The RetirementIQ iOS app is now a fully native SwiftUI application — and that’s a big deal. No more web view under the hood, no compromises. It loads instantly, responds the way iOS apps respond, and feels like software that belongs on your device. Inputs, navigation, transitions — everything behaves the way you expect it to.

Worth knowing: the iOS app runs on iPhone, iPad, and Apple Silicon Macs. If you’re in the Apple ecosystem, one purchase covers all three. The iPad experience in particular is well-suited to retirement planning — more screen space to work through projections and scenarios without feeling cramped.

For this kind of work — adjusting numbers, comparing scenarios, checking projections across decades — a dedicated native app beats a browser tab every time. Features like the What If Explorer, where sliding scales let you instantly visualize how changing a spending rate, retirement age, or return assumption reshapes your entire projection, feel exactly right on a native touch interface. Drag a slider, see your plan respond. That kind of immediacy is what native makes possible.

But the native advantage goes beyond feel. RetirementIQ already includes AI-powered guidance, and on iOS that capability is getting stronger. Apple’s on-device processing means sensitive financial data doesn’t need to leave your phone to get intelligent analysis. That aligns directly with how we think about privacy: your retirement numbers are yours, and the tools that help you understand them should treat them that way.

Looking ahead, we’re genuinely excited about where Apple is taking its platform. On-device intelligence, tighter Siri integration, and new interaction paradigms opening up across iPhone and iPad represent real opportunities for a tool like RetirementIQ — not gimmicks, but ways to make retirement planning more accessible and more useful in the moments when you actually need it. We’re building with that future in mind.

On pricing

The iOS app is priced at $69.99. That reflects two realities: Apple takes a 30% cut of every App Store purchase, and while the iOS app shares logic with the web app, it is genuinely separate software — separate codebase, separate development effort, separate maintenance. Building and maintaining it well takes real work, and the pricing needs to reflect that.

That said, if you’re already a web app subscriber and want to add iOS, reach out to us at support@retirementiq.app. We’ll get you access at $29.99 — a $40 savings. We’d rather reward existing users than have you pay full price twice.

Why the web app still leads

The web app is where RetirementIQ is built and where it moves fastest. When a tax law changes, when a calculation issue surfaces, when a new feature ships — the web app gets it first. Sometimes within hours.

It also runs everywhere. Windows, Android, Linux, any browser, any device. If you’re not in the Apple ecosystem, the web app is your app — and it’s the same full-featured tool, nothing cut down. Even iOS users who want every update the moment it’s live will find the web app keeps pace faster than any App Store review cycle allows.

The two apps complement each other. The web app sets the pace and covers every platform. The iOS app gives Apple users the best possible native experience. Both are actively developed and both are getting new features.

A note on macOS

We’ve retired the dedicated macOS wrapper app. It was a web view in a window — not meaningfully different from opening retirementiq.app in Safari. Mac users lose nothing; the web app works exactly as well in any browser. And of course, Apple Silicon Mac users can now run the native iOS app directly.

Most self-employed people don’t retire in one day. They take fewer clients, wind down a practice, do some consulting while the portfolio does more of the work. That transition can take years. It’s also where the planning gets hard — and where most retirement tools go quiet.

The problem with a clean retirement date

Standard retirement planning software assumes one handoff: you work until a date, earned income stops, withdrawals begin. For W-2 employees that’s roughly how it works. For the self-employed, it rarely is.

In the transition years, your business income and your retirement income are running at the same time. SE income counts against your ACA subsidy — the wrong year can eliminate eligibility entirely for a family paying pre-Medicare healthcare costs. It also shapes your Medicare bill two years later: IRMAA uses income from two years prior, so a strong consulting year at 63 shows up as a surcharge at 65. If you’re collecting Social Security before full retirement age, the earnings test applies to SE income too — the business you’re winding down can trigger benefit withholding. And every dollar of business income changes your Roth conversion headroom: a high-income year closes the window, a quiet year opens it.

Most planning tools can’t model this because they were built for the moment after income stops, not the years of transition before it. The design assumption is one retirement date and a clean cutoff. For the self-employed, that assumption produces projections that look right but aren’t.

