About Manage Your Means

Who operates this application

Manage Your Means is operated by Manage Your Means LLC, an independent company registered in Ohio, United States.

How it is paid for. Everything one household needs to run its own money is free, and stays free for good: the Cash Flow Planner up to 18 months ahead, budgets, debt and net worth tools, retirement planning, bill alerts, sharing view-only access with a partner, and downloading or deleting your data. The application is live and still adding new features, and a paid tier, Plus, is coming for people who want more. There is no advertising, no selling of data and no affiliate or referral commission on anything the application mentions, and there never will be. It is a personal project. Nothing in this application 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.

Plus, the paid tier

Plus is for people who want more: planning further ahead with life-event scenarios, a partner who can edit, sharing with more people and a view across several households you help with, AI analysis of your data that stays off unless you turn it on, a year-end package, new depth at the High level, and a small game mode. It is coming soon, and nothing that is free will move behind it. Planning further ahead, a partner who can edit and sharing with more people already work, and need Plus.

• Plus: $30 a year.
• Supporter, the same Plus for people who want to give more: $50 a year.

These are the planned launch prices, in U.S. dollars, paid a year at a time. Plus is sold through Paddle.com, the merchant of record, which adds any sales tax or VAT at checkout. It renews each year on the date you first paid, until you cancel, and any charge can be refunded in full within 14 days: see Plus and payments and Refunds in the Terms of Use. People who help test the application, give feedback or suggest features will get a period of Plus free, its length set by Manage Your Means LLC.

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 application 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 statistical release: United States government surveys if you live in the United States, and if your profile names another country, that country's own statistics office or central bank, Eurostat, or the OECD. You are only ever compared with your own country. Each figure is cited in the app at the point it is used, with the survey year and a link to the source.

You are never compared against another user of this application. 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.

Amounts are compared in your currency. A figure published in another currency is converted at the European Central Bank's average euro reference rates for 2025 — through the euro where neither currency is the euro — and the card says what it was published as and the rate used. It is a market exchange rate, not an adjustment for what money buys in each country.

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 — 2027. 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.

Public pensions outside the United States

The application never estimates these. It counts the amount you copy from each program's own statement, in your own currency, and changes it only for when you plan to start — using the program's published rules, checked in the year shown against the linked source. Each rule carries that year, and the build fails once any of them is older than the current one.

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 mostly national or regional. In the United States a state figure is used first where one exists, then a census region, then the national figure; in another country, its province, state, nation or region where the publisher gives one, then the country as a whole. Age and geography are not published as a cross-tabulation by every source, and the application 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.

Corrections

If a figure in this application 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 application.

Security

How your account and data are protected, the independent security checks anyone can re-run, and how to report a security problem are on the Security page.