See the whole plan before you fly it.
Retirement Preflight is a desktop planner that projects your retirement one year at a time — the tax code included. Federal brackets, all 51 state jurisdictions, Social Security timing, Roth conversions, IRMAA surcharges, ACA subsidies and RMDs, each computed in the order the law actually applies them.
Built for United States tax law, and only for it. Every rule in the engine is a US rule — federal brackets, the 51 state and DC jurisdictions, Social Security, Medicare IRMAA, ACA subsidies, RMDs. It does not model the tax or retirement system of any other country. It is not intended to be sold or used outside the United States, and it produces meaningful results only for a household filing US taxes.
What it models
The parts of a retirement plan that interact
Most calculators apply an average tax rate to a lump sum. The interesting problems live in the interactions — a Roth conversion that lifts your MAGI into the next IRMAA tier two years later, or a withdrawal that crosses the ACA subsidy cliff. Those are the ones this models explicitly.
Federal and all 51 jurisdictions
US federal brackets, the standard deduction, capital gains and NIIT, QBI, the self-employed health-insurance deduction, and every state's own rules — retirement-income exclusions, age deductions, federal-tax deductions and exemption phase-outs included.
Claim timing, done properly
Claim year and month per person, the earnings test if you work while claiming early — and the restoration at Full Retirement Age that most tools forget, which otherwise understates lifetime benefits.
IRMAA and the subsidy cliff
IRMAA surcharges on the two-year MAGI lookback, and ACA premiums on the statutory sliding scale rather than a flat guess — so you can see exactly where the cliff sits relative to your income.
A draw order that knows about tax
Set the account waterfall yourself, or let it look ahead for the 0% long-term capital-gains band — a yearly allowance most strict drain orders never reach.
Market crashes, two at once
Model a downturn and its recovery as one shape, not a drop with a flat rebound. Run two independent crash scenarios over the same plan.
Find Best
Hold your finances fixed and search the decision space — conversion policy, claim timing, sale years — scored against goals you weight yourself. Runs in parallel across your CPU cores.
Privacy
Your financial data never leaves your machine
This is a desktop application, not a web service. There is no account to create, nothing to sign in to, and no server that holds your balances. Your plans are ordinary files on your own disk that you open and save like any other document.
The projection engine is deterministic and runs entirely locally: the same inputs always produce the same output, on your hardware. Your plan and balances never leave the machine. The app only talks to the network to check for updates, activate a key, or fetch a tax-data pack — none of which include your numbers. Details in the privacy policy.
Pricing
Buy it once
No subscription, ever. The full engine and every what-if is free to use — what you pay for is keeping your work and letting the machine search for a better version of it.
| Free | Core license | |
|---|---|---|
| Every input and the full projection engine | Yes | Yes |
| Workbench: levers, charts, tables, all pages | Yes | Yes |
| Printing and PDF reports | Yes | Yes |
| Save, Open and Recent files | — | Yes |
| Find Best optimizer | — | Yes |
A note on what "free" means here. The free tier is not a trial and does not expire — but it saves nothing. Close the app and the afternoon's work is gone. That is the honest shape of the limit, and we would rather say so plainly than let you discover it at the wrong moment.
Tax-data packs
The app inflates its published tax figures forward for years beyond the data it shipped with, so it keeps working indefinitely — it simply gets less precise the further out it extrapolates. A tax-data pack is a one-time purchase that replaces those extrapolated figures with a given year's real published law.
It never unlocks a feature. It is a precision upgrade, it is entirely optional, and the app tells you which vintage it is running on rather than hiding it.
Status
Not released yet
Retirement Preflight is in development and there is no public download today. This page exists so the product has a home to point at while the release is prepared.
If you would like a note when it ships, write to support@preflightretirement.com and we will keep your address for that one message and nothing else.
Not financial, tax, investment or legal advice. Retirement Preflight is a calculation and modeling tool. It projects outcomes from assumptions that you choose, and those assumptions — investment returns, inflation, how long you live, what future tax law does — are uncertain and will not match reality exactly. Its output is an illustration, not a prediction, a recommendation, or a plan prepared for your circumstances.
Preflight Retirement LLC is not a registered investment adviser, tax adviser, accountant or law firm, and nothing this software produces creates a professional relationship of any kind. Tax law is intricate and changes; the software may contain errors or model rules in a simplified way. Consult a qualified professional who can look at your actual situation before acting on anything you see here.
United States only. The software models United States federal and state tax law and US retirement and health programs. It does not model the tax, pension, or healthcare system of any other country, and no result it produces should be relied on for a household taxed outside the United States. It is not intended for sale or use outside the United States.