Built for people who want to understand the math themselves.

The idea

BucketSavers exists because many retirement planning decisions are explained as if ordinary people cannot understand them. We disagree. The tradeoffs can be made visible with clear assumptions, plain language, and calculators that do not hide the ball.

What is here

Eleven tools, in two families, and a household page where you enter your numbers once for every calculator. The tax-side tools work under 2026 federal law and price one decision at a time: a Roth conversion planner, a state tax reference table, the real marginal rate on the next IRA dollar, the required-distribution wave that builds in an untouched IRA, the order in which accounts are drawn down, Social Security claiming ages, the tax cost of a spouse’s death, what heirs keep of each kind of account, and the tax side of a year of long-term care.

The bucket tools look at the other half of retirement: whether a spending plan holds up. The Retirement Bucket Simulator runs time-segmented buckets through a downturn you place on the timeline, and Retirement Date Roulette runs the same engine against every start year since 1928, using actual stock, Treasury bill, and inflation data.

A household entered in one tool can be opened in the others: every calculator reads and writes the same .buk file. The full list, with a line on each tool, is on the home page.

The stance

The tools show mechanisms, not verdicts. Each one models how a rule works — a bracket, a threshold, a refill rule, a ten-year payout window — and leaves the decision with the person using it. Where a tool can compute something exactly, it does; where it needs a guess, such as a future tax rate or a return, the guess is an input you can see and change. Every tool page states what it leaves out, and the methodology page collects the conventions they share.

Nothing is uploaded. The calculations run in your browser, there are no accounts, and a saved plan is a file on your own computer.

Who is behind it

BucketSavers is an independent project, not a financial firm. It sells nothing and recommends nothing, and the tools are free to use.