAA and NIIT thresholds are respected across all of them at once.

You don’t have to manage the interactions between strategies. The engine handles it.

The Optimizer

On top of all of this is our new Optimizer that searches across strategies, bracket targets, and timing windows to find what works best for your specific plan.

Tell it what you care about: lower lifetime taxes, higher net worth, more ACA subsidies, reduced IRMAA surcharges, lower RMDs, or higher net legacy. It evaluates hundreds of combinations and presents a winner.

The results show exactly what the winning strategy gains you, with a full breakdown of the trade-offs across tax liability, net legacy, RMDs, IRMAA, ACA subsidies, and effective tax rate. One click to apply it. One click to explore alternatives.

This is the kind of analysis that would cost thousands from a financial advisor. It runs inside your plan in seconds.

Works Internationally

Tax strategies aren’t US-only. Canadian plans integrate CPP earnings ceilings. Australian plans handle bracket stacking across ordinary income and capital gains. UK plans support both PCLS and UFPLS pension drawdown methods, so you can model phased crystallisation or the 25% tax-free split per withdrawal and target brackets accordingly.

Medicare, Properly Modeled

Medicare moves from plan settings to a fully visible expense card. You can now see estimated costs before running a simulation: Part B, Part D, and supplemental premiums (Medigap or Medicare Advantage).

IRMAA surcharges are modeled with the correct 2-year income lookback. A medical inflation modifier accounts for healthcare costs growing faster than general CPI. Each filer in a couple gets independent calculations.

And Medicare ties directly into the new Tax Strategy engine. IRMAA thresholds are treated as income ceilings the Optimizer actively manages around.

Estimated Social Security Benefits

Enter your Primary Insurance Amount from your SSA statement, pick a claiming age between 62 and 70, and ProjectionLab computes your benefit automatically with early reduction factors and delayed retirement credits built in.

Spousal and survivor benefits are modeled. The earnings test is applied for early claimers who are still working. Benefits use your plan’s projected employment and respond dynamically, so results adapt inside Chance of Success trials too.

No more looking up your FRA and doing the math yourself.

A Visual Refresh

The app has a new design system with consistent surfaces and subtle glassmorphism. Forms have been standardized across income, expenses, goals, and accounts. Plan Settings are now routable, so you can deep-link directly to a tab or navigate with the browser back button. There’s also a first-class “Reduce Transparency” accessibility mode.

Explore What’s New

There are lots of smaller improvements in this release too, including a “Today’s Currency” fix for fixed-date plans, refinements to savings yield calculations, and updates to international tax presets.

Check out the full release notes or log in to explore what’s new in your plan.

Or if you would like a quick walkthrough, we put together a short video:

Video coming soon.