If you have an Israeli pension and a US 401(k), or CPF and a plan to leave Singapore, or Australian super and a move abroad โ every retirement tool you've tried has quietly given you the wrong answer.
A normal retirement calculator adds up everything you own, divides by a withdrawal rate, and hands you a date. That works if all your money lives under one set of rules.
It falls apart the moment it doesn't โ because each system locks your money until a different age, taxes it differently on the way out, and pays a state pension on its own schedule. Two people with identical net worth can have retirement dates a decade apart purely because of where the money sits.
Not an edge case. If you've moved country once in your working life, this is probably you.
You worked in the US, made aliyah, and now have a 401(k) you can't touch until 59ยฝ plus an Israeli pension locked to 60 โ under two tax authorities that both think they have a claim.
Years of CPF contributions, but you don't intend to retire in Singapore. What you can withdraw, when, and what it's worth after you leave is genuinely hard to find out.
Australian super preserved until 60, family and possibly a future in another country, and no tool that will put both halves of your life on one timeline.
Single-country calculators treat your move as a fact about your past. For anyone still deciding, it is the largest variable in the plan โ and it is the one thing a tool built for one country structurally cannot see.
Several countries โ Israel among them โ grant substantial, time-limited relief to new and returning residents on foreign-source income and gains. The relief is measured from the date residency begins, which means the month you arrive can be worth more than a year of saving. Whether it applies to you, and for how long, depends on facts we can't see from here.
Some jurisdictions treat severing residency as a deemed disposal of your assets โ an exit charge on gains you haven't actually realised. When you sever, what you hold at that moment, and in what wrapper, all change the number. This is the part people discover after the fact.
A pension locked to 60 in one country and 59ยฝ in another don't average out โ they create a specific window your liquid savings have to cover alone. That window is where cross-border plans usually fail, and it's invisible if you model each half separately.
To be explicit about what this is. The three items above describe the shape of the decision, not your answer to it. Residency rules, treaty positions and exit charges turn on individual facts and change with legislation. We have not had these provisions reviewed by a tax professional in any market, and until we have, we will not put numbers against them. Treat this as a list of questions worth taking to an adviser โ that is genuinely all it is.
We're deciding which pair to build first, and this is how we're deciding. Pick yours โ it takes a second and it genuinely counts as a vote.
Built and live today: four deep single-country calculators โ Israel, Singapore, Australia and a general US/global model โ each modelling that country's real pension rules, access ages and tax treatment. If your money is all in one place, one of those already gives you a straight answer.
Not built yet: the combined engine that runs two systems on one timeline. That's the thing this page is about. We'd rather find out whether enough people need it before spending three months building it โ which is why there's a vote above instead of a promise.
What we won't do: we won't guess at tax-treaty specifics we haven't verified, and we won't pretend a rough model is precise. Cross-border tax is genuinely complicated, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. Whatever gets built will show its assumptions like the rest of the site does.
Join the list and you'll get the short series on what actually moves your retirement date โ plus first word when the cross-border tool ships. If you reply and tell us your situation, it shapes what we build.