Why I'm building Slackwater

Hi — I’m Mike, and I’m building Slackwater. I wanted to write a short note about why.

The gap I kept running into

Most retirement tools are good at answering one question: do I have enough saved? Far fewer help with the question that actually keeps people up at night: once I stop working, how do I draw this money down without handing an unnecessary chunk of it to taxes?

That second question is where the real decisions live — which account to pull from each year, when to start CPP and OAS, how to split income with a spouse. So that’s what Slackwater is built around.

What Slackwater is

Slackwater is a retirement planner for Canadians. It’s meant to be simple on the surface: you set it up once, and after that the only recurring work is updating your balances. You tell it your target spending, and it tells you your earliest retirement date and the plan behind it.

Under the surface is a deterministic engine that does the tax math the same way every time, across all ten provinces. Every number the product shows you is a number that engine actually computed.

What it isn’t

I’m building this on my own, bootstrapped, in Canada. There’s no big team behind it and no venture money. I’d rather be honest about where it is than oversell it. If a feature isn’t built yet, I won’t pretend it is.

Thanks for taking a look. I’ll use this space for genuine product updates as things ship.