Changelog

We’ve simplified how Retirology is sold. It’s now a true one-time purchase: pay once — from $19, your call above the floor — and every future update is yours free. Bug-fix patches, new features, and the annual releases with refreshed tax tables are all included, forever. No renewal, no per-year charge, no upgrade fee, no discount codes to chase.

Already bought Retirology? Nothing changes except in your favor — the annual versions you might once have paid to upgrade to are now free. Re-download the latest build anytime from your Lemon Squeezy customer portal.

Backups now keep everything. This patch fixes backups that left out your income streams and budget, adds three states’ tax credits for retirees, and tidies a few labels. Free for every customer, as always.

Fixed

• Backups now include income streams and your budget. Settings → Data → Export left out your income streams (pensions, rentals, annuities) and everything on the Budget Analysis tab, so restoring a backup lost them. Exports now include both, and importing replaces them cleanly. After updating, export a fresh backup. Older backups still restore, but they don’t contain those two parts.
• Senior tax credits in California, Delaware and Iowa. Each state’s per-person credit for older residents is now included: $153 per filer 65 or older in California, $110 per filer 60 or older in Delaware, and $20 per filer 65 or older in Iowa. State tax for retirees there is slightly lower than before.
• Optimize my plan: the SEPP note and the headline now value early-withdrawal penalties in today’s money, the same way each change’s explanation does. Before, the note used future dollars, so the figures disagreed.
• Compare tab: the Roth conversion ladder row shows the strategy’s name (“Auto-fill”, “Off”) instead of an internal code.
• Cash Flow tab: working years are labelled “Working year N of M” instead of being counted as years in retirement.
• Setup time: Mission Control and the setup wizard now agree that setup takes about 2 minutes.

Using Retirology for AI apps? Plans you save there for the desktop app now import with your income streams and budget included.

Download 2026.0.5 from your Lemon Squeezy customer portal and install over your existing copy. Your saved plans are safe: your data lives outside the app.

Our biggest update yet, focused on accuracy. Every state’s tax rules now follow 2026 law, including the breaks most states give retirement income. The model tracks each account on its own, prices early withdrawals, and models more taxes. A new Optimize my plan finds your best Roth-ladder, ACA and SEPP settings in one click, and every figure in the app was audited for consistency. Expect some of your numbers to move. As always, this update is free: re-download from your Lemon Squeezy customer portal.

Check these two inputs after updating

• Medicare is now charged per person. If you’re married and entered a combined household figure, enter half. The app flags a figure that looks like a household total.
• Your standard deduction is calculated for you each year from your filing status and ages, including the 65+ amounts and the 2025–2028 senior deduction. The figure you typed before is no longer used. If you itemize, enter that amount under Tax assumptions.

The app shows a one-time “What’s changed” card the first time you open it after updating. Your saved plans are upgraded automatically.

New features

• Optimize my plan. Tries your Roth-ladder strategy, ACA income target, ACA-aware withdrawals and SEPP carve-out together, since they affect each other. It keeps whatever leaves the most money after tax, and explains each change it suggests. It also tells you whether you need SEPP at all.
• Your state’s retirement rules, explained. Pick a state and see in plain English how it taxes retirees: its rate, Social Security, retirement-income exclusions and capital-gains breaks.
• Projected FI date. Mission Control shows when you reach your FI target at your current savings, and whether that’s ahead of or behind your target retirement age.
• Redesigned Mission Control. The progress card is now the progress bar itself, Monte Carlo results show against your target, and everything fits on one screen.
• Birth dates instead of ages, so 59½, Medicare, RMD and Social Security timing are exact.
• Social Security preview. See what you’d actually receive at each claim age, plus any spousal benefit.
• More inputs: dependent children (for ACA household size and survivor filing status), a spouse still working after you retire, a per-account withdrawal order, which employer plan qualifies for the Rule of 55, and each brokerage account’s dividend yield.
• New Drawdown insights: lifetime healthcare cost, and what your heirs would keep after tax.

More accurate modeling

• State taxes follow 2026 law in all 50 states and DC, including this year’s rate cuts and changes. Most states’ breaks for retirees are now modeled: retirement-income exclusions by age, income-tested Social Security, and capital-gains breaks. Rate changes already passed for future years are applied in those years.
• 2026 federal figures, verified against IRS and SSA publications: brackets, capital-gains thresholds, IRMAA, the senior deduction and contribution limits.
• Every account is tracked separately and grows at its own expected return. Cash accounts are now part of your retirement money.
• Early withdrawals are priced: the 10% penalty before 59½ (with Rule of 55 and 457(b) exceptions), and the full retroactive penalty if a SEPP series is broken.
• Survivor years: either spouse can be the one who dies first, with inheritance, step-up in basis (full in community-property states) and the right filing status afterwards.
• Social Security uses your birth year’s full retirement age, and adds spousal benefits. Roth earnings follow the 5-year rule.
• New taxes modeled: dividends, the 3.8% net investment income tax, and payroll tax on a working spouse’s wages. Medicare and IRMAA are charged per person.
• Totals in today’s dollars. Lifetime taxes, healthcare and other totals are shown in today’s money rather than decades of inflated dollars added together. Year-by-year figures stay in that year’s dollars.

