Retirement Explorer

What is Retirement Explorer?

Retirement Explorer is a financial planning tool that lets you model your retirement with real-world detail and uncertainty. Define your current financial picture as a baseline, build any number of scenarios that tweak the assumptions, and run Monte Carlo simulations to see the range of outcomes — from worst case to best. It pays special attention to the “widow tax”: the tax impact when a spouse dies and the survivor shifts from Married Filing Jointly to Single.

Features

• Households for an individual or a married couple, with per-spouse account ownership
• Actuarial life-expectancy simulation calibrated to SSA mortality tables
• Accounts of every type — Taxable, IRA/401k, Roth, Cash, Home, and Loan — with configurable returns and volatility
• Returns correlated across stock, bond, and housing markets
• Full home modeling: appreciation, carrying costs, and sales with detailed tax treatment (LTCG, NIIT, exclusions, commissions)
• Income from employment, Social Security with survivor benefits, RMDs, dividends, interest, and stock sales
• Expense modeling for private medical insurance, Medicare with IRMAA surcharges, housing, and general spending
• Federal and state income, estate, and sales taxes
• Unlimited scenario comparisons, each overriding any settings you choose
• A built-in AI assistant to ask questions about your retirement plan

Why Monte Carlo?

Markets don’t deliver a steady average return year after year — and a single “expected” projection can hide the risk of running out of money. Retirement Explorer runs thousands of randomized simulations so you see a full distribution of outcomes, including the chance that a plan fails. Comparing scenarios side by side turns hard questions — when to claim Social Security, whether to sell a house, how a spouse’s death changes the math — into clear, quantified trade-offs.

Privacy

Retirement Explorer runs entirely in your browser and keeps your data on your device. For full details, see our Privacy Policy.