What RetirementIQ models

RetirementIQ lets you define income phases — full consulting, reduced consulting, done — with SE income declining year by year on whatever schedule matches reality. The self-employment tax calculation runs in each phase year, as does the QBI deduction, the ACA subsidy calculated against your actual MAGI, and the IRMAA lookback that connects this year’s income to your Medicare premium two years out.

Nothing requires manual adjustment when the income changes. If your consulting drops by $30,000 in year two, the ACA picture, IRMAA exposure, and Roth conversion headroom all update automatically. You can model what it costs to take a large engagement at 63 versus spreading that work across two lower-income years. Or what the subsidy picture looks like while you’re still on ACA and still billing. Or whether one more active client year pushes you into the next IRMAA tier — and whether that trade-off is worth it.

The SE tax, the QBI deduction, the downstream effects on every bracket and surcharge — RetirementIQ runs it all in the same projection, in every year, so you can see how the wind-down interacts with the drawdown.

In most couples, one person manages the money. They know where the accounts are, what the withdrawal strategy is, which bracket they’re trying to stay under, and why the Roth conversions stop at age 72. The other person knows it’s handled.

That works fine until it doesn’t.

This isn’t about estate planning or wills. Attorneys handle that. This is about the operational question: if you died this year, could your spouse actually execute the retirement plan you’ve been running? Do they know which accounts to draw from first? When to claim survivor Social Security benefits? Whether to continue the Roth conversions or stop? What the tax picture looks like as a single filer?

If the answer is “probably not,” you’re not alone. Most couples don’t have this written down anywhere. The plan lives in one person’s head, and when that person is gone, the surviving spouse is making high-stakes financial decisions in the worst possible state of mind.

What a roadmap actually looks like

It’s not a binder full of account statements. It’s a complete financial projection — from today forward — that assumes one of you is gone. A projection that has already been optimized: the right withdrawal order, the right Social Security timing, the right conversion strategy for a single filer in narrower tax brackets.

That’s what RetirementIQ’s Adopt Plan feature builds. You click “If You Pass First,” and the app rebuilds the entire plan as your spouse’s solo retirement: filing status switches to single, your income stops, accounts roll over, expenses adjust, survivor Social Security kicks in. Then you optimize it — run the Strategy Report Card, find the best path, calculate maximum sustainable spending, stress-test it with Monte Carlo.

When it’s dialed in, you export it as an HTML snapshot. That file opens in any browser, on any device, without the app and without a license. It contains the full projection, the strategy, the year-by-year numbers. Print it, save it to a shared drive, put it with the estate documents. Your spouse doesn’t need to learn the tool. They just need to find the file.

And it’s not just for your spouse. Share it with adult children so they understand the picture and can help when needed. Or bring it to a fee-only advisor for a one-time review — when someone shows up with a year-by-year projection already built, the conversation starts at strategy, not data gathering. That alone can turn a $3,000 engagement into a $500 one-hour consultation.

Do it once a year

Balances change. Tax law changes. The right strategy shifts. The same workflow takes twenty minutes annually — update the balances, re-run the optimizer, export a fresh snapshot. The Strategy Check-in card on the Dashboard will flag when it’s time: balances shifted more than 5%, a better strategy emerged, or a milestone like RMD age is approaching.

A retirement plan that only works while you’re alive to run it isn’t really a plan. It’s a dependency. The roadmap turns it into something your spouse can follow — and your family can support.

Nobody builds a retirement plan expecting to use the survivor version. But roughly 900,000 Americans are widowed every year, and by age 65, four in ten women are managing retirement alone. The financial shock isn’t just emotional — it’s structural. The plan you built as a couple no longer works, and the changes hit fast.

Your tax bracket compresses

This is the one most people don’t see coming. A married couple filing jointly has roughly double the bracket width of a single filer. When one spouse dies, the surviving spouse gets one more year of joint filing, then shifts to single status. Same income, narrower brackets, higher tax bill. If the deceased had a pension or large IRA, the survivor can easily jump two brackets without earning a dollar more.

