Straight answers, no sales pitch.

Yes. The beginner path is about understanding account types, fund costs and basic tradeoffs — concepts that matter before a portfolio becomes large. If you're brand new, Start HereMoney Now gives you a flexible framework. The advisor calculator becomes more relevant if you pay an adviser or want to compare future fee structures.

There is no rule that every investor needs ongoing advice. If your finances are relatively straightforward and you are comfortable managing your account choices and behavior, you may be comfortable doing more yourself.

An advisor is more likely to earn their fee if your taxes or estate are genuinely complex, you're handling a big one-time event, or you know you'd panic-sell without someone to talk you through it. The point is to choose on purpose. Our cost calculator shows the long-term dollar cost so you can weigh it.

Start with near-term cash needs, understand your employer match, address expensive debt, learn the account you're using, choose a diversified investment you can explain, and automate a contribution you can sustain. The order can vary; Start Here explains the tradeoffs.

Don't trust anyone blindly — including us. Terra's goal is to show assumptions and let you change them so you can inspect the math rather than accept a claim on faith. Verify Terra too: time-sensitive rules should point to official sources and fund data should be traceable to the fund or research source.

Do not make the fund choice the first decision. Identify exactly what you received, separate money you may need soon, review emergency reserves and expensive debt, understand the account and tax rules, and then decide what portion is actually long-term investment money. Terra's New Money / Windfall path walks through that sequence.

Federal tax treatment depends on what you received and what happens afterward. IRS guidance generally distinguishes property received by inheritance from income that the inherited property later produces. Selling inherited property can also require determining its tax basis. State rules and inherited retirement accounts can add other issues, so Terra does not calculate inheritance tax liability.

No. A 401(k) generally receives employee salary deferrals through the workplace plan, and IRA contributions have annual limits and compensation rules. A windfall can still change your strategy — for example, it may give you enough outside cash flow to increase future workplace-plan contributions — but you cannot treat retirement accounts as unlimited deposit accounts. Check current IRS limits.

Pause before assuming an immediate sale is tax-neutral. Inherited property can have special basis rules, and inherited retirement accounts have a separate set of beneficiary rules. Gather the estate and brokerage paperwork first. See Inherited Investments: Before You Sell →

Terra does not treat one approach as universally correct. The decision depends on when the money is needed, the risk you can tolerate, and whether gradually investing helps you stick with the plan. The important first step is to separate near-term money from genuinely long-term money.

No. A one-time financial plan and ongoing asset management solve different problems. A windfall may justify professional help without automatically justifying a permanent percentage-of-assets fee. Compare the scope and dollar cost of each arrangement before choosing.

Terra Investor Tools is an independent educational project that grew from the founder's “down-to-earth options investing” philosophy. It isn't a brokerage, isn't a registered investment adviser, and doesn't manage anyone's money.

The current plan is to keep core educational tools free. Terra may eventually be supported by clearly labeled advertising and optional paid features. If partnerships or affiliate relationships are added, they should be disclosed where they appear.

The calculators run in your browser and do not require a brokerage login. Their design does not send your portfolio inputs to Terra for storage. Terra uses Google Analytics 4 to understand aggregate site usage such as page views, scrolling and outbound-link activity. Calculator input values and My Terra saved values are not intentionally sent to Google Analytics. See the Privacy page for details.

No. Everything here is educational and general. Terra shows you how the numbers work so you can make your own decisions or ask a professional better questions. It doesn't know your full situation and can't tell you what to buy.

No. The goal is to make a cost visible that's usually invisible — the long-run dollar impact of fees — not to push a verdict. Some advisors are well worth their fee. The calculator even shows the "return hurdle" an advisor would need to clear to justify their cost, so you can judge it for your own situation.

A 1% annual asset-based fee is a commonly encountered pricing structure, but advisory fees vary with account size and services. On larger balances over decades, 1% a year can add up to a very large number because of lost compounding. The cost calculator turns that percentage into an actual dollar figure for your situation. Flat-fee, hourly, subscription and lower-percentage arrangements are alternatives worth comparing. “Fee-only” describes how an adviser is compensated; it does not automatically mean inexpensive.

Projected Value Gap is the modeled difference in ending value between the two arrangements under the assumptions you entered. It includes the effect of costs and compounding in the scenario; it is not a forecast of what either arrangement will actually earn.

The comparison holds unrelated assumptions as constant as practical so the effect of costs is easier to see. The return hurdle is the extra modeled annual return the higher-cost arrangement would need to close that gap.

Very roughly: a percentage (AUM) advisor charges a percent of what they manage each year. A flat-fee advisor charges a set dollar amount regardless of balance. A fee-only describes an adviser compensated by clients rather than product commissions. It describes compensation structure, not price. Commission-based advisors are paid when you buy certain products, which can create incentives worth understanding. The calculator lets you model a flat-fee or lower-cost alternative to compare.

Sometimes moving triggers taxes or transfer friction, and that's a real consideration — the tool doesn't decide this for you. It gives you the long-term cost side of the equation so you can weigh it against the switching cost and the value your current advisor provides. A one-time cost to move can still be worth it if the yearly drag is large enough for long enough, but that math is personal.

It's a retirement account offered through your job. Money goes in straight from your paycheck, often with an employer "match" that adds free money on top. Inside the account your money is invested in funds and grows without yearly taxes. There are penalties for pulling it out early (generally before age 59½), so it's meant to be left alone to grow.

