BS BucketSavers
Retirement tools, not retirement mystique

Model retirement taxes, withdrawals, and buckets without handing over your financial life.

BucketSavers is for people who manage their own retirement money and want to see the tradeoffs before talking to anyone who sells advice. Eleven tools cover Roth conversions, tax brackets, withdrawal order, Social Security, and bucket strategies tested against a downturn and against market history since 1928. All of them run in your browser, and a household you enter once fills in every calculator.

See all eleven tools See how the math works

Two families of tools

Tax-side tools and bucket tools, sharing one household.

The tax-side tools price one decision at a time under 2026 federal law: a Roth conversion, the next dollar out of an IRA, the order accounts are drawn down, a claiming age, a death in the household, a bequest, a year of long-term care. The bucket tools test a spending plan against a downturn you place on the timeline and against every start year in the historical record.

  • 2026 federal brackets, deductions, and thresholds, with sources cited
  • What each tool leaves out, stated on its page
  • One household, entered once and shared by every calculator
  • Over 550 automated checks on the calculation engines

Privacy stance

Your numbers stay in your browser.

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.

The household you enter is kept in this browser, on this device only, so every tool opens with it. It is never sent anywhere, and you can forget it at any time.

To keep a plan, save it as a .buk file on your own computer and reopen it later. It is plain JSON, so you can inspect exactly what is inside, and one file holds the whole household for every calculator on the site.

The tools

Eleven tools, each running entirely in your browser.

Start here

Your Household

Enter your household once and every tool opens with it, kept in this browser on your device and never sent anywhere.

Live

Roth Conversion Planner

Find the cheap years and how much a year is worth converting, then run the plan through your whole household — required distributions, Social Security taxation, Medicare surcharges, a surviving spouse, and how the tax is paid — against converting nothing.

Live

State Tax on Retirement Income

How each state taxes Social Security, IRA withdrawals, and conversions: a reference table re-checked September 24, 2026, and a starting point to verify rather than a guarantee.

Live

Real Marginal Rate Explorer

The bracket table is not your tax rate: see what the next dollar out of your IRA actually costs once the Social Security torpedo, gains pushing, and IRMAA cliffs are counted.

Live

RMD & IRMAA Horizon

Leave 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

Withdrawal Order Sandbox

All six orders for drawing down taxable, traditional, and Roth accounts, run year by year with federal tax, gains stacking, Social Security taxation, and RMDs, then ranked after final taxes.

Live

Retirement Date Roulette

Same savings, same spending, every start year from 1928 to 1996 run against real market history — click 1966 and read what a bad decade does to a good plan.

Live

Social Security Claiming-Age Optimizer

Every 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.

Live

Widow's Penalty Simulator

When one spouse dies, the survivor keeps the IRA and its required distributions but loses half the brackets — the year after, in numbers, and what the joint-filing years are worth.

Live

Your Heirs' Tax Bill

Taxable steps up, Roth passes clean, and the IRA lands on your heirs at their peak earning rates — what a dollar in each account is actually worth to them.

Live

The Long-Term Care Shock

$120,000 a year of care, and the part rarely mentioned: the medical deduction can make those the cheapest years of retirement to draw down the IRA.

Important boundary

Educational software, not financial planning.

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.

Read the disclaimer