Why some numbers changed

• Progress to FI now measures your investable money (retirement accounts, brokerage, cash and HSA). That’s what the FI target is a target for. Home equity and other assets that can’t fund retirement spending aren’t counted.
• Monte Carlo’s saving-years success is lower for most plans. It used to compare future, inflated balances with a target set in today’s dollars, which overstated success. Both are now in today’s dollars.
• Plan comparisons now count tax still owed. A dollar in a Traditional account still owes income tax, so the optimizer and recommendations now value it below a Roth dollar.

Fixed

• One-time expenses never reduced net worth.
• A tax bill could go unpaid once only Traditional money was left, overstating late-retirement net worth.
• Plans that can’t pay for a year now say so clearly, instead of hiding the shortfall.
• A spouse’s Social Security claim age and SEPP window used the wrong age.
• Turning SEPP off didn’t always turn it off.
• Several screens calculated the same figure different ways and disagreed. They now share one model.
• Tooltips could be cut off on Mission Control.

Intel Mac fix. If you run Retirology on an Intel-based Mac, previous builds failed to start with “Couldn’t start Retirology — Backend did not become ready within 35s.” This release fixes that. There is no change for Apple silicon Macs, Windows, or Linux, and no change to any calculation.

Fixed

• Intel Macs could not launch the app. Our build pipeline packaged the Apple silicon version of Retirology’s calculation engine into the Intel download by mistake. Intel hardware cannot run that file, so the engine never started and the app stopped at the loading screen. The Intel and Apple silicon downloads are now each built on their own matching hardware, and the pipeline refuses to publish a build whose engine doesn’t match its installer. Affected versions: 2026.0.0, 2026.0.1, and 2026.0.2.

On an Intel Mac? Download 2026.0.3 from your Lemon Squeezy customer portal and reinstall over your existing copy. Your saved plans are safe — your data lives outside the app and is untouched by reinstalling. Not sure which Mac you have? Apple menu → About This Mac: anything listing an Intel processor needs this update.

The second patch closes every known limitation listed in the 2026.0.1 release notes — fourteen tracked improvements in all. Highlights: a Lifestyle changes schedule for modeling spending shifts like kids leaving home or downsizing; automatic debt payoff handling (your mortgage payment stops counting toward retirement spending the year the loan is gone); property sales that pay off their linked mortgage; automatic capital gains tax on property sales with the home-sale exclusion; and Monte Carlo percentile outcomes that show your bad-luck floor, not just a success rate. As always — and now officially forever — this update is free: re-download from your Lemon Squeezy customer portal.

New features

• Lifestyle changes schedule. Real lives don’t spend one flat inflation-adjusted amount for 50 years. A new table in the Spending section lets you set stepped changes — "from age 55, spending drops to $65k" — for kids moving out, downsizing, or slow-go years. Every projection (drawdown, FI targets, Monte Carlo, recommendations, PDF export) consumes the schedule.
• Debt payoffs now reduce your spending automatically. When a loan amortizes to zero mid-projection, its payment stops counting toward your retirement spending from that year onward — no more manually pruning the budget row. Your required portfolio drops accordingly, since your lifestyle floor genuinely falls after a payoff. A per-loan Payment is part of my spending toggle covers the case where your spending figure never included the payment.
• Adjustable-rate loans. Debt accounts gain an optional scheduled rate change — "4.5% now, resets to 7.25% after year 5" — for ARM and HELOC modeling. Each loan now amortizes individually, so two loans paying off in different years each drop their payment at the right time.
• Property sales pay off their linked mortgage. A sale event can now name the loan it settles: at the sale year, the outstanding balance comes out of the proceeds, the loan zeroes on every chart, and its payment stops counting toward spending. Underwater sales are handled honestly — if the payoff exceeds the proceeds, the shortfall is a cost your plan funds that year.
• Automatic capital gains on property sales, with the home-sale exclusion. Enter a cost basis on a property and the app computes the taxable gain at sale time and runs it through the real bracket-stacked capital-gains math — including the effect on your MAGI for ACA subsidies and IRMAA that year. Check This is my primary residence to apply the IRS §121 exclusion ($250k single / $500k married). Prefer your own math? The net-proceeds override still short-circuits all of it. No basis entered = the previous tax-free behavior, unchanged.
• Capital-gains & qualified-dividend income streams. Income streams gain a third tax treatment for REIT distributions, qualified dividends, and trust K-1 capital-gains passthrough. These stack on top of ordinary income per IRS rules — landing in the 0% bracket during low-income years — and count toward MAGI.
• Per-spouse income streams and survivor modeling. Married-joint households can now mark each stream as yours, your spouse’s, or joint. Spouse-owned streams read their age window in the spouse’s age frame — "her pension starts at 65" now means when she turns 65. Pair it with the new optional Spouse life expectancy input: from that year, spouse-owned pensions continue at their configured survivor percentage (0/50/75/100%), and household Social Security drops to the larger of the two benefits per the survivor rule.
• Monte Carlo percentile outcomes. Two plans can both show 95% success while one leaves a $200k cushion in bad markets and the other leaves $1.5M. Every run now reports the 5th / median / 95th percentile end-of-plan net worth (today’s dollars) — on the Mission Control card and as three comparison rows on the Compare tab.
• Lifetime IRMAA tracking. The Medicare surcharge portion of your healthcare costs is now broken out per year, and the Compare tab gains a Lifetime IRMAA paid row — directly showing whether a conversion strategy that runs MAGI hot after 65 is quietly costing you thousands in surcharges.

Bug fixes

• Number fields now edit like normal number fields. Two long-standing annoyances shared one root cause: clearing a field with Backspace instantly snapped back to 0, and editing several fields before hitting Save could silently lose one of your values. Every numeric input in the app was rebuilt — what you see in the field is now always exactly what gets saved, and click-then-type reliably replaces the old value.
• Monte Carlo debt accuracy. Simulations previously started the retirement phase with today’s debt balance instead of the projected balance at retirement, slightly overstating risk for anyone paying down a mortgage during accumulation. Fixed.
• Account editor no longer clips off-screen. Tall account forms (debt accounts, property sale settings) now scroll within the dialog instead of pushing the Save button below the viewport.

Accuracy refinements

• Contributions step like real IRS limits. Tax-advantaged contributions no longer inflate in smooth fractions of a dollar — they now step in $500 increments with a one-year lag, mirroring how the IRS actually rolls 401(k) and IRA limits. A small, honest haircut to long-horizon projections.

UI improvements

• Plain-English tooltips on the Monte Carlo card. Hover any term — success rate, accumulation, drawdown, percentiles, volatility, return model, stress tests — for an explanation written for people who don’t read retirement forums for fun. No jargon required to understand your own plan.

Known limitations carried into a future patch

• Survivor modeling keeps the household filing married-joint after a spouse’s death. The switch to single filing (smaller standard deduction, tighter brackets and IRMAA thresholds) is not yet modeled, so plans with large post-death Roth conversions will look slightly rosier than reality.
• Adjustable-rate loans support one scheduled rate change. Multi-step ARM schedules (annual adjustment cadences, lifetime caps) may come later if there’s demand.
• Automatic sale gains use your account’s equity minus cost basis, since the app tracks equity rather than market price. For exact figures, the net-proceeds override remains the precise path.

The first post-launch patch. Eleven tracked improvements based on customer feedback and a deeper pass over the account-type model. Highlights: a brand-new Additional Income Streams section for modeling rental income, pensions, and annuities; five new liability account types (mortgage, student / auto / credit card / personal loan) that amortize and subtract from net worth; a Property Sale Event feature; and an expanded Cash Flow diagram that now covers your entire lifetime instead of just retirement. Free download for all customers via your Lemon Squeezy customer portal.

New features

• Additional Income Streams. A new section on the Budget Analysis tab lets you model recurring retirement cash flows that previously had no good home — rental income, pensions, annuities, trust distributions, royalties. Each stream carries a name, type, monthly amount, age window, tax treatment (ordinary income or tax-free), and COLA. Streams active during pre-retirement years flow into your Cash Flow & FI Trajectory cards; streams active during retirement reduce the portfolio withdrawals needed to fund your spending. Replaces the old Social-Security-stream hack for rental income.
• Mortgage and other liabilities. Five new account types in a new "Liabilities" category: Mortgage, Student loan, Auto loan, Credit card balance, Personal loan. Outstanding balances subtract from net worth. Each loan amortizes year-over-year using the rate and payment you configure; visualized as a red overlay line on the Accumulation chart and a new Debt column on the Drawdown tab's year-by-year table. Credit-card minimum-payment cases (where the payment is less than monthly interest) are modeled correctly too.
• Property Sale Event. Real estate, 529, pension, and "other" accounts now have Sell at age and Net proceeds (today’s $) fields. At the sale year, the asset zeroes out and the net proceeds flow into your taxable bucket as fresh basis. Lets you model "I'll sell the house at 70 and convert to a smaller place" cleanly. The previous workaround required manually editing the account balance and adding a negative lumpy expense.
• Real estate, 529, and pension assets now appreciate in the chart. Pre-2026.0.1 the model held these at a static balance, so a $500k home today was still $500k at retirement on your projection chart. Now they compound at the per-account rate during accumulation and contribute properly to your net worth trajectory. Drawdown still excludes them from the withdrawal hierarchy (you can’t pay groceries with your house).
• Roth contributions in the Budget Analysis dropdown. Three new expense categories under the Savings group: Roth IRA contributions, Roth 401(k) contributions, Mega backdoor Roth contributions. All flagged as savings so they show up in your savings-rate analysis without inflating your annual_spend.

