The fundamental question of retirement planning is: "How much money will you have to spend during retirement?" "Money" means after-tax, inflation adjusted funds which are available to be spent during each year of your retirement, expressed in today's dollars.

The Optimal Retirement Planner (ORP) computes the plan that maximizes your annual retirement spending. Before retirement ORP determines which retirement savings account to contribute to. After retirement ORP spreads your saving withdrawals across the entire term of your retirement. The optimal plan schedules withdrawals from your IRA, Roth IRA and after-tax accounts in a way that minimizes the Federal and state income taxes on your taxable income from your IRA withdrawals, Social Security benefits, pensions and post retirement earned income. The optimal schedule includes IRA to Roth IRA transfers and saving pension income in your after-tax account.

ORP's core is an industrial grade linear programming optimizer. ORP is the only publicly available, retirement calculator of this genre. (There are two other such calculators but you have to be a client of a financial service to use them.) Linear programming is an Operations Research tool that has been used in many industries for the past 50 years.

ORP is available on the Internet free of charge. To compute your retirement spending level please proceed to ORP's parameter input form: