Welcome to The Retirement Beast

Buying a house was chapter one. Retirement is the long game.

The Retirement Beast is a free Canadian planning site — sibling to The Mortgage Beast — built on a simple observation: most retirement tools available to Canadians are either American math with a maple leaf pasted on, or lead-generation funnels where the "calculator" exists to book you into a sales call. We wanted the thing that didn't exist: planner-grade Canadian math, free, with every calculation shown.

What you can do here

Build a complete plan. The Plan Builder is the front door: a guided, seven-step wizard for singles and couples that produces a full year-by-year retirement plan. It handles the things Canadian tools routinely skip — pension income splitting optimized every year the way a planner does it on Form T1032, GIS with the real couple tables, locked-in accounts (LIRA/LIF) with jurisdiction-specific maximums, RRIF minimums on the younger spouse's age, and a survivor stress test that shows what actually happens to the plan when one of you dies. It ends with a Monte Carlo simulation across hundreds of market lifetimes and exports a full PDF — inputs, assumptions, derivations, and year-by-year tables in referenced appendices — that you could hand to a CFP®.

Or go deep on one question. Seven focused calculators: retirement readiness, CPP/OAS/GIS with timing charts and clawback math, RRSP/TFSA/RRIF contributions, year-by-year cash flow, the withdrawal sequencer for tax-smart drawdown order, Monte Carlo stress testing, and a scenario comparator.

Or just learn. The guides explain the system — CPP timing, the OAS clawback, GIS, RRIF rules, workplace pensions — in plain language, with a glossary for every term (the same definitions ship in every plan PDF).

How we keep the math honest

This is the part we're proudest of, and the part you should hold us to:

• Versioned, verified constants. Every government figure — brackets, benefit maximums, clawback thresholds, RRIF factors, LIF maximums — lives in a versioned data file with its source URL and a verification date, checked against CRA and Service Canada. OAS and GIS figures update quarterly; we track the schedule.
• The derivation is always visible. Tools show how a number was computed — the timing factor applied to your CPP, the residency proration on your OAS, the brackets and credits behind your tax bill — so you can check us.
• Tested like software, because it is. The engine runs under nearly two hundred automated tests, including regression suites that lock in every bug we've ever found so it can't come back.
• Assumptions are disclosed, not hidden. Where we simplify (and every model simplifies), it's stated on the tool and in the PDF — never buried.

Our promises

• Always free for the core tools. No paywall on the math.
• No sales funnel. Nobody will call you. Froogal doesn't do commissions.
• Privacy-first. Calculations run in your browser; your plan persists on your device, not our servers.
• Honest about limits. Froogal is a mascot, not a licensed advisor. Quebec provincial tax is still approximate (it's on the roadmap). When a decision is big — and retirement decisions are — verify with Service Canada, the CRA, and a qualified professional.

Start with the Plan Builder, or kick the tires with a five-minute readiness check. Either way: the beast is friendly, the math is Canadian, and nobody is selling you anything at the end.

Not financial advice. Always verify with Service Canada, CRA, and a qualified professional when decisions matter.