Your household
Change anything; the simulation re-runs instantly.
Your chosen order
Same spending, same returns — the only thing that changes between the lines below is which account each year's dollars come from.
Watch the accounts drain
The same chosen order, split by account. This is where the order becomes visible: which account empties first, when RMDs start gnawing at the traditional balance, and what's still compounding at the end.
All six orders, ranked
Every possible order of the three accounts, ranked by what's actually spendable at the end — after the taxes still hiding inside the traditional balance and the unrealized gain. Click a row to make it your chosen order.
"After final taxes" = Roth at face value + taxable minus 15% of its unrealized gain + traditional minus the Trad rate — an implied rate the tool computes for each order, not a number you guess: the leftover traditional balance is run through the brackets as an even 10-year liquidation (the inherited-IRA window) on top of the plan's final-year income. Orders that leave a bigger IRA behind earn themselves a higher rate. Heirs who get a basis step-up would do better on the taxable piece; a surviving spouse filing single would often do worse. Both are warnings, not adjustments.
Year-by-year table — show your work
How the math works
Order of operations
Each year: spending and other income rise with inflation → the RMD, if you've reached RMD age, is forced out of the traditional account → remaining spending plus the year's tax is withdrawn from your accounts in the order you chose → federal tax is computed → any excess cash (usually an RMD bigger than your spending) is reinvested in the taxable account at full basis → every account grows at its own blended rate. Tax and withdrawals depend on each other, so the tool solves them together rather than guessing.
The tax model
2026 federal law, source-reviewed against IRS Rev. Proc. 2025-32: ordinary brackets, the standard deduction (16,100 single / 32,200 joint) plus the age-65 addition, and the 0/15/20% capital-gains bands with gains stacked on top of ordinary income. Traditional withdrawals and pension income are ordinary income; taxable sales realize gains in proportion to your cost basis; Roth withdrawals are tax-free. The taxable share of Social Security comes from the provisional-income formula (IRC §86): pension income plus traditional withdrawals plus realized gains plus half the benefit, run through the 0/50/85% bands. Every dollar threshold is indexed forward by your inflation number, because real law indexes them by CPI — freezing them would invent decades of bracket creep that isn't yours.
RMDs don't care about your order
Once you reach RMD age — 73 if you were born in the 1950s, 75 if 1960 or later, per SECURE 2.0 — the IRS forces a slice of the traditional account out every year using the Uniform Lifetime Table, whether you need the money or not. That's why "save the IRA for last" can quietly stop being your decision to make: the longer the traditional balance compounds untouched, the bigger the forced, fully-taxed distributions on the far end. The tool shows RMD years shaded in the table, and reinvests whatever you didn't spend.
The Social Security tax torpedo
The provisional-income thresholds — $25,000/$34,000 single, $32,000/$44,000 joint — are frozen in law and have been since the 1980s and 90s. Everything else in this model inflates; they don't. So the same real spending makes a growing share of your benefit taxable over the decades, and every extra dollar pulled from the traditional account can drag up to 85 cents of Social Security into taxable income with it — a marginal rate well above the bracket printed in the table. Roth withdrawals never enter the formula. Watch the "SS taxable" column while switching orders; it's the quietest big number in the table.
The growth/safe sliders
Each account holds its own mix of two assets: growth (default 10%/yr — the long-run all-years S&P figure, because no downturn is modeled here and the rate has to carry the crashes) and safe (default 3.5%/yr, the T-bill anchor). Where you put the growth matters: growth inside the Roth compounds tax-free forever, growth inside the traditional compounds into future ordinary-income RMDs, growth inside taxable builds unrealized gain. The sliders let you see what the asset-location argument is actually worth for your numbers.
What "after final taxes" means
Ending balances aren't comparable dollars: a traditional dollar still owes ordinary tax, a taxable dollar owes capital-gains tax on its embedded growth, a Roth dollar is done. The ranking therefore discounts the embedded taxable gain by 15%, and the ending traditional balance by a rate the tool computes rather than asks for: the leftover balance is liquidated evenly over ten years — the SECURE Act window an heir would actually face — with each slice stacked on the plan's final-year pension and taxable Social Security, through brackets indexed to the end of the plan. It's a best guess with a real mechanism behind it: leave $200k in the IRA and the implied rate is low; leave $3M and the tenth of it coming out every year fills brackets fast. The raw balances are shown next to it so you can argue with the assumption.
What this tool is not
It is not a tax return. Not modeled, on purpose, and worth knowing about: Medicare IRMAA surcharges (crossing a threshold two years before it bites), the 3.8% NIIT, state income tax, the annual tax drag of dividends and interest inside the taxable account (this makes taxable-last look slightly better than it should), the temporary 2025–2028 senior bonus deduction, ACA subsidy cliffs, qualified charitable distributions, and the basis step-up at death. Married statuses assume both spouses are the same age. One more boundary: this tool spends accounts in a fixed order — it does not model Roth conversions, which are a different lever entirely and have their own tool on this site.
Glossary
- Cost basis
- What you originally paid for the holdings in your taxable account. Selling returns your basis tax-free; only the growth above it is a capital gain. 60% basis means a $100 sale realizes $40 of gain.
- RMD (required minimum distribution)
- The annual withdrawal the IRS forces from traditional accounts past a certain age: last year's balance divided by a life-expectancy factor. Taxed as ordinary income. Cannot be skipped, converted, or redirected to Roth.
- Gains stacking
- Capital gains are taxed at 0, 15, or 20% depending on where they land when stacked on top of your ordinary income. More IRA withdrawals can push gains from the 0% band into the 15% band — the accounts interact.
- Provisional income
- The number that decides how much of Social Security is taxed: pension income plus IRA withdrawals plus realized gains plus half your benefit. Between 0% and 85% of the benefit becomes taxable as this rises — through thresholds that never adjust for inflation.
- Bracket fill
- The space left in a low tax bracket before the next rate kicks in. Withdrawal order is largely the art of deciding which years' bracket space gets used by which account.
- .buk file
- Your plan saved as a plain JSON file on your device. Load it later to pick up where you left off. Nothing is ever sent anywhere.