About Manage Your Means
This page says who runs this site, where every number it shows you comes from, and what its projections assume. If a figure here looks wrong to you, it should be possible to check it against the source yourself — that is the point of the page.
Who operates this site
Manage Your Means is operated by Manage Your Means LLC, an independent company registered in Ohio, United States.
Manage Your Means LLC6545 Market Ave. North, Ste 100, Canton, Ohio 44721
support@manageyourmeans.com
How it is paid for: it isn't. There is no paid tier, no advertising, no upsell and no affiliate or referral commission on anything the site mentions. It is a personal project, and support is voluntary. Nothing on this site is ranked, recommended or hidden because of what it pays — because nothing pays.
What it is not. Manage Your Means is not a bank, a broker, a lender, an investment adviser or a lead generator. It does not connect to your bank accounts: every figure in your plan is one you typed in yourself. It does not sell your data, and no third-party advertising or tracking scripts load. See the Privacy Policy for what is stored and the Disclaimer for the limits of what any of it means.
This is a planning tool, not financial advice
Everything here is educational and informational. The calculators do arithmetic on the numbers you give them; the reports apply published rules of thumb. None of it takes account of your particular circumstances, and using this site creates no adviser–client relationship. For a decision that matters, talk to a professional who can see your whole situation.
How the guides are written
The written guides — personal finance, debt and giving — are written and maintained by Manage Your Means LLC. There are no guest contributors, no syndicated copy and no sponsored posts. The funding note above applies to the writing as much as to the tools: nothing is mentioned, ranked or omitted because of what it pays.
Where the content comes from. Rules, limits and thresholds are taken from the body that issues them — the IRS, the Social Security Administration, the FDIC, and the federal statistical agencies named below — rather than from secondary coverage of them. The guides are plain HTML rather than parts of the application, so unlike the figures further down this page they are not generated from the constants the calculators use. That is a real limitation, and the dates are how it is bounded: a figure in a guide is accurate as of the date the guide says it was last updated, and no later.
What the dates mean. Every guide shows when it was first published and when it was last updated. The updated date moves when the words change — not when the file is touched, and not when the way the page is delivered changes. Both of those happen for reasons a reader has no interest in, and a date that moves for them is a date nobody can trust.
There is no review schedule, and it would be dishonest to claim one. Guides are revised when something changes or when a reader points out that it has — which makes the corrections address below part of how this works rather than a formality.
Where the comparison figures come from
The How You Compare feature places your own figures beside published reference data. Every reference number comes from a free, publicly downloadable United States government statistical release. Each is cited in the app at the point it is used, with the survey year and a link to the source.
| Source | What it provides | Survey year |
|---|---|---|
| Federal Reserve Board — Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) | Net worth, liquid assets, investments and total household debt, nationally, by age of the family reference person. Medians, means and percentile breakpoints. | 2022 |
| U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — Consumer Expenditure Survey (CE) | Household spending, nationally and by census region (2024). Income after taxes, and the savings rate derived from it, on the same table and population (2023). | 2024, 2023 |
| U.S. Census Bureau — American Community Survey (ACS) | Household income before taxes, by state and age band, with percentile breakpoints. Computed from the five-year public-use microdata rather than the published summary table, which publishes only four wide age groups. | 2024 |
| Federal Reserve Bank of New York — Household Debt and Credit | Debt balances by state, from the quarterly Consumer Credit Panel. | 2025 |
You are never compared against another user of this site. There is no cross-user percentile, no peer ranking and no table that aggregates one person's figures for another's benefit. Every comparison is against published national, regional or state statistics.
Like is compared with like. Take-home pay is compared only against after-tax income figures, and pre-tax pay only against pre-tax ones — the two are never averaged together or substituted for one another. Where a figure is a two-year average, or is measured per borrower rather than per household, the card that shows it says so.
The statutory figures, and the year they are from
Some numbers are set by law and restated annually. They are dated in the code that uses them, and the years below are read from those same values — this page cannot claim one year while the calculators use another.
- Retirement contribution limits — tax year 2026. The elective-deferral ceiling for a workplace plan, the catch-up contributions from age 50 (and the larger SECURE 2.0 amount at ages 60–63, which ends at 64), the IRA limits, and the HSA ceilings. The app does not distinguish a 401(k) from a 403(b), a 457 or a SIMPLE IRA, so it applies the ordinary elective-deferral limits and says "workplace plan" rather than naming a code section. For a SIMPLE IRA that overstates the room available.
- Social Security — 2026. The benefit-formula bend points and the taxable wage base, plus full retirement age by birth year and the reduction or delayed-retirement credit applied for claiming anywhere in the 62–70 window. Used to estimate a benefit only when you have not supplied your own figure from your Social Security statement, which is always the better number.
