Make the most of your nest egg.
Your income, your taxes, your investment accounts, and your retirement accounts all draw on the same nest egg — and most people manage them in separate silos. We show you how to run them the way a family office would: coordinated, tax-first, using strategies written into the tax code itself — explained in plain English, with a free calculator to run your own numbers.
By keeping most of the tax invested instead of paying it, the offset path pulls ahead by$1.8Mby age 90 — balance plus all the income drawn along the way.
Adjust assumptions▾
Same base case as the full calculator: a laddered conversion starting at 55 with deductions offsetting 65% of each slice's tax, after-tax withdrawals from 65 to 90, married filing jointly, compared on total value. Open the full calculator to change ages, the offset share, or see all four paths.
Free · Compare leaving it in your IRA, converting, and converting tax-efficiently — across your whole retirement
Run your retirement like a family office
Wealthy families don't manage income, taxes, and investments in separate silos. A family office coordinates all of them, so every decision compounds instead of colliding. The Nest Planner brings that discipline to your nest egg — the same tax-first playbook, in plain English.
Income
Sequence wages, Social Security, and withdrawals so each dollar lands in the lowest bracket available — and the surcharges never see it.
How income is taxed →Taxes
Use the deductions Congress wrote into the code — the ones professionals use — to shrink conversions, RMDs, and Medicare surcharges.
See the strategies →Investment accounts
Coordinate taxable, tax-deferred, and tax-free accounts — including self-directed IRAs — so growth compounds where it's taxed least.
Accounts, explained →Retirement accounts
Decide what stays traditional, what converts to Roth, and when — the single biggest tax lever most retirees control.
The Roth decision →It all starts with the biggest lever: the tax on your retirement accounts. Here's why.
The less you lose to tax, the more your nest egg compounds
A Roth conversion is taxed up front. The smaller you can keep that tax bill, the more of your savings stays invested and growing — here's the long-run difference on a $500,000 conversion.
More stays invested
Pay it up front
What it takes to catch up after paying the tax up front
Keeping the conversion tax low is the whole game. There are legitimate, code-based ways high earners do this — see the strategies or the advanced guide.
Same $500,000. Four strategies. One breaks away.
Run the same balance, the same returns, and the same retirement income four different ways. Three land in a tight band — then one pulls ahead by more than $1.4 million by your plan-end age, even with deductions covering only 65% of the conversion tax.
Illustrative example — your numbers will differ, and the offset path shows the tax effect only: the capital, fees, returns, and risk of the deduction-generating investment sit outside this model. Run yours in the calculator →
Understand the tax side of retirement
Clear, sourced guides on the decisions that move the needle on what you keep.
Roth Conversions
How conversions work, the tax they create, the five-year rules, and when converting actually pays off.
Read the guide →Withdrawals & Taxes
How retirement income is taxed — RMDs, Social Security, IRMAA, and the order to draw accounts.
Read the guide →Self-Directed IRAs
What an SDIRA can hold, the prohibited-transaction rules, and how they fit into a conversion.
Read the guide →Advanced Strategies
Backdoor and mega-backdoor Roth, deduction-offset conversions, and other high-earner planning.
Read the guide →Built from primary sources, written by a family-office practitioner
The Nest Planner is written by Casmir Mason — CFO of a private family office and CEO of North Pine Capital — who has run these strategies with real capital. Every tax claim is built from the Internal Revenue Code, Treasury regulations, and official IRS guidance, and cited so you can verify it yourself.
Sourced
Tax claims trace to the IRC, Treasury regs, or IRS publications — not opinion.
Honest about risk
Every strategy discloses its requirements, limits, and the investment risk involved.
Educational, not advice
This is a starting point for your own research and a conversation with your CPA — not a sales pitch.
Get new guides as they're published
Occasional, no-spam updates when we add a guide or release the downloadable version of the calculator.