About Tweed

Why Tweed exists

Most retirement calculators are built to make you feel good about a number. They choose a return assumption for you, often an optimistic one, and never show it to you. You leave with a projection you can't check and couldn't defend to anyone who asked.

The tools that do better are usually behind a login, and some want a phone number before they will show you anything at all. Tweed is the version that was missing: the number, the factor it used, the table that factor came from, and the date it was last checked.

Who writes it

Nicolas Straut

Personal finance writer, former Forbes contributor and This Week in Fintech writer

Tweed's calculators and guides are written by Nicolas Straut, a personal and business finance writer and former Forbes contributor. He has spent eight years writing about money and building content for fintech companies including NerdWallet and North One Business Banking.

Worth being straight about what that is not. He is not a financial advisor, not a CPA, and decades from retirement himself, so nothing here comes from the experience of living off a portfolio.

What Tweed offers instead is narrower and easier to check: the primary document, the arithmetic done correctly, and both shown on the page. It is not meant to replace an advisor, and on a decision that involves your whole retirement, you should talk to one.

How the numbers stay accurate

Every factor, limit, bracket and threshold on this site is checked against the IRS, the SSA or CMS, not against other retirement blogs. Each figure carries the year it applies to and the date it was last verified.

Where a calculation makes a simplification, the page says so rather than hiding it. Where a rule is genuinely unsettled, the page says that too, instead of picking the answer that reads more cleanly.

What Tweed won't do

Your return assumption is yours. Tweed will not pick it for you without showing it, sourcing it, and letting you change it.

Tweed will not publish a number it cannot trace to a primary document. A figure still unverified does not go up.

Tweed will not ask for your email before showing your result. The answer is the page. The email list is optional and separate.

And Tweed will not call a projection a plan. A calculator can tell you what the arithmetic says about a set of assumptions. It cannot tell you what markets will do, what your health will cost, or what Congress will change.

When the numbers change

The IRS, the SSA and CMS publish updated figures for the coming year in the autumn, usually October or November. Tweed updates when they do, and every page carries an Updated date so you can see when that last happened.

Retirement figures go stale in a way that matters. A contribution limit or an IRMAA bracket from last year isn't approximately right. It's wrong.

When something is wrong

Everything here is checked, and something will still be wrong eventually.

Send it in and it gets corrected. The correction gets a dated note at the bottom of the page rather than a quiet edit, because a site that silently rewrites its own history isn't one you should trust with a number.

What Tweed collects, and what it doesn't

The calculators run entirely in your browser. The ages, balances and figures you type are never sent to Tweed, to Google, or to anyone else. There is no server that receives them, so there is nothing to store, sell, lose, or hand over.

What Tweed does collect is ordinary web analytics on page visits: which page you looked at, roughly where in the world you are, what browser you used, and which site sent you. That runs through Google Analytics, and it never sees the contents of a calculator field.

You can switch it off in the footer, and Global Privacy Control is honoured automatically. The privacy policy has the full detail.

How Tweed makes money

The tools are free and they will stay free. Some guides link to products worth a look, and Tweed may earn a commission if you sign up through one of those links.

That does not change which products get mentioned or the numbers the calculators produce. Any page carrying one of those links says so at the top of that page, not just here.

What Tweed is, and what it isn't

Tweed gives you educational estimates to help you think. It is not financial, tax, or investment advice, and it does not know your health, your family, your pension, or the rest of your situation the way an advisor would.

Use it to understand the mechanics and to test what changes when you change an input. Then take anything that matters to someone who can see the whole picture.