New Financial Tools Section (Retirement Planner Is the Big One)

I mentioned in the WordPress-to-Hugo migration post that this site was going to start drifting a bit toward retirement and financial planning content alongside the usual networking stuff. Here’s the first real piece of that: a new Financial Tools section, same browser-only, nothing-sent-to-a-server philosophy as the Network Tools I’ve been building for years.

Retirement & Social Security Planner

This is the one that actually matters. It’s a full retirement dashboard — portfolio projections, Social Security claiming strategy (including spousal/survivor benefits), RMDs, a Roth conversion planner, Medicare/IRMAA cost estimates, and a Monte Carlo simulation that runs a thousand random market paths against your numbers instead of just assuming a flat return every year. I’ve been building and using a private version of this for a while now; this is that tool, cleaned up for public use. Find it at fryguy.net/financial-tools/retirement-planner.

Nothing you enter is saved or sent anywhere — refresh the page and it’s gone, same as every other tool on this site.

The smaller ones

A few more went up alongside it:

• Debt Payoff Calculator — avalanche vs snowball, side by side. Add your debts, add whatever extra you can throw at them each month, and it’ll show you the payoff date and total interest for both strategies so you can see whether the “optimal” order is actually worth it over the “keep-you-motivated” order.
• Loan Calculator — Mortgage and Auto tabs compare every standard term at one loan amount (5–30yr for mortgages, 24–84mo for auto), each with its own editable rate, so you can see the real tradeoff between a lower payment and less total interest. Personal loan is a simpler standalone calculator.
• FIRE Calculator — Lean/Regular/Fat FIRE numbers, plus your Coast FIRE number (what you’d need invested today to coast to financial independence on growth alone, no more contributions) and roughly how many years out each one is at your current savings rate.

Same rules as everything else on this site: all client-side, no accounts, no tracking, no data leaving your browser. Take a look at the Financial Tools index and let me know if there’s something else worth building — a net worth tracker is next on my list.