Clarity · Continuity · Confidence
RetireFlow is a retirement income scenario calculator built for the distribution phase of retirement. Enter your accounts, Social Security, and spending targets. See exactly where your income comes from each year, when RMDs arrive, what taxes look like, and how long your money holds up — under your assumptions, and under stress. Your numbers. No subscription. No account required.
Run the Tool Quick Retirement Check →Capital Preservation spends income first and draws principal in bucket order — cash, bonds, equity. Time Segmentation gives each bucket a time horizon and lets it compound fully in place, drawing in the same order. Total-Return: Proportional and Total-Return: Rebalancing treat the portfolio as one integrated pool. No approach is built in as the “right” one; find out which actually holds up best for your own numbers.
Enter each spouse’s age and expected lifespan. If both have a traditional retirement account, each gets their own RMD schedule. The model projects the survivor’s income — reduced Social Security, solo tax filing, and all — so you can plan for the transition before it happens.
Current federal brackets, the standard deduction, the extra deduction at 65+, qualified charitable distributions, and the above-the-line charitable deduction are all computed alongside your withdrawals. State income tax is also included — either as zero for no-income-tax states, or as a flat effective rate you enter — so a brokerage withdrawal’s capital gain is kept separate from ordinary income and taxed at the appropriate rate.
Already-taxed money outside your retirement accounts gets its own treatment. Savings & CDs can bridge the years before Social Security or serve as a reserve; a taxable brokerage carries its own cost basis, so only the actual gain is taxed on withdrawal, at capital gains rates — not the whole amount.
Layer in up to three market shocks — historic or custom — at any age. Run thousands of randomized Monte Carlo trials for a probabilistic range of outcomes. Or replay your exact plan against every real historical starting year since 1928 to see what a stretch like 1929 or 1966 would actually have done to it.
Model a longevity annuity, qualified charitable distributions, and pension income for either spouse. Each is handled based on its actual income, tax, and RMD impact — so the model shows how these tools interact with the rest of your picture, not just in isolation.
Save up to three scenarios — whatever combination of settings you ran — and see them laid out side by side: ending balance, whether the plan lasted, and total tax paid. Each one re-runs fresh every time you look, so it’s never a stale snapshot.
Export any scenario as a PDF to keep for your records or bring to a financial advisor. Your inputs persist in your browser so you can pick up where you left off, and reset to a clean slate whenever you want to start a fresh scenario.
Head to the Tool and enter your numbers. The Instructions page walks through every field if you want to understand what’s driving the model. For a faster first look, the Quick Retirement Check gives you a bare-essentials run in a fraction of the time.