This improvement slipped in unannounced. Now with graphical > taxes> ordinary income vs tax brackets graph you can visually see exactly where you are relative to the brackets. Wonderful way to get a handle on what Roth conversions and misc deductions are doing.
Agree. It's an excellent visual way of seeing where you are re: brackets and managing through that.
Agree.
(Adding inter-Scenario comparison option for some of these graphs etc would be also very useful…)
Agree as well - wholeheartedly. Visualizations, even simple ones, can distill all this voluminous data down into an easily comprehensible message and near-instantaneous cognition. More visual communication like this will be - in my very humble opinion - the differentiator that pulls Pralana ahead of its pack of competitors. Everybody likes the pretty pictures, especially when the picture switches on a bright clarifying light over a confusing and complicated financial path. I was actually preparing to submit a mockup suggesting a similar chart showing how income moves up the tax brackets. But Mr. Stone's is much better; I am so glad I didn't embarrass myself. Thanks again Charlie/Stuart for a tremendously helpful addition to Pralana.
Thanks to all for your kind comments.
Tonight's release adds two more Tax Projection charts: one for the LTCG brackets and one for IRMAA brackets. The IRMAA chart needs to be modified to show when Medicare actually starts and perhaps the IRMAA $ amounts. Your ideas and suggestions are welcome for both.
On a side note, I have a weird test scenario where in some future year: LTCG is $1million, line 11: AGI is $1.2 million, Schedule A itemized deductions (mostly healthcare) is $1.5 million and thus line 15 taxable income is $0. As as result, there was $0 LTCG tax. This is because 'taxable' LTCG/QD is the lesser of LTCG/QD or Taxable Income. There was, however, some NIIT.
I ran it in TurboTax which confirmed the $ LTCG tax is correct. And @taxman concurs!
@cstone Across several decades in software engineering, I declare I never encountered a developer even remotely as prolific as are you. It simply defies belief how quickly you churn out - with high quality - new feature after new feature. Much respect.
Thank you for the new LTCG and IRMAA visualizations. They are extremely helpful and light up nicely a couple more bulbs on the tree. As requested, I wanted to provide a minor bit of feedback for potential improvement. On the Long Term Capital Gains chart, the shaded blue band depicts clearly how LTCG+Qual Divs fall into, or straddle, the 0%, 15%, and 20% tax brackets. However, the figures on the 0%/15%/20% band flyovers cause me a bit of confusion. The flyover for all three brackets indicates the identical aggregate value for "Taxable LTCG + Qual Divs". I would expect to see the amount of LTCG taxable at 0% in the 0% bracket flyover, the amount taxed at 15% in the 15% bracket, and the same for the 20% bracket. In other words, the "Taxable" amount would be context-sensitive to the bracket. Consider a year when one's LTCG+Qual Divs stack on top of Ordinary Income but do not reach the bottom of the 15% LTCG bracket, i.e., LTCG is wholly untaxed. It's confusing to me to hover over the green 0% bracket and see a non-zero value for "Taxable LTCG + Qual Divs" when no Gains/Qual Divs are actually taxable. Perhaps in the second-to-last flyover line prefix the word "Taxable" with "0%", "15%", or "20%" and show the actual amount of LTCG/QualDivs taxable in the bracket? Or maybe add an entirely new line if the current "Taxable LTCG + Qual Divs" metric has some utility that I am completely missing? (Even this metric seems inaccurate to me, though, since any LTCGs falling below the 15% bracket floor should presumably be deducted from the "Taxable" aggregate total but are not.) I think I might be missing something! I have a sneaking suspicion, though, that what I'm suggesting could possibly have been your original intent since there is a second line on the flyover named "LTCG + Qual Divs" (sans "Taxable") that appears currently to be redundant with "Taxable LTCG + Qual Divs" (they both always have identical values, across each LTCG bracket flyover). I hope this makes sense. And of course, I may very well be completely missing the boat on understanding something. It's not a major issue regardless.
The IRMAA chart is just wonderful as well. One thing you might want to consider for both charts is adding an additional flyover line showing the amount of "headroom" left in the bracket before traversing into the next higher one (and maybe another line showing the amount over the current bracket's floor). You already have the "Bottom-Top" line but adding the calculated "Headroom"/"Amount to Next Higher Bracket"/whatever would relieve some mental math. Highlighting the headroom might pinpoint an opportunity to plan for some capital gains harvesting or additional Roth conversion in that year if the available bracket space is substantial enough (or alternately trying to reduce income/gains if just slightly above the bracket floor).
Thanks again for these great new charts and for consideration of these suggestions. If they make no sense, please just ignore and feel no obligation to spend your valuable time on a written response.
Maybe removing one of the redundant lines and use only one line called “Realized LTCG + Qual Divs” instead of using the words “Taxable LTCG + Qual Divs”, may help.
I also like this new chart. However, it emphasizes the Qual-Divs dramatic fluctuations which are not realistic and hopefully will be modified in the future.
@hecht790 I certainly agree that dividend growth (both Ordinary & Qualified) could be better projected based on Percentage of Account Balance vs. ROR Growth. Projected dividend growth is indeed misleading, in my mind, at present. I'm with you in looking forward to this improvement.