Social Security changes

The surviving spouse keeps the higher of the two benefits — not both. If you were each collecting $2,200 and $1,800 a month, the household doesn’t drop to $2,200. It drops to $2,200 and loses $1,800 entirely. That’s a 45% cut in Social Security income. Survivor benefits have their own claiming rules, and getting the timing wrong can cost tens of thousands over a lifetime.

Expenses don’t cut in half

Housing, property taxes, insurance, utilities — most fixed costs stay the same. Food and discretionary spending drop some, but not by 50%. The surviving spouse is often living on 55–65% of the prior household income while carrying 75–80% of the prior expenses.

Accounts need retitling

Joint accounts, beneficiary designations, RMD schedules — all of these change. An inherited IRA has different distribution rules than a spousal rollover. The wrong choice can trigger unnecessary taxes or penalties.

Most tools don’t model this

Most retirement planning tools assume two people throughout the projection and stop there. The ones that do handle survivor planning tend to treat it as a footnote — a toggle that zeroes out one person’s Social Security and calls it done.

This is one of the reasons we built survivor planning into the core of RetirementIQ. The app models three futures: both alive, you survive, your spouse survives. Each path runs its own tax projection, Social Security recalculation, expense adjustment, and withdrawal sequence. And when circumstances change — a market drop, updated balances, a new year’s tax brackets — the Strategy Check-in tells the surviving spouse whether their current approach still holds or whether it’s time to revisit. No re-analysis from scratch. Just a clear signal: on track, or worth reviewing.

You don’t plan for this because you expect it. You plan for it because someone you love would have to figure it out alone if you didn’t.

Seven million Americans receive Social Security Disability Insurance. Most of them will eventually retire — but their path into retirement looks nothing like what the standard planning tools assume.

If you’re on SSDI, the basics are different from day one. You’re already receiving Social Security income, but it’s not a retirement benefit — it’s a disability benefit that converts to retirement at your Full Retirement Age. You don’t choose when to claim. SSA handles the switch automatically at FRA, and your monthly amount stays the same. The decision that most retirees agonize over — claim at 62 or wait until 70 — doesn’t apply to you in the same way.

Medicare doesn’t start at 65

For most Americans, Medicare eligibility begins at 65. For SSDI recipients, it begins 24 months after benefits start. If your disability began at 50, you may have had Medicare since 52. That changes the entire healthcare cost picture: no ACA premiums to bridge, no COBRA to manage, no 13-year gap between early retirement and Medicare. It also means you’ve been paying Part B premiums and potentially IRMAA surcharges for years longer than a typical retiree.

The tax picture is quieter — until it isn’t

While you’re on SSDI with limited other income, your tax bill is usually modest. SSDI is taxed like regular Social Security — up to 85% can be taxable depending on provisional income. But if you have a spouse still working, or investment income, or start taking IRA distributions, that provisional income threshold creeps up fast. The same bracket compression that hits widowed retirees can hit SSDI households when one spouse earns and the other receives disability.

What happens at FRA matters

When SSDI converts to retirement benefits, the amount doesn’t change — but everything around it might. RMDs may begin soon after. Medicare premiums are already running. The withdrawal strategy that worked during the disability years may no longer be optimal. If you’ve been deferring Roth conversions because income was low, FRA is often the moment the window shifts.

Almost no planning tool handles this

Most retirement calculators assume you start from a working salary and model the transition to Social Security at a claiming age you choose. They don’t model SSDI income, the automatic FRA conversion, early Medicare eligibility, or the interaction between disability benefits and spousal earnings. Of the nine full-featured retirement planners we analyzed, RetirementIQ is the only one with dedicated SSDI modeling — including the FRA conversion, the 24-month Medicare rule, tax integration, and survivor benefit interactions when an SSDI recipient dies.

The 7 million people on SSDI deserve the same planning depth as everyone else. The transition is just different — and the tools should reflect that.

In 1997, Senator William Roth of Delaware pushed through a new kind of retirement account as part of the Taxpayer Relief Act. The idea was simple: pay tax now, never pay tax again. The first year you could open one was 1998. The contribution limit was $2,000.

It was a nice option for middle-income savers. Not much more than that.

Twenty-eight years later, the Roth IRA sits at the center of almost every serious retirement tax strategy in America. How it got there is a story about a few legislative changes that, taken together, turned a modest savings vehicle into something genuinely transformative.

