Twelve nomograms in the résistance des matériaux tradition — enter with a load, follow a curve, read off an allowable. Each is drawn from legislation rather than from anyone’s finances, over a single canonical register of 97 statutory thresholds, each carrying its citation, its base year, its sunset, its confidence flag and its drift law.
Arithmetic, not advice. Every sheet shows its own working. Nothing here is personalised investment or tax guidance.
Twenty-six of the ninety-seven figures are re-set every January. Get notified when they are re-verified →
Measure a retirement plan in years of salary rather than dollars and the pay cancels out of balance, contribution and target alike. One curve then serves every reader, whatever they earn. That is what makes a chart an abaque rather than a case study.
Salary re-enters in exactly one place, and it is worth knowing why:
A purely legislative effect on a financial trajectory, isolated and drawn. Sheet 01 is where to start.
| # | Sheet | What it shows |
|---|---|---|
| 00 | The Statutory Register | The datum sheet every other sheet depends on |
| 01 | What the Shelter Can Carry | Load against allowable, in years of salary |
| 02 | Roth vs Pre-tax | t_now mapped against t_ret |
| 03 | The True Marginal Rate Curve | Statutory rate vs. what you actually pay |
| 04 | The Legislated Age Timeline | Every age Congress wrote down |
| 05 | The Retirement Corridor | Synthesis |
| 06 | The Shelter Ceiling | Where the plan stops accepting money |
| 07 | The ACA Premium Credit Cliff | A genuine discontinuity, not a ramp |
| 08 | The 0% Capital Gains Window | The window, and what closes it |
| 09 | Early Access | The routes out before 59½ |
| 10 | The Phase-out Atlas | Every phase-out on one plane |
| 11 | The Cheat Sheet | Every figure computed from the register at load |
Bracket edges are ramps, not cliffs. The real cliffs — IRMAA, the Social Security torpedo, the ACA subsidy edge — get sheets of their own.
Twenty-six of the ninety-seven entries are re-set each January by the IRS, SSA, CMS or HHS. A snapshot is a snapshot of a moment, which is why this one carries its compile date. When the next set of figures is published and re-verified against primary sources, the register is revised and the changelog records which values moved.
If you maintain these numbers yourself, that notice is probably the useful part.
Sent when the figures are re-verified — once a year, near January. Nothing else.
Every threshold used anywhere in the series lives in one file, exactly once. Renderers ask the datum what it is permitted to do rather than remembering: an index control is physically unable to move a frozen number, and that guarantee is unit-tested.
| Drift law | Meaning |
|---|---|
| FROZEN | Nominal amount with no adjustment mechanism. Moves only by Act of Congress. |
| INDEXED | Re-set annually by IRS / SSA / CMS / HHS. The stated value will go stale. |
| SCHEDULED | Moves by a formula written into the statute itself. Not inflation. |
Confidence is read as a tolerance band and is never silently promoted. This revision is 94 VERIFIED 1 APPROX 2 UNVERIFIED, and flagged values render with the flag visible. What is unconfirmed about each is listed in the changelog.
The machine-readable snapshot is statutes.json, under
CC BY 4.0. The figures themselves are public facts published by the IRS, SSA, CMS and HHS
and no claim is made over them — attribution is asked for the compilation: the selection, the drift
laws, the confidence flags and the citation trail.
Arithmetic, not advice. The charts show their working and name the trade-offs. They are not personalised investment or tax guidance. Talk to a CFP or CPA.
Every dollar figure is approximate and re-indexed. Verify against the current IRS revenue procedure, SSA fact sheet, CMS premium notice and HHS poverty guidelines before relying on any amount.
Nothing here executes anything. No trades, no transfers, no contribution changes.