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We have reached a point now we don’t need to use either free or paid tools or calculators for things like, figure when to claim social security, we have converted all our t-IRA accounts, so no RMD, nor NIIT, nor IRMAA. We have also done our estate planning and a letter of instruction, etc. We did very well with our budgeting with our spreadsheets. All that is left to figure out annually are our annual retirement cash flow/income, and an estimation for coming year tax liabilities. Our question is what do you use to estimate both? Thanks in advance for any input and insights.
I did something I thought I would never do.
I asked Claude to create an Excel spreadsheet to do this. I was impressed with the result. Just made a few adjustments. Here was my prompt:
“I am retired and need to plan out my taxes for the coming year. What is the best way to do this, including pension and investment income so that my wife and I, who are married and file jointly, can stay in the 12 percent tax bracket? Do you have an example of a spreadsheet for tax planning?”
I also use Boldin and Empower to help in my longer term planning and asset location planning.
I just used the IRS tax withholding estimator last week to estimate our taxes for 2026. You don’t have to have a W-4 to be able to use it, and it is already updated for 2026. It was helpful for us. I am sure some of the more knowledgeable people here will chime in also. Chris
Wow! What a great financial position to be in. Congratulations!
I’m not 100% sure this is what you are asking for, but here is what I use.
To track my expenses I primarily use two mechanisms:
Fidelity Full View – I linked all of my financial accounts to this about 3 years ago. For me, it does a great job of accumulating all income and expense flows and enables grouping by category with customizations. I can search for activity and look over a desired time period very easily.
Empower – I linked all of my financial accounts to this years ago and have years of history. This is my backup to Fidelity Full View.
I use a simple spreadsheet that I developed for myself which I update at the beginning of the year with any tax rule changes to predict what my tax bill will be at the end of the year.
This review, by Rob Berger, might be of interest to you. I use Pralana.