How ThunderHarbor Works: Where to Go for Every Common Task

Convert a specific dollar amount to Roth

This has two different answers depending on what you actually want, and they are not interchangeable. If you want to test what converting a flat amount every year would do, without touching your real plan, go to What-If Workshop and pick “Custom: set your own annual amount.” Drag the slider to the amount, and it gives you a full breakdown by retirement phase: the tax cost, which phase is your cheapest bracket to convert in, and whether the plan can actually sustain it. Nothing here changes your saved plan until you decide it is worth keeping.

If you want your actual saved plan to convert a specific amount in one specific year, that is a different tool: go to Roth Strategy, set Conversion mode to Manual, then scroll to the Year-by-Year Conversion Planner and type the amount for that year only. One thing to know before you do: a manual amount here is not capped by your ACA or IRMAA guard the way Auto mode is. If $100k pushes you past a cliff, nothing stops it or warns you on this tab. Check Tax Cliffs right after to see the real MAGI impact.

Keep your income under an ACA or IRMAA line

This is the one that trips up the most people. The setting is not on the Healthcare tab. It is on Roth Strategy, in the “Conversion Strategy” card. That is where you turn the ACA guard and IRMAA guard on or off, set your MAGI ceiling as a percent of the federal poverty level, and set a safety margin.

Healthcare shows the result of that setting: your projected MAGI against your ACA and IRMAA tiers, plus a separate read-only slider you can drag to preview a different income level. That slider does not save anything.

Tax Cliffs is the clearest place to see the guard actually holding, year by year, against every relevant line at once.

Take your pension as a lump sum

This depends on the kind of pension, and the honest answer is not the same for everyone. If yours is a cash-balance pension, there is a real, permanent election for this in Edit Profile, on the Income step: choose lump sum instead of annuitize, and your saved plan rolls the balance into a Traditional IRA the year your pension would have started.

If yours is a standard, formula-based pension (a fixed monthly amount starting at a set age), there is currently no permanent setting anywhere in the app to convert it into a lump sum. What-If Workshop has a “Pension: Lump Sum vs. Annuity” card that lets you compare the two side by side, but it is explicitly a preview. It never changes your saved plan.

If you are actually taking the cash now, that is a different situation from either of the above: log it as a one-time event on the On Track tab (see the next section), tagged as ordinary income. The after-tax amount lands in your taxable brokerage balance and gets taxed that year, which is the correct treatment for cash in hand rather than a tax-free rollover.

Report military retirement pay, VA disability, or TRICARE

There is no dedicated military tab. Go to Edit Profile, on the Income step, and open the military and veterans benefits card. From there you can flag a pension as military retirement pay (which changes its state tax treatment and how survivor benefit costs are calculated), enter VA disability for either spouse with its own cost-of-living adjustment, and turn on TRICARE with Prime or Select.

Turning on TRICARE is a bigger switch than it looks. It replaces ACA marketplace modeling everywhere in the app, not just on Healthcare. Tax Cliffs, Roth Strategy, RMD Analyzer, and every ACA-related guard all skip the ACA subsidy math entirely for a TRICARE household, since it is not the relevant coverage type.

Add a windfall: a home sale, a business sale, severance, or an inheritance

Go to On Track, scroll to Future Income, and add a one-time event. You give it a description, a year, and an amount, then pick how it is taxed: capital gains, ordinary income, tax-free but still counted for IRMAA and ACA, or no tax impact at all. The last option is for money you already owe no tax on, like an inherited brokerage account with a stepped-up basis, or a cash gift.

Once added, it flows into every year of your projection automatically: taxes, MAGI, and Roth conversion room all update, and it shows up as its own column on Tax Cliffs and Projection Table.

