Decumulation Studio
Retirement withdrawal planning in the Decumulation Studio
Compare Roth conversion and withdrawal schedules across tax brackets, IRMAA, ACA, lifetime-tax, and terminal-wealth constraints.
Conversions, withdrawals, thresholds, and capital gains interact across years. The studio shows which constraint drives each modeled year.
View a recorded example without signing in. A Free account includes 1 run per day in each planner. Pro includes unlimited runs and advanced planning features.
What the studio compares
- Multi-year Roth conversion and withdrawal schedules.
- Goals such as filling a bracket, staying under an IRMAA tier, increasing modeled ACA credits, improving terminal wealth, or reducing modeled lifetime tax.
- A year-by-year marginal-cost view that attributes pressure to federal brackets, capital gains, NIIT, IRMAA, ACA, and state tax.
Why it belongs next to Roth conversion planning
A conversion schedule changes the withdrawal path, and a withdrawal path can change the cost of each conversion. The studio keeps those decisions in the same modeling frame instead of treating them as separate calculators.
Inputs to check before interpreting results
- Account balances by tax treatment and the source of conversion taxes.
- Filing status, ordinary income, Social Security, state tax, and capital-gain assumptions.
- Which constraint the run is optimizing against, because a bracket-fill run and an IRMAA-limit run can answer different questions.
Interpretation boundary
This is educational scenario modeling. It does not determine whether a conversion or withdrawal action is appropriate for a specific household or tax return.
FAQ
- Does the Decumulation Studio find a globally optimal plan?
- No. It is a deterministic bracket-fill heuristic plus a marginal-cost search, not a stochastic or globally optimal solver. Use it for cliff analysis and tradeoff comparison, not for a single guaranteed-best schedule.
- Which objectives can the schedule target?
- You can fill an ordinary bracket, stay below an IRMAA tier, or maximize lifetime ACA premium tax credits. You can also minimize lifetime tax present value or maximize real ending wealth after tax. The proposed schedule is shown alongside a no-conversion, naive-sequencing baseline so the tradeoff is explicit.
- Does it run Monte Carlo or recommend trades?
- No. The Studio is deterministic and surfaces a Roth conversion and withdrawal schedule with per-year binding-constraint and marginal-cost detail. It does not run stochastic simulations, execute trades, or replace tax, legal, or investment advice.