An IRA is a retirement account you open yourself at a broker, separate from your job. "Roth" means you pay tax on the money now and qualified withdrawals later are tax-free — often attractive when you're younger and in a lower tax bracket. It's usually not either/or: a common approach is to get your full 401(k) match first, then add a Roth IRA. Each has an annual contribution limit set by the IRS; look up the current-year number when you open one.

Log in to the provider your employer uses (the company that mails your statements), or ask your HR/benefits contact for the plan's fund list and fee disclosure. You're looking for the fund names, their expense ratios, and whether a target-date fund is offered. Our Terra Research shows how common fund types have performed against the market for context.

Useful things to examine include the employer match, vesting, plan-level fees, the quality and cost of the investment menu, and whether the available choices fit your time horizon and risk needs. Compare your funds' expense ratios to the low-cost benchmarks on the research page.

Not in the sense of a complete retirement plan. It shows a deterministic savings runway under the inputs you choose, converts the result into today's dollars, and compares a user-selected first-year withdrawal-rate illustration with your stated spending target. It does not automatically model Social Security, taxes, healthcare, longevity or sequence risk.

To isolate cost sensitivity. The gross-return assumption stays the same while the annual investment/advisory cost changes. The difference is a scenario result, not a promise that a lower-cost arrangement will produce identical real-world investment results.

No. The withdrawal rate is an editable illustration. Terra deliberately avoids labeling any fixed percentage “safe” for every person because taxes, market sequence, longevity, spending changes and other income sources can materially change a retirement plan.

No. It compares a no-conversion Tax/RMD baseline with the conversion assumptions you choose. A conversion can raise federal tax now, reduce future Traditional balances and RMDs, and change the mix of Traditional, Roth and taxable assets. Terra shows those tradeoffs but does not call a strategy optimal because Medicare IRMAA, state taxes, ACA subsidies, NIIT, future tax law, estate goals and personal tax facts can change the real answer.

Terra estimates a conversion amount that keeps modeled ordinary taxable income at or below the top of the federal bracket you selected for that year. The calculation allows Social Security taxation and deductions to react to the conversion. It is a scenario rule, not advice to use the entire bracket, and it does not optimize around IRMAA, ACA subsidies, NIIT or state-tax thresholds.

SPY is an ETF that tracks the S&P 500, a widely used benchmark for large U.S. companies. It is not the entire U.S. stock market. Terra uses it as a familiar benchmark when that comparison is relevant. Beating it consistently, after costs, is harder than it sounds, which is a big part of why low-cost index funds are so widely recommended.

CAGR is the steady yearly return that would carry your starting amount to your ending amount, accounting for compounding. A raw "up 200%" doesn't tell you whether that took 3 years or 30 — CAGR does, and it lets you compare two investments on the same per-year footing.

It's the fund's own yearly fee, shown as a percent. Expense ratios vary by fund and share class. The 401(k) Reality Check shows the current ratio for the specific share classes in its study and translates the percentage into dollars for the investment amount you choose.

Tax drag is the bite taxes take out of returns each year in a regular taxable account — on dividends and on gains you realize. Inside a 401(k) or IRA, growth is sheltered, so tax drag mostly doesn't apply there. That's why the cost calculator treats it as optional and focused on taxable portfolios.

It's the amount of extra return, every year, that a higher-cost arrangement would need in order to tie the lower-cost one after fees. It's not a claim that your advisor is bad — it's simply the bar their results have to clear to be worth the cost. Seeing that bar in plain numbers is the whole point.

No. They're scenario models, not forecasts. They hold the market return the same on both sides so you can isolate the effect of costs. Real markets bounce around and no one can promise a return — the tools show how the tradeoffs work, not what will happen. See the Methodology page for exactly what's assumed and left out.

A fund can sell appreciated securities inside the portfolio and distribute realized gains to shareholders. In a taxable account, those capital-gain distributions can be taxable to you even if you never sold your fund shares. Form 1099-DIV may show the distribution in Box 2a.

See the plain-English tax guide →

In a taxable account, reinvesting a dividend generally does not make the dividend disappear for tax purposes. Reinvestment buys more shares; it does not necessarily eliminate the income that was reported.

No. Index funds still trade when indexes change, when cash flows require transactions, and for other portfolio needs. Passive funds often have lower turnover than active funds, which can reduce opportunities for realized gains, but “passive” does not mean “no trading” or “tax free.”

No. Many ETFs can be more tax-efficient than comparable mutual funds because in-kind exchanges can reduce capital-gain distributions, but ETF investors can still owe tax on distributions and when appreciated ETF shares are sold.

Portfolio turnover measures how frequently a fund buys and sells investments. Higher turnover can mean higher trading costs and may produce more taxable consequences when the fund is held in a taxable account. Turnover is a signal, not a complete tax score.

No. A profitable taxable account can create legitimate tax cost from dividends, interest and gains. Potential tax inefficiency is a different question: whether turnover, short-term gains, fund structure or other choices are creating more taxable friction than the strategy requires. Terra helps surface the questions; it does not declare a tax bill “avoidable” without context.

Investment activity inside tax-advantaged retirement accounts generally does not create the same current annual capital-gains tax bill as a taxable brokerage account. Traditional and Roth accounts have different contribution and withdrawal tax rules.

No. Terra's Tax Drag Reality Check is an educational estimator. You supply the investment amounts and tax-rate assumptions. It does not replace a tax return, CPA, or tax attorney.