Why I built this

Hi there 👋 I'm Barry. Although I've always been interested in investing and personal finance, this side quest to optimize roth conversion schedules started while at MIT, where I took two years off from work to attend graduate school. A friend had mentioned two lower-income years could be a good opportunity for roth conversions, so I decided to look into it.

Starting with what I assumed would be a straightforward question to answer, "how much should I convert, and over the course of which years?", I went searching for answers. Unfortunately, all I found was expensive, complicated financial tax software at one end of the spectrum and overly simplistic calculators on the other.

So, armed with the wide-eyed optimism of grad school and the knowledge from three of the more intimidating classes at Sloan - Tax Strategy, Managerial Finance, and Data, Models, and Decisions, I set out to weave knowledge of tax brackets, retirement accounts, present values of future cash flows, and constraint optimization problems into a product which can help people save money and increase their long term wealth.

Although the v1 Excel spreadsheet (built sans AI, mind you!) took an embarrassingly large amount of hours to complete, it drove a major financial decision for both my wife and me - albeit after a couple rounds of sanity checking with financial professionals.

I wanted to package up those learnings into a simple, easy-to-use experience for anyone navigating similar questions, which led to building this platform.

So, whether you're between jobs, transitioning careers, taking time off to start a business, working part-time, in the early years of retirement pre-RMDs, or in any other "in-between" period that puts you in lower tax brackets, this space is meant to help interactively explore possible scenarios and understand the tradeoffs more clearly, without being overwhelming or expensive.

I hope you find it valuable, and I'd love to hear any feature requests or feedback you might have. Rest assured, I read every message sent through the Support and Feedback channels!

Cheers!
Barry