BucketSavers is being built for people who want to manage their own retirement money, pressure-test decisions, and understand tradeoffs before talking to anyone who sells advice.
The first flagship tool
Most Roth conversion examples compare taxes today with taxes later, then quietly skip the opportunity cost of the tax bill itself. BucketSavers makes that cost visible whether you pay from outside cash or from the conversion.
Privacy stance
Calculators run locally. There is no account, no server-side portfolio storage, and no need to paste sensitive retirement data into someone else’s database.
If you want to keep a plan, save it as a local .buk file and reopen it later.
The first version uses plain JSON so users can inspect exactly what is inside.
Tool roadmap
Estimate incremental federal tax, bracket fill, future after-tax comparison, and the hidden cost of paying conversion taxes.
Live prototypeMap cash, income, conservative assets, and growth assets into a retirement spending structure and watch the buckets through a market crash.
Live prototypeCompare taxable, tax-deferred, and Roth withdrawals without pretending one generic rule fits every household. Federal tax, capital-gains stacking, and RMDs, year by year.
Live prototypeThe bracket table is not your tax rate. See what the next dollar out of your IRA actually costs: the Social Security torpedo, gains pushing, and IRMAA cliffs.
Live prototypeWhen one spouse dies, the survivor keeps the income and the IRA — but loses half the brackets. The year after, in numbers, and what the joint-filing years are worth.
Live prototypeSame savings, same spending — every start year since 1928, run against real market history. Click 1966 and read what a bad decade does to a good plan.
Live prototypeTaxable steps up, Roth passes clean, and the IRA lands on your kids at their peak earning rates. What a dollar in each account is actually worth to them.
Live prototype$120,000 a year of care — and the twist nobody mentions: the medical deduction makes those the cheapest years of your retirement to drain the IRA.
Live prototypeLeave the IRA untouched and watch the forced-distribution wave build — which Medicare cliffs it crosses, and the conversion window that expires before it hits.
Live prototypeEvery claiming-age combination for you and your spouse: the break-even chart, the honest invest-the-early-checks version of it, and the check the survivor keeps.
Important boundary
BucketSavers can help you research and model decisions. It does not know your full tax return, state law, estate plan, benefit eligibility, or household risk tolerance. That boundary is part of the product.