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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.
Achnk53, don’t say ‘spreadsheet’, you’ll only encourage RDQ 😁. Seriously, your past planning has landed you in a great place.
You didn’t say what your other income consisted of. People with only non-taxable IRA distributions and Social Security income would not have any tax concerns.
Cash flow? I am aware of our fixed income and IRA distributions, and what we spend. The former is significantly more the latter. Life is good.
Regarding withholding, I don’t care for tax calculators, my way is much faster. I want to avoid a penalty, so as long as I’m within 90% of liability, I’m happy. If I know I will have significantly more income going forward, I’ll open last year’s tax return and pop in the approximate increase (as interest), then compare the tax to my current withholding. I will schedule estimates if needed. (I could just multiply the increased income by my marginal tax rate of 12%, but this wouldn’t tell me the effect on the taxable portion of my Social Security)
Additional calculations would violate my KISS philosophy.
What is left is 2 large taxable in brokerage accounts earmarked for legacy, and LTC.Plus 2 large Roth accounts. so instead of try to figure out estimate taxes or to 110%, I just make a Roth distribution in mid December and do a withholding for federal and state taxes.
Got it. I think you’ve done a great job minimizing your tax exposure.
Isn’t it even simpler to pay 100% (or 110%) of the previous year’s tax? I take my RMD near the end of the year, and make sure the additional withholding will get me there.
I have done some fairly large Roth conversions the past few years to empty out both our traditional IRA. So the safe harbor rule nor the 110% would not make sense right now.
Makes a lot of sense to me. I do nearly the same. Never had to file estimated yet. I like getting a refund and any lost interest is not worth worrying about.
Yeah, that works great. Either method is simple enough, requiring a minimum of mental gymnastics, and both keep us from paying a penalty.
I don’t understand how there can be a budget and spreadsheets without knowing net annual retirement cash flow/income first.
We live on a pension and social security so ours is fixed, but if we didn’t, I would want our income well defined before figuring what we could spend each year.
There is always some unexpected major bills, e.g. medical bills, etc. that may not accounted for. Our emergency funds is 3 years of our normal expenses because of that.
I have that too, but nowhere near 3 years worth. That would be a heck of an emergency. That seems beyond any budgeted cash flow though.
At least at 65 major medical bills are a minor risk. We have incurred several hundred thousand dollars in the last few years and never paid more than Part B deductible. Premiums are a major monthly expense though.
Great work, achnk53, at bringing closure to so many loose ends!
Although my tax returns are no longer trivial (18 pages, this year, for the IRS), my tax planning is simple. To estimate investment income, I rely on year-end account statements. Mine include both the total income by type for the just completed year and projections by month for the coming year. To be on the safe side, I estimate future investment income to be a few percent larger than projected or previously received. An RMD, withdrawals of tax-deferred funds, and capital gains considerations are also factored in as income.
The AARP/dinkytown tax calculator is a great tool and what I use to estimate future taxes: https://www.aarp.org/money/taxes/1040-tax-calculator/ . (If you use it, be sure to expand the entry prompts by clicking the down arrows to the right of the page.)
Yes. But the dinkytown tax calculator will be update first before AARP would. I find that out last year with the tax changes.
Thanks – I was going to recommend this. The AARP version is not yet updated for 2026 yet. The Dinkytown site has the 2026 version and prior years if needed. I’ve used this multiple times in the last few weeks to help some AARP TaxAide clients do some 2026 tax planning.
I’ve used Quicken for decades and because I enter all bills and income into it I get very detailed reports. Things I like:
Projected monthly balances of accounts; no concerns about overdrawing.
A list of bills forthcoming, including biller name, amount and due date.
Automated importing of credit card information; payees, amounts, etc.
Automated importing of investment, retirement and bank account data.
Estimated tax.
We run almost everything through credit cards which give us cash back each month, and I simply print the credit card statements and review for errors or fraud, etc. Quicken imports each payee and I check for proper category (utility, grocery, dining, etc.).
Other useful information includes tax loss harvesting available in my investment accounts, a “Lifetime Planner” which takes information about income, expenses, debt and assets and projects account balances (savings) for each year until the end of life.
One of the things I want to know each year is spending and this is provided. Will I spend all of my retirement income? Will I spend my RMD withdrawal? Etc. If not, how much will probably remain unspent as of December 31?
Quicken includes a tax center with a tax withholding estimator and a link to file taxes with TurboTax.
I agree. The new Yearly fee for Quicken seems cheap, given how dependent I am on it.
The categories and payees lists remain clunky, but if guess if I spent An afternoon I could clean them up and eliminate all the unuse dones from 15 or 20 years ago!
