Abaque 11 · Synthesis

The cheat sheet

Eleven sheets reduced to what you would actually want on one page. Everything here is derived from the register — the same statutory data the other sheets draw from — so none of it depends on who is reading. Three figures answer three questions: where are the walls, which windows shut and when, and which numbers will quietly erode. The rules underneath are the series' findings stated as plainly as they can be stated, each with the number that proves it.

Sheets00 – 11
Register entries—
Biggest cliff—
Frozen / indexed—
Register—
Sheet11 · Rev A
Fig. 1

Where the walls are — every true cliff, ranked

Cost of one dollar too much Single filer where the pair differs
A cliff is a threshold where one additional dollar costs a fixed sum rather than a percentage. There are only a handful in the whole system, and they are not where people look: ordinary bracket edges are not on this chart, because crossing one costs a few cents. The top two bars are the same cliff, joint and single — and the largest wall that is not the ACA credit is more than five times smaller. It lands precisely on people who retire before 65 and buy their own cover. If you remember one number from the whole series, it is that one. Figures assume the defaults stated on each source sheet; the ACA cliff in particular scales with the benchmark premium, so treat it as a shape, not a quote.
Fig. 2

Which windows shut, and when

Open Shuts — and does not reopen Needs a run-up before it works
Almost every age in retirement law opens something. The ones worth marking on a wall are the few that close. Three close by age — the super catch-up at 64, the conversion corridor when required distributions begin, and marketplace cover at 65. Two close by action rather than by time, which is worse because nothing announces them: rolling a workplace plan to an IRA destroys the separation-from-service exception permanently, and a Roth conversion ladder only works if it was started five years before the money is needed. The IRMAA look-back means the first age whose income can raise a Medicare premium is 63, not 65.
Fig. 3

What erodes — the drift census

Frozen — erodes every year Indexed — re-set annually Scheduled — moves by formula
Read this as a map of where inflation is quietly working against you. The pattern is not random. The thresholds that limit what you may put in are almost all indexed — contribution limits are re-set every January. The thresholds that grant relief, or that trigger a penalty, are overwhelmingly frozen: every Social Security taxation threshold since 1984, the surtax floors since 2013, and fifteen of the sixteen early-access provisions. A frozen dollar amount is a tax increase that requires no vote. When you plan more than a few years out, index the indexed figures and leave the frozen ones exactly where they are — the register enforces that distinction so you cannot get it wrong by accident.
Rules

What the eleven sheets add up to

Index

The series, and the one thing each sheet proves

SheetThe findingThe number
How to use this, and what it deliberately does not say

The order to think in

  1. Capacity before optimisation. Filling unused shelter is worth one to two orders of magnitude more than trimming fund fees. Do the boring thing first.
  2. Find the cliffs, not the brackets. Bracket edges are ramps and crossing one is nearly free. Plan around the walls in Fig. 1.
  3. Check the geometry before planning around any threshold. Ramp, staircase or cliff — the three behave completely differently and the code mixes all three.
  4. Count backwards from the look-backs. Medicare reads income from two years earlier; the ACA credit reads the prior year's poverty guideline; the mandatory-Roth catch-up rule reads last year's wages. Anything you do this year is priced later.
  5. Ask what a move destroys, not only what it gains. A rollover, a conversion, a SEPP: each closes doors as well as opening them, and several are irreversible.

What is deliberately absent

  • Any recommendation. Every figure here is a property of the statute. What to do with it depends on facts — health, family, state, risk tolerance, actual balances — that no sheet in this series has or wants.
  • State tax, everywhere. Several of these effects reverse or vanish once a state income tax is layered on.
  • Investment returns. Nothing here depends on a market assumption, which is deliberate: the whole series is built on quantities that are knowable in advance.
  • Anything not yet enacted. Bills to restore the enhanced ACA credit exist. Until one passes, the cliff in Fig. 1 is real.

Where the numbers come from

Every figure on this sheet is computed at page load from data/statutes.js — the same register that drives sheets 00 and 05 through 10 — rather than copied from them. If an entry changes, this sheet changes with it. The cliff sizes use each source sheet's stated default assumptions, which are the honest way to price a threshold whose absolute size depends on a premium or a contribution you have to supply yourself.

Confidence

The register stands at the count shown in the title block, with four entries flagged below Verified: the RMD Uniform Lifetime divisors and the mortgage acquisition-debt cap are Unverified, and the per-person poverty guideline increment and the §401(a)(17) compensation limit are Approx. None of them is load-bearing for anything on this sheet. Two quantities the series refuses to supply at all — the SEPP life expectancy factor and the federal underpayment rate — are inputs on sheet 09 rather than data here, because they could not be verified.

This is arithmetic, not advice. It is a summary of what the legislation does, compiled so that the shape of the rules can be seen at once. It is not a plan, and a summary is exactly the form in which a caveat gets lost — every line here has a fuller treatment on its own sheet, with the assumptions spelled out. Dollar figures are approximate and re-indexed. Take decisions to a CFP or CPA.
Indexed figures are re-set every January and this snapshot will go stale. Get notified when they are re-verified → · All twelve sheets