The early years: a savings account with a twist

For the first decade, the Roth IRA was limited in two ways. Contribution limits were low — $2,000 until 2002, then slowly climbing to $4,000, $5,000, and eventually today’s $7,500. And there was an income cap: if you earned too much, you couldn’t contribute at all. These limits kept the Roth in the background. Useful, but not the main event.

The traditional IRA and 401(k) dominated retirement savings. You got a tax break going in, and you’d deal with the taxes when you took the money out. That was the plan.

2010: the conversion floodgates open

The real turning point came from a law passed in 2005 that took effect in 2010. Congress eliminated the income restriction on Roth conversions. Before this, only households earning under $100,000 could convert a traditional IRA to a Roth. After 2010, anyone could.

This changed everything. Suddenly a retiree sitting on a million-dollar IRA could move chunks of it into a Roth, pay the tax in a low-income year, and let the rest grow tax-free forever. Roth conversions went from a niche move to the most discussed strategy in retirement planning.

SECURE 2.0 seals it

The SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022 added more fuel. Roth 401(k)s no longer require minimum distributions — previously, even Roth 401(k) money was subject to RMDs, which made no sense for a tax-free account. Catch-up contributions for workers 60 to 63 increased. And employer matching contributions can now go directly into Roth accounts.

Each change on its own is incremental. Together, they’ve made the Roth the single most tax-efficient bucket a retiree can hold.

Why it matters now

Today’s retirees face a specific problem: large pre-tax balances that will generate forced distributions, higher tax brackets, and Medicare surcharges for decades. The Roth is the release valve. Convert in the low-bracket years between retirement and RMD age, and you reduce every one of those pressures.

But the strategy is only as good as the math behind it. How much to convert, into which bracket, for how many years, without triggering IRMAA — that’s not a back-of-the-envelope calculation. It’s exactly the kind of multi-variable problem that RetirementIQ’s Roth optimizer was built to solve: 200+ strategy combinations, IRMAA-aware bracket targeting, breakeven analysis, and a 5-Year Rule Tracker for every conversion tranche.

Senator Roth probably didn’t envision all of this in 1997. But the tool he created has become indispensable — if you use it right.

“Put it in a Roth and it grows tax-free.” You hear it everywhere. And it’s true — but only if you understand the rules that govern when and how that money actually comes out tax-free. Get the ordering wrong, or pull from the wrong bucket at the wrong time, and you’ll owe taxes or penalties on money you thought was untouchable.

Here’s what “tax-free” actually requires.

It starts before retirement

The Roth decision begins during your working years. If your employer offers a Roth 401(k), your contributions go in after-tax — but your employer match always goes into the pre-tax side, even if you contribute 100% Roth. At retirement, that Roth 401(k) typically rolls into a Roth IRA. Here’s the catch: the 5-year clock for tax-free earnings starts when the Roth IRA is opened, not when the 401(k) was opened. If you don’t have a Roth IRA yet, open one early — even with a small amount — to start the clock.

Whether to contribute Roth or traditional during your career depends on one question: is your tax rate higher now or in retirement? If you’re in the 22% bracket today and expect to be in the 24% bracket with RMDs later, Roth contributions now are the right call. If you’re in the 32% bracket now and expect to drop to 22%, traditional wins. Most people don’t know the answer — which is exactly why modeling it matters.

The three buckets inside every Roth

Roth IRAs don’t hold one pile of money. They hold three, and each follows different rules. Contributions are always yours to withdraw at any age, no tax, no penalty. Conversions — money moved from a traditional IRA — each start their own 5-year clock; withdraw before 5 years and before age 59½, and you owe a 10% penalty. Earnings are the strictest: tax-free only after 59½ and after the account has been open at least 5 years.

The IRS enforces a specific ordering: contributions first, then conversions (oldest first), then earnings. This is what makes Roth conversion ladders work for early retirees — but only if you start the ladder early enough.

The 5-year rule isn’t one rule

There are actually two. The first applies to conversions: each conversion has its own 5-year waiting period before 59½. The second applies to earnings: the Roth account itself must be 5 years old. Open your first Roth at 58, and your earnings aren’t fully tax-free until 63.

