About

Why Harbor exists

Harbor started with a question I had about my own money: should I convert part of my retirement savings to a Roth — and if so, how much and when (timing matters)? I couldn't find a tool that answered the question to my satisfaction, so I built one.

The question I couldn't get a straight answer to

A Roth conversion sounds simple: pay tax on some of your pre-tax retirement money now, so it grows and comes out tax-free later. Whether it's actually worth it is not simple at all. The answer depends on your other income, your future tax brackets, what it does to your Medicare premiums, how it interacts with Social Security, when and how you'll spend the money, and what you want to leave behind. Change any one of those and the answer can flip.

When I went looking for help with my own decision, the free calculators stopped at this year's tax bracket, a single number that ignored almost everything that actually mattered. The tools that went deeper were locked behind an account, a subscription, or an advisor who wanted to manage my money before they'd answer the question. I wanted to reason about my own situation, with my own numbers, without handing them to anyone.

So I built the tool I needed

I've spent more than fifteen years building custom software as a business and financial analyst, and another decade running my own business, so modeling this kind of problem is familiar territory. I built Harbor to model the whole picture: your income, your accounts, your spending, your drawdown order, your taxes, your Medicare premiums, and what's left for your family — all at once, the way the real decision actually works. It ends in a plain answer, do it, don't, or it's close, and shows how much that answer depends on the assumptions behind it.

What began as a Roth conversion calculator has grown into a small family of retirement-planning tools, because I kept running into the same truth: you can't judge one retirement decision well without seeing the rest of the plan around it.

What Harbor is, and what it isn't

Harbor is free, there's no account to create, and nothing you type ever leaves your browser. I'm not a financial advisor, and Harbor isn't advice. It's a rigorous estimate built to help you understand your own situation and ask sharper questions, of yourself or of a professional. A conversion is one of the few tax moves you generally can't undo, so for a decision that size a second opinion from a fee-only fiduciary is worth it, and Harbor will point you to an independent directory of them. It earns nothing for doing so.

Free, and staying that way

Harbor is free and I intend to keep the calculators that way. It doesn't run ads, it doesn't sell your data, and it doesn't take a cut of any advisor referral. If that ever changes, I'll say so plainly, here and on the privacy page.

Related