Retirement planning, built honestly.
Slackwater is a small, independent project with a simple goal: make tax-smart retirement planning accessible to Canadians.
Our mission
Most retirement tools tell you whether you have enough saved. Far fewer help you figure out how to actually draw it down in a tax-efficient way. Slackwater is built to close that gap — to take the complexity out of retirement planning and put tax-aware projections in the hands of everyday Canadians.
You set up once. From then on, the only recurring work is updating your balances. The one big input is your target spending; the headline answer is your earliest retirement date and the full plan behind it.
How it's built
Slackwater is bootstrapped and independently built in Canada by its founder, Mike Cousins. There are no investors to answer to and no growth targets to hit — just a tool that gets a little better each release.
Being small is a feature. It means the product can stay simple on the surface and honest about what it does and doesn't do.
The methodology
The math is the proof.
We don't have customer counts or press logos to show you. What we have is an engine you can trust.
A deterministic engine
Slackwater runs on a deterministic projection engine that computes your plan the same way every time. It handles federal and provincial tax across all ten provinces — including Quebec, with QPP and the federal abatement — along with CPP, OAS, RRSP, TFSA, and RRIF rules. It's one source of truth for every number the product reports.
Agent proposes, engine verifies
The Optimizer works on one principle: an on-device agent proposes candidate strategies, and the deterministic engine scores each one. The best engine-verified candidate becomes your plan. Every figure you see is one the engine actually computed — never a number invented by a language model.
Funding
Independently built.
Slackwater is proudly bootstrapped and independently funded. We answer to the people who use it, not to investors.