Why this matters for conversions

Roth conversions are the most powerful tax tool in retirement — moving pre-tax money into Roth during low-income years, paying tax now to avoid higher rates later. But the tradeoffs are real: upfront tax cost, IRMAA surcharges two years later, and the question of how much to convert without jumping a bracket.

RetirementIQ models the full picture: a 5-Year Rule Tracker for every conversion tranche, a Break-Even Tax Rate showing when conversions pay off, an optimizer testing 200+ strategies, and automatic pro-rata handling if your IRA has nondeductible contributions. The Roth decision doesn’t end when you retire. It’s where the real complexity begins.

To plan retirement properly, you need to enter the most complete financial picture you’ll ever assemble in one place: Social Security estimates, IRA and 401(k) balances, brokerage holdings, pension amounts, expected expenses, tax filing status, maybe your spouse’s entire financial life too.

Before you type any of that into a tool, it’s worth asking: where does it go?

We looked at the privacy policies of four popular retirement planning tools and compared what they collect, where they store it, and who else gets to see it.

The free tier that isn’t free

There’s a popular free retirement dashboard that Reddit recommends constantly. It’s backed by one of the largest asset managers in the country — trillions under management. The dashboard is genuinely useful: net worth tracking, budgeting, investment analysis. The problem is the business model behind it.

The free dashboard exists to identify people with investable wealth and convert them into advisory clients. The privacy policy — about 8,000 words — describes collecting identifiers including Social Security numbers, using cookies and web beacons for interest-based advertising, and sharing data with affiliated companies and third-party service providers. There’s a “do not sell or share my personal information” link at the bottom of every page, which tells you something about the default.

When you link your brokerage accounts through Plaid, they get read-only access to your holdings, transactions, and balances. That’s what powers their portfolio analysis — and their advisory pitch.

The subscription tools: better, but still cloud-stored

The two most popular paid retirement planners represent a significant step up from the lead-gen model. Both claim not to sell your data, and both give you more control than the free dashboard does.

But there are differences worth noting. One — the $144/year subscription planner — stores your data on their servers and shares it with “service vendors” including third-party AI providers that power their assistant. Their Terms of Use also describe a referral service where using it means consenting to share your name, address, phone number, and email with financial product providers. It’s opt-in, but it’s there.

The other — a $108/year projection tool — is more privacy-conscious. It deliberately does not offer account linking. The community has requested it for years; the team has declined. You enter numbers manually. You can choose to store data in the cloud (encrypted) or keep it in your browser only. That’s a meaningful choice most tools don’t offer.

The architecture that can’t spy on you

RetirementIQ takes a different approach entirely: there is no account to create, no server that receives your data, and no mechanism by which we could access your financial information even if we wanted to.

Your plan lives in your browser’s local storage on the web, or inside the app sandbox on iOS and Mac. Every calculation — tax brackets, RMDs, Monte Carlo simulations, the entire projection engine — runs on your device. Nothing is transmitted. You can verify this yourself: open browser devtools, check the network tab, and watch the silence.

Our privacy policy is about 600 words. It’s short because there’s not much to disclose when you don’t collect anything.

The only personal information we ever see is an email address — collected by Stripe at purchase on the web, used solely to deliver the license key. On iOS and Mac, Apple handles payment entirely. We don’t even get an email.

Why this matters for retirement data specifically

A retirement plan is not a Netflix preference or a shopping cart. It’s your Social Security estimate, your IRA balance, your spouse’s pension, your expected healthcare costs, your tax bracket, and your expected death. It is, by a wide margin, the most complete financial profile you will ever build in one place.

That profile has value to people who aren’t you. It tells an advisory firm exactly how much you have and where. It tells an advertiser your income tier and risk tolerance. It tells a data broker your age, state, health assumptions, and retirement timeline.

Some of these tools are very good at what they do. The free dashboard’s portfolio analysis is excellent. The subscription planner’s scenario modeling is thorough. The projection tool’s interface is best in class. We’re not suggesting they’re doing anything wrong — they’re doing exactly what their privacy policies say they do. The question is whether you’ve read those policies before entering your Social Security number.