- Inflation and average-wage indexing — annual series from 1990 to 2026. United States annual inflation and the Social Security Administration's national average wage index, used for wage growth and real-terms conversions.
These are refreshed on a schedule, not when someone remembers. An automated check fails the build from 1 February each year if either statutory year stamp has fallen behind the calendar, and again if the two disagree with each other. A stale limit is worse than no limit, so it is not left to habit.
How the projections are calculated
Retirement
- Figures are in today's dollars. The projection runs in real terms: the nominal return is deflated to a real return, and contributions and spending stay flat so they implicitly rise with inflation. Balances are therefore directly comparable to money you can picture. They sit deliberately far below what a nominal rate would produce — a headline "$4.2M at 65" tells you much less than it appears to.
- It is a Monte Carlo simulation, not an average. The plan is run thousands of times against randomly drawn returns, and the result reports how many of those futures the money survives. Averaging a single smooth rate hides sequence-of-returns risk: a bad decade early in retirement can sink a plan that a steady-7%-a-year projection shows comfortably succeeding, because withdrawals during a downturn sell shares that never recover.
- The median balance and the success probability come from one run. They are two views of the same simulation, not two calculations — so they cannot disagree, and re-opening the report cannot move your score.
- The portfolio is only asked to fund what Social Security does not. The estimated benefit is subtracted from the income need first. Without that offset the apparent shortfall for a median earner roughly doubles.
- Return and volatility come from what you hold — blended across your accounts by balance — and fall back to your stated risk profile only when no holding carries a risk level. These pairs are planning conventions rather than forecasts: roughly 4.5% nominal for a conservative mix through to 9% for an aggressive one. Blending volatility by balance ignores correlation, which makes a mixed portfolio look slightly more volatile than it is; that is the conservative direction to be wrong in.
- Withdrawal rates are research findings, restated annually. 4% is the initial rate research supports for a fixed, inflation-adjusted income over a roughly 30-year retirement — Bengen's original figure, within a rounding of Morningstar's 2026 base case of 3.9% at 90% confidence for a 30–50% equity portfolio. 5.7% is the ceiling for a retiree willing to flex spending with markets. Above that, no mainstream strategy supports the plan. Both assume about 30 years, so retiring appreciably earlier means drawing less — the report says so rather than modelling it.
Debt and loans
- Payoff ordering is the standard pair. Avalanche pays the highest interest rate first and costs least in interest; snowball pays the smallest balance first and clears individual debts sooner. The app orders the plan and shows the difference — it does not decide which one suits you.
- Loan and mortgage figures use the standard amortization formula (M = P · i(1 + i)n ⁄ ((1 + i)n − 1)), with a zero-rate loan degenerating to straight-line repayment.
Budgets and schedules
- The schedule is built from your real pay dates and recurrence rules, not from a monthly average. Income is scheduled as take-home pay throughout, so what a budget allocates is money that actually arrives.
- Every derived view is a view, never a second calculation. The cash-flow calendar, the recurring-cost audit and the year-in-review summary all read the schedule the rest of the app already produced, so two screens cannot quietly disagree about the same month.
What these numbers cannot do
- The reference data is United States only, and mostly national or regional. Where a state figure exists it is used first, then a census region, then the national figure — but age and geography are not published as a cross-tabulation by every source, and the app never multiplies two separate cuts together to invent a cell it does not have.
- Different sources count different things. The New York Fed's debt figures are per borrower rather than per household, and are never mixed into the same series as the Fed's household balance-sheet data. The Consumer Expenditure Survey under-reports income relative to spending, a known property of that survey, so savings rates derived from it read low against national-accounts measures. It is still the right comparator here, because your own figure is built the same way — income minus spending, both self-reported.
- A survey year is not this year. The Survey of Consumer Finances is triennial; the others are annual or quarterly. A comparison tells you where you stood against households measured in that year, not against your neighbours this morning.
- A projection is not a forecast. A success probability is a statement about a model, not about the future. Nothing here can know what markets, your health, your job or the tax code will do.
Support this project
Manage Your Means costs something to run — a domain, a database, a web host — and it brings in nothing. If it has been useful to you and you would like to help cover that, there is a tip jar.
What supporting buys: nothing. There is no supporter tier, no feature behind it, no faster answer to an email, and no influence over what this site says about any product — for the same reason nothing here is ranked by what it pays. Everything on the site is available to everyone whether or not anybody ever gives a penny, and that is not going to change. It is a thank-you, not a purchase.
Corrections
If a figure on this site is wrong, or a source has published a newer release than the years named above, please say so — write to support@manageyourmeans.com. Corrections to the reference data are welcome and are the fastest way to improve the site.
See also the Privacy Policy, the Terms of Use and the Disclaimer.