I haven’t use Quicken since it became an online subscription. It is great that it still works for you. Thanks.
I tried the same thing (modifying your input text slightly). I’d be very careful with this. The spreadsheet Claude gave me had at least one error. It used the pension income cell (B5 in the spreadsheet Claude gave me) when it was calculating how much of the social security income (actually in cell B6) was taxable (calculation in cell B20). I didn’t look for any further problems.
I am still very worry about AI data input, as to be correct. It can collect data but it can’t interpret data.
I use Excel to track income and expenses and have found the tax estimates to be very close to actual figures at https://engaging-data.com/tax-brackets/
I have just tried the link. It is very cool because you can visualize where the money flow and tax rate/bracket flow. and I think it is already updated to 2026. Thanks.
Yes, it is updated for 2026, until something changes… Glad you gave it a try. I also like the visualizations it shows.
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 recently asked Claude to build a spreadsheet to track all the moving parts of my portfolio — tax-deferred and tax-exempt accounts, life valuations, splits across account types, and so on. It came back with something really impressive. It’s not something I’d have had the time or the skills to build myself. A great example of AI earning its keep. Claude even added a consolidated cross-account function giving a snapshot of my asset allocation across everything combined without being prompted to do so.
Excellent use of Claude, Mark. I have disliked spreadsheets my whole life but they are great for these sorts of projects. I, too, could never build something like this in my own. I could learn, but I rather be out hiking or reading a good book.
I have been enough impressed with Claude to pay $17 a month. I have used it to examine several of my Mutual fund postions and compare them. You only get publicly avalible data and there are inaccuracies, but the reports are impressive and save a huge amount of time.
I would be careful and limit any identifications. Claude says they save your downloads for training but do not access anything on the computer. Maybe I believe him.
My daughter wrote a spreadsheet with RMDs and IRRMAs on it. It is pretty complicated so I will ask Claude to give it a try.
Is Claude windows friendly, and free download?
yes. there is an app too. free gets you the functionality but you can get limited out.
much better than google search too.
How is the AI spreadsheet working out? I am curious to know.
It has worked out very well for me. It is especially nice being able to test different income scenarios and see what effects on taxes they have.
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
I use eFile but they are not update to 2026 yet.
This was not the eFile. It was called tax withholding estimator when you search the IRS site. Chris
Thanks for clarifying the site you use.
Chris, thanks for sharing. I’ve not tried using the IRS estimator. Does it allow you to save the information as you input data throughout the year?
I’ve been doing my own spreadsheet for a few years now and I keep tweaking it to make it viewer friendly and understandable.
I like all the responses from everyone as there are some methods I didn’t know about.
Hi Olin. I am not sure if it allows you to save the info or not? Hopefully one of the accountants or folks who do the VISTA program will know. I just use it after we get our taxes back each year if we get a big refund. Later in the year if things change more than I think they will, I will make an estimated payment in January. I went ahead and changed our SS withholding after doing the estimator. Chris
Chris, thanks for the clearer explanation as to how you use it. I started inputing data, but didn’t know how many more steps there would be and didn’t see a way to save the data. I guess one needs to decide what works best for them and stay with it. Thanks again!
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.
I afraid to use any thing like Empower due to privacy reasons. Don’t want all my accounts to be out in the web.
If you are using credit cards (and maybe you aren’t) all of your information is already available to sources I’d think you would be equally concerned with.
The best approach might be to export your income and expense activity from whatever sources it is available and import it into an offline utility for aggregation and reporting. For instance you could probably create an offline access database for importation of the data and desired manipulation.
This review, by Rob Berger, might be of interest to you. I use Pralana.
I am subscribed to Pralana online this year but I think, pralana, bolden, projectionlab are all might be an over kill for what I try to access from year to year.
An update on ProjectionLab, as I tried to decide whether to try it or Pralana online. So I went with PL first for a 7 days trial, the site said it will charge me $128/year afterward, then I got an email from their billing service said that it will be $139.32(I was so mad I don’t remember the exact amount.) anyway I cancel it after I tried it for a few days and it was really an over kill for my situation anyway.
Very misleading messaging to say the least.
Misleading? They have sales tax just like everyone else and that’s clearly shown during the checkout process.
Maybe I have missed something, but there was no listing they collect sale taxes on the site. Then, when I get the email from their billing service and I email to ask why there was a difference in the pricing, there was no reply, & the ticket didn’t indicated there is sales taxes added on. Either way I think that as these tools are getting much attention and popular, their charges has been going up and up. Are the increasing pricing justifiable? I think not, they have already build out the tool, just making more profit. No Thanks.