Piggy🌴 Retirement & saving
How much you can put away, and what it becomes.
ACA 400% Cliff + Retirement
Wrong vs right: a modest SEP/Solo 401(k) can restore thousands of PTC under the 2026 cliff.
⚠️Solo 401(k) 20% vs 25%
Wrong vs right: why most tools overstate a sole proprietor’s employer share — with dollar gaps.
🥇Solo 401(k) Contribution Limits
2026 limits done properly: 20% for the self-employed, not the 25% most tools apply.
🏦SEP-IRA vs Solo 401(k)
Which retirement plan lets a freelancer contribute more — and save more tax?
🚪IRA & Backdoor Roth
2026 $7,500 / $8,600 limits, Roth phaseouts and a pro-rata backdoor check.
🔁Roth Conversion Tax
Extra 2026 federal income tax if you convert traditional IRA dollars to Roth.
🌴Retirement Calculator
Project your nest egg and the monthly income it could sustain.
📈Compound Interest Calculator
Watch deposits plus monthly contributions snowball over the years.
🎯Savings Goal Calculator
The exact monthly amount to hit any savings target on time.
Self-employment removes the automatic pension and replaces it with something better, if you use it. The contribution limits available to a sole proprietor are several times what an employee can put into a workplace plan, because you are both the employee and the employer.
Which plan, and how much
The first question is usually SEP-IRA or Solo 401(k), and the answer depends on your profit more than anything else. A Solo 401(k) lets you contribute as employee and employer, which means it wins comfortably at moderate profits — often by tens of thousands of dollars — while a SEP-IRA is simpler and catches up at higher incomes. The gap is largest exactly where most freelancers are. Before you trust any “25% of compensation” figure from another tool, read Solo 401(k) 20% vs 25% — for sole proprietors the Pub 560 rate is 20% of net earnings after half of SE tax.
There is a second reason to care, and it has nothing to do with retirement. A deductible contribution reduces your adjusted gross income, which is the figure that governs your ACA premium tax credit. For anyone near the subsidy cliff, that makes a retirement contribution the highest-return move available — dollar comparison on ACA 400% cliff + retirement.
What it becomes
Once the plan is chosen the question is what the money does. The compound interest calculator shows the shape of regular contributions over decades, the retirement calculator projects a nest egg and the income it could sustain, and the savings goal calculator works the other way — from a target and a date back to the monthly amount that gets you there.
One habit is worth more than any of them for irregular income: set the contribution at what a bad month can support and treat good months as extra, rather than committing to a figure that a quiet quarter will break.