Account for an IRA you already inherited, or expect to inherit

The Inherited IRA tab shows the distribution schedule, but the account itself gets added under Edit Profile, on the Money step. You set the beneficiary type (spouse, non-spouse, disabled, chronically ill, minor child), the year of death, and whether the original owner had already started RMDs. This same form works for an inheritance you have not received yet: enter the year of death as a future year and today's expected balance, and the account activates in your projection exactly then, with the real 10-year or stretch schedule applied from that point.

This only applies to a retirement account (a traditional or Roth IRA, or a 401k) someone is leaving you. A future inheritance that is cash, a brokerage account, or other property is a completely different case, covered next.

Plan for a future inheritance that is not a retirement account

Use the same one-time event form on On Track described above, with the year set to when you expect to receive it and the tax treatment set to “no tax impact.” That is the correct bucket for an inherited taxable brokerage account, savings, or a cash gift, since those come with a stepped-up cost basis and owe nothing when you receive them.

Getting this split wrong has a real cost. A $200,000 inherited traditional IRA logged as a one-time ordinary-income event gets taxed as a single lump sum in the year it arrives. The same $200,000 logged correctly on the Inherited IRA setup gets spread across its real 10-year (or stretch) distribution schedule, which is usually far less expensive. Match the entry to what the money actually is, not just to how big the number is.

See what your heirs will owe in taxes

Go to Legacy Planning. You set your assumed age at death, how many heirs, each heir's estimated income and filing status, and whether you want to model Qualified Charitable Distributions. It estimates the federal income tax your heirs would owe on what they inherit from your retirement accounts, and compares that against converting more to Roth during your own lifetime instead.

Worth knowing plainly: this tab is federal income tax only. It does not model estate tax, step-up in basis on your taxable accounts, life insurance, or trusts. It also reads your plan's ending balances but does not feed anything back into your main projection. Nothing here changes numbers on any other tab.

Change your spending, or when it changes

Go to Life & Spending. This is the single most connected setting in the app: it drives Projection Table, Full Report, Bucket Strategy, Tax Cliffs, and Healthcare all at once, since spending is what sets how much your portfolio has to produce every year.

Take penalty-free withdrawals before 59½

Go to SEPP Planner for a 72(t) schedule, or check Rule of 55 eligibility on the same tab if you left a job at 55 or later. Turning on a SEPP plan does more than add a withdrawal line: it overrides your normal withdrawal order entirely while it is active, so Healthcare, Tax Cliffs, and Projection Table can look different in ways that are not obvious from the SEPP Planner screen alone.

Plan around a spouse's benefits, or one of you passing first

Go to Settings and turn on the widow scenario. This changes your filing status partway through the plan, married to single, which moves your tax brackets, IRMAA thresholds, ACA family size, and Social Security survivor benefit all at once. Full Report shows a three-way comparison (married, widowed, and your actual plan) once this is on.

Use your HSA for medical costs in retirement

Go to Settings and set your HSA deferral. Until the age you choose, the app leaves your HSA balance alone to keep growing; after that, it spends it down against your healthcare costs automatically. The effect shows up on Healthcare and Projection Table.

Preview a different retirement age or scenario without touching your real plan

Go to What-If Workshop. Most scenarios built here (a different conversion strategy, spending level, Social Security age, or state) only ever show up on Projection Table, behind an explicit Baseline/What-If toggle that defaults to Baseline. The one exception is the retirement-age slider at the top, which is shared more widely: Roth Strategy, Bucket Strategy, RMD Analyzer, Executive Summary, and Full Report will all reflect an explored age if you set one, even after you navigate away. Every one of those tabs shows a clear banner when that is happening, with a one-click reset back to your saved plan.

See most of your numbers in one place, year by year

Go to Projection Table. This is the tab with the most detail in the app: your tax bracket, MAGI, healthcare cost, Roth conversions and withdrawals, and every account balance, all by year, in one row-by-row table. It will not tell you why a number is what it is, for that you still go to the specific tab that owns that setting, but if you just want to see most of your numbers laid out year by year, this is the fastest place to look.