@cstone I am reconsidering my suggestion earlier to add "Headroom"/"Amount to Next Higher Bracket" to the chart flyover panel. For the LTCG chart, the bracket ranges are so huge that knowing the precise headroom value isn't going to contribute greatly in exposing any hidden opportunities for gain harvesting/Roth conversions (though if income is very near the next bracket's threshold it very well might). For the IRMAA chart, however, the Tier ranges are much narrower and additionally suffer from being true cliffs. Managing to stay inside a desired tier is of much greater importance as $1 over a bracket threshold would have such an impactful consequence. Instead of adding a simple flyover line, though, I'm thinking that "headroom" for IRMAA might be better communicated via an additional bar chart just below your current chart. The X axis would be each year in the plan while the Y axis would be "Additional MAGI until the next IRMAA Tier" (or whatever descriptive verbiage would be more consistent with usage elsewhere). That way we as users could look at a given year in the current chart to see in which IRMAA Tier our income has landed us and then look just below to the new chart to see graphically the amount of wiggle room we have left in the current tier before falling over the cliff into the next tier (or, thinking in reverse, how much income we need to forgo to drop us down to the next lower tier if we are just over the current tier's bottom). Considering that last comment - just brainstorming here - maybe the chart could have a baseline line at 0 with a blue (for example) bar above the line representing the amount of income to the next Tier while an orange (for example) bar beneath the line could depict income above the current Tier's bottom. One glance would help the user identify, by year, where income is nearing a higher tier or just tripping into the current tier and possibly take actions before that year of the plan arrives. Where that Baseline 0 line falls between the two bar segments would offer quick cognition of where income currently resides within the range of the current tier. The flyover of each bar could expose the actual $ amount over bottom/under top. Just a thought. I would have to prototype this myself to conclude whether this would be an effective communication of the data. I have charts in my own personal finance spreadsheet that let me know on any given day how close I am to tripping into the next higher Federal Tax/LTCG/ACA bracket. They are crucially important to me for managing my current year's income. {Screenshot attached for funsies, with hypothetical values.} It might be cool to have a similar visual in Pralana as described above to help keep us below our own personal off-limit brackets in our long-range planning too, though it's certainly more difficult when graphing multiple years vs. a single year as in my personal chart examples. If deemed of merit, the IRMAA idea above could theoretically be extended to tracking relative position in the current Federal Tax brackets & LTCG brackets as well, and maybe any other metric based on ranges. Otherwise, please just disregard without comment, no hard feelings whatsoever.
Addendum: Reading back over this it occurs to me that it might be simpler to keep this analysis focused on the current bracket/tier only - 1) amount above the current tier's bottom and 2) amount below the current tier's top (not confusing matters with both current tier and next highest tier). Sorry for the length! I try to be concise but am well known for failing.
[2025.08.04 - Edited to add my personal headroom charts]
[2025.08.05 - Edited to remove my example personal headroom charts. Because I generated them with fictitious data to traverse more brackets than match my actual income, I discovered a couple of bugs in heretofore untested code that made them meaningless. Those charts weren't even representative of the suggestion above and shouldn't have been included in the first place. The next time I submit a chart suggestion for consideration I will mock up something to communicate my idea better.]
@hecht790 I certainly agree that dividend growth (both Ordinary & Qualified) could be better projected based on Percentage of Account Balance vs. ROR Growth. Projected dividend growth is indeed misleading, in my mind, at present. I'm with you in looking forward to this improvement.
@cstone I am reconsidering my suggestion earlier to add "Headroom"/"Amount to Next Higher Bracket" to the chart flyover panel. For the LTCG chart, the bracket ranges are so huge that knowing the precise headroom value isn't going to contribute greatly in exposing any hidden opportunities for gain harvesting/Roth conversions (though if income is very near the next bracket's threshold it very well might). For the IRMAA chart, however, the Tier ranges are much narrower and additionally suffer from being true cliffs....
Addendum: Reading back over this it occurs to me that it might be simpler to keep this analysis focused on the current bracket/tier only - 1) amount above the current tier's bottom and 2) amount below the current tier's top (not confusing matters with both current tier and next highest tier). Sorry for the length! I try to be concise but am well known for failing.
[Edited to add my personal headroom charts]
Just to be clear: you are saying that these graphs would replace the text in the "fly over" box there currently? Given the small size of the flyover box, wouldn't the graph be harder to read than the simple text?
My “bright ideal” was apparently as confusing as I’d feared. I wasn’t necessarily advocating replacing the flyover text, which I think I great. I was just blue skying an idea to make it easier to determine where current income falls within the current IRMAA Tier. Since those tier bands are so compact on the existing chart it’s difficult to see clearly whether projected MAGI is closer to the bottom or the top of the tier. My suggestion was to add another year-based series bar chart just below the existing chart to show visually and more clearly where MAGI currently fell within the tier. It would essentially look like a small “ribbon” under the existing chart, where the years line up in both charts, that shows via bars above and below a line where income currently falls within the current IRMAA tier range. A simple mock-up would make this admittedly opaque suggestion so much easier to visualize as I know I am not describing it well. Unfortunately, for now, I have just discovered a mini-geyser erupting from my main water line in the front yard and am booting up to go out and start digging. Thanks for making a stab at deciphering what I was trying to suggest. (I shouldn't have even included the example charts of mine that I attached to my suggestion. They only illustrate the idea of tracking to a tier/bracket range top but really have nothing to do with my actual suggestion. Just added noise in retrospect.)