Bug fixes

• HSA non-medical post-65 tax treatment. Previously the model treated every HSA withdrawal as qualified medical (tax-free). In reality, post-65 HSA withdrawals beyond your medical spending are taxed as ordinary income (penalty-free, same treatment as a Traditional IRA). The Accounts tab gains an "Annual medical out-of-pocket" field; set it to model the tax distinction correctly. Leave at $0 to keep the legacy behavior.

UI improvements

• Cash Flow diagram covers your full lifetime. The tab formerly called "Retirement Cash Flow" is now just "Cash Flow." Scrub the year slider back to your current age and the Sankey switches to an accumulation view (paycheck flowing into taxes, deductions, retirement contributions, and lifestyle). Cross the retirement boundary and it morphs into the original drawdown view automatically. HSA withdrawal bands also added to the retirement-years view.
• Compare tab gains strategy-differentiating metrics. Seven new rows so two scenarios that hit the same final net worth no longer look identical: Lifetime Roth conversions, Average effective tax rate, Years on ACA bridge, ACA subsidies captured, plus an "End-of-plan portfolio mix" section breaking down what you'll have in Trad / Roth / Taxable when the plan ends.
• Budget Analysis Spending Summary is now a donut chart. The numeric card was replaced with an interactive donut grouped by category (Housing / Transportation / Food / etc.). Hover any slice to see the dollar amount and percentage. Reflects whether you're using budget-derived or manual annual spending. Implied SWR moved to the FI Trajectory card.
• FI Target section refactored. The redundant "Resolved target" card is gone. Three mutually-exclusive cards now: Conservative floor, Strategy-adjusted, and a new inline-editable Custom override. Cleaner three-choice picker instead of two presets plus a passive read-out.
• Paycheck section now autosaves. Matches the Income Streams and Expenses sections — no more explicit Save button to remember; edits are persisted ~600ms after you stop typing. Status indicator shows "Saving…" then "Saved 10:42 AM."

Known limitations carried into a future patch

• Income streams and HSA non-medical withdrawals support only ordinary income and tax-free treatments in this release. LTCG / qualified dividend rates will be added in v2026.0.2.
• Property Sale Event uses the user-entered net value (you handle the capital gains math). Automatic LTCG calculation + home-sale exclusion ($250k single / $500k MFJ) will be added in v2026.0.2.
• When a debt account pays off mid-projection, the model doesn’t automatically remove the corresponding mortgage line from your Budget Analysis. You’ll want to remove it manually to avoid the payment continuing to count against your retirement spending after the loan is gone.
• Selling a property doesn’t automatically pay off a linked mortgage account. Set the mortgage payment high enough to amortize to zero by the sale year, or manually delete the loan account, to model this correctly.

First public release of Retirology. Highlights:

• Path-to-FI accumulation projections across taxable, traditional, Roth, and HSA buckets, with employer match, HSA tax credit, and inflation-adjusted figures.
• Budget analysis — define spending category by category to derive a real FI target and power the year-by-year drawdown view, rather than guessing a single annual number.
• Drawdown planner with four Roth conversion ladder modes, ACA premium-subsidy optimization, SEPP 72(t) carve-outs, RMD modeling, Social Security claim-age strategies, and full state + locality income tax (51 states plus NYC, Detroit, and Maryland counties).
• Monte Carlo simulator with both normal-distribution sampling and historical bootstrap mode using a bundled 1928–2024 dataset (S&P 500, 10-yr Treasury, T-bills, CPI).
• Deterministic stress tests against the 1929, 1973–74, 2000, 2008, and 2022 sequences.
• Plan analysis with rule-based recommendations and a cross-strategy optimizer for one-click apply.
• Sankey cash-flow diagram for the drawdown phase.
• Side-by-side multi-scenario comparison.
• Local SQLite storage. No accounts, no telemetry, one update-check network call per launch.