About

What this is

A small set of tools that each answer one question with a number, show the working, and say what they leave out. The first is about the tax shortfall an RSU vest creates; the ones after it will cover Medicare surcharges, retirement contribution limits, Social Security timing, and the rest of the everyday US tax questions where a good answer exists and is hard to find.

The bar for publishing one is that a stranger could check it. Every bracket, rate and threshold comes from the document that sets it: an IRS Revenue Procedure or Notice, a publication, the tax code itself, or an official Social Security release. A person reads it and records the date. A figure nobody has checked against its source cannot appear on a page: the build refuses it, and the calculator shows nothing rather than a number that looks confident. The methodology page describes how that works, and the changelog records when figures changed.

What this is not

It is not advice, and that is a real limit rather than a disclaimer. These tools cannot see your circumstances, your other income, your state, or anything else that would change the answer for you specifically. They exist to make one mechanism legible. That is genuinely useful, and much smaller than advice.

It does not recommend products, providers, funds or accounts. It does not predict markets or rates. It does not cover jurisdictions outside the United States. And it does not do the things a personal-finance site is usually built to do: there is no account to create, no newsletter, no lead form, and nothing here is trying to become a relationship.

How this is paid for

It is not, yet. There is no advertising on this site, no sponsored content, no affiliate arrangement with any financial institution, and no data changing hands. Your figures never leave your browser, so there is nothing to sell even in principle. Nobody has paid for a placement here and nobody can.

That may change: sites cost money to run, and if advertising or affiliate income is ever introduced it will be disclosed on this page and on any page it affects, before it takes effect rather than after. The part that will not change is that a commercial relationship may never influence what a calculator computes or what a page says is true. The editorial policy states that as a rule rather than an intention.

Who is behind it

A small independent team. Dollar Almanac is not owned by a publisher, a media group or a financial company. There is no parent organisation behind it, and nobody upstream with an interest in what these calculators say. Work is reviewed and published under the team’s name rather than individual bylines.

We would rather be straight about what that costs you. A named author with visible credentials is a stronger signal than a team name, and you are right to weigh an anonymous source more carefully, particularly on money. What we will not do is close that gap by inventing someone: a plausible-looking expert with credentials nobody can check is worse than no name at all, and it is the single thing most likely to make everything else here untrustworthy.

So the evidence is offered instead of the byline. Every figure names the document it came from and the date it was read. The arithmetic is tested against worked examples the IRS and the Social Security Administration publish themselves, so the tools can be checked against their own sources rather than taken on faith. Every page carries the date it last changed, derived from the revision history rather than typed in. And corrections reach a person and are recorded rather than made quietly.

Getting in touch

If a figure here is wrong, that is the most useful thing you can tell us and it goes to the top of the queue. If something is explained badly, that is worth saying too. If a calculator you came looking for does not exist, knowing that genuinely changes what gets built next. Contact details are here.