Two people are behind everything on RetirementCalc: the person who researches and drafts a guide, and the person who signs off on the underlying numbers before it goes live.
Jessica Martinez
Contributing Writer, Business & Finance
Jessica writes the retirement guides on this site: how much a household needs, age-based savings checkpoints, the 4% withdrawal rule, Roth versus Traditional IRA decisions, and the practical question of when someone can actually stop working. Before she wrote about money for a living, she spent six years underwriting consumer loan files at a regional bank, reading a stated number against the paperwork behind it rather than taking it on faith, a habit that carried straight over into checking a contribution limit against the IRS notice that set it.
Her byline runs on How Much Do I Need to Retire?, Retirement Savings by Age, The 4% Rule, Is $1 Million Enough to Retire?, When Can I Retire?, and Roth vs Traditional IRA. She also writes about loans and paychecks for two sibling sites, LoanCalcTools and PaystubTools, under the same review process described below.
Before one of her drafts goes live: every dollar figure in a worked example is recalculated by hand against the underlying formula rather than trusted from a prior version of the page. A cited limit, whether that is a 401k contribution ceiling, an IRA catch-up amount, or the RMD table's starting age, is traced to the specific IRS revenue procedure or Treasury regulation that set it, and the tax year is labeled on the page rather than left implied. Any historical claim, such as what the Trinity study actually tested, is checked against the original paper rather than a secondhand summary of it. Chris Terry (below) reviews a draft against those three checks before it publishes, and again whenever the IRS or SSA issues an update that could touch the page.
Chris Terry
Owner and Editor, Encore Promotional Products
Chris built the calculators on this site and owns and operates RetirementCalc, along with its sibling sites, through Encore Promotional Products. He sets the sourcing rule laid out on the editorial standards page, is the final check on every IRS and SSA figure before a page ships, and personally answers the contact form when a reader flags something that looks off.
What he checks: that each calculator's contribution limit, catch-up amount, or RMD factor matches the current tax year's published IRS figure rather than a stale one carried over from a template, that the underlying formula (compound growth, the RMD divisor method, the 4% withdrawal math) matches the published standard for that calculation, and that a reported error gets corrected and dated within the week rather than sitting in a queue.
How to reach us
Found a contribution limit that does not match this year's IRS notice, an RMD figure that does not match the current Uniform Lifetime Table, or a savings benchmark that looks out of date? Use the contact form. Messages reach Chris directly, and a confirmed correction is dated on the page, not quietly rewritten.