Fifteen sheets in the résistance des matériaux tradition — nomograms for the most part, with a filterable register, a timeline and a computed table alongside them. 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 120 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.
Thirty-eight of the 120 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:
Which of them binds depends on the reader — §402(g) for most, §415(c) for anyone with after-tax room — but the shape is the same either way: a fixed dollar amount, falling as a hyperbola against rising pay. 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 |
| 12 | The Non-Covered Job | Public employment that earns no Social Security |
| 13 | Claiming Age & the Survivor | The 82.5% floor most calculators never draw |
| 14 | The Housing Corridor | What a below-market mortgage is worth, and what moving costs |
Bracket edges are ramps, not cliffs. The real cliffs — IRMAA, the Social Security torpedo, the ACA subsidy edge — get sheets of their own.
Thirty-eight of the 120 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 notice names the values that 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.
The twelve sheets that compute from the register share a single file: every threshold in it is written down exactly once, and each of those sheets carries that file verbatim, checked on every build. 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 117 VERIFIED 1 APPROX 2 UNVERIFIED, and a flagged value renders with its flag visible on every sheet that uses it.
Every figure is a public fact — an amount or an age Congress enacted, or a value the IRS, SSA, CMS or HHS publishes each year — and each entry carries the authority it was read from, whether that is a section of the Code or the notice that set it. The work is in the checking, and in deciding what a chart is allowed to say.
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.