Who built RetOpt

I'm Jon. I'm a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries and a CFA charterholder, and I built RetOpt to check the rules everyone repeats about retirement money.

Why I built it

You've probably heard the usual rules. Spend your taxable savings first. Leave the RRSP or IRA alone for as long as you can. Take CPP or Social Security as early as you can, or as late as you can, depending on who you ask. Everybody repeats these rules, but it always seemed to me that nobody had bothered to check the math. And do they really apply to every situation?

So I checked. The math turned out to be much harder than I expected. Each year's tax depends on every choice you make that year, and on choices you made decades before. Some benefits shrink as your income rises, so a withdrawal that looks cheap this year can cost you more in a later one. Starting a pension later pays more each year, but means drawing more from your savings in the meantime. All of these pull on each other.

And the usual rules often don't apply. For some households they come close. For others they leave real money with the tax department. You can't tell which kind of household you are without doing the arithmetic for your own situation, year by year. That arithmetic is what RetOpt does.

Where I come from

I spent years working in investments and risk management focused on retirement savings, and building programs that helped create top-tier retirement products in Canada.

Much of an actuary's work comes down to one question: will this promise still hold up years from now? You can't answer that with a rule of thumb. You have to run the numbers and then recheck them.

None of this makes a plan a prediction. The tax rules will change, and your investments will not earn exactly what you assumed. I liken it to a sailor planning a voyage: you set a course knowing the winds and the currents will shift, and then you adjust as they do. That is why the plan is worth running again, once a quarter, or whenever something changes.

How that shows up in RetOpt

Every tax rate and threshold comes from a file that names the government document it was taken from and the tax year it applies to. Before you see a plan, it is run through a second, separate calculation of the same tax rules, and every figure on your results page comes from that one. Where RetOpt can't give you a reliable answer, it says so instead of guessing. Here is what it can't do.

What RetOpt is not

I'm not your financial planner, and RetOpt isn't advice. It works out the tax on the choices in front of you, on the assumptions you enter, and shows you what each one is worth. Take the results to your accountant or advisor. The year-by-year table prints for exactly that.

If you find a number you think is wrong, I want to hear about it: info@retopt.com.

Where do you live?

I live in Canada I live in the United States