About The Wise Senior

This site does two things. It works out what Medicare will actually cost you in a year, and it works through when to start Social Security. Around those sit a third section on what eldercare costs and who really pays for it, and a fourth of print-first checklists and dates. That is the whole scope, and keeping it that narrow is what lets us check every figure by hand.

What we are not

Most of what you find when you search these questions is a marketing operation wearing a calculator as a costume. The number is a doorway; the business is your phone number. So before anything else, four plain statements, each of which is enforced by an automated test that runs every time this site is built:

• •We are not the government. No agency endorses this site, and no page here is an official determination. Only Social Security, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, your state Medicaid agency, or the Department of Veterans Affairs can decide what you actually owe or receive.
• •We do not sell insurance. There is no licensed agent behind this site and no broker we hand you to. We do not offer, rank, or recommend any Medicare plan, and we never will.
• •We take no carrier money. No commissions, no referral fees, no per-lead payments, no sponsored placements. The affiliate configuration for this site forbids Medicare, insurance, and final-expense partners outright — a test fails the build if one is ever added.
• •We never ask for your phone number. There is no telephone field anywhere on this site, in any form, on any page. Nobody is going to call you because you used a calculator here.

Why this site exists

Two decisions in your sixties set the floor under everything that follows: what you pay for Medicare, and when you start Social Security. Both are governed by rules that are written down publicly and explained almost nowhere. The premium is one figure, but the income surcharge on top of it is assessed from a tax return you filed two years ago, which means the year to understand it is the year before you feel it. The claiming decision is usually reduced to a break-even year, which is the one part of it a spreadsheet can do and the part that matters least to a surviving spouse.

The people who most need this explained are the people the commercial sites most want to reach, so the plain version is hard to find. We built the plain version.

No unverified number, ever

Every figure on this site that can change — premiums, deductibles, income brackets, cost-of-living adjustments, benefit limits, state care costs — lives in a versioned data pack that records the official document it came from, the year it takes effect, and the date a person last checked it against that document. Each calculator prints that provenance on the page, at full reading size rather than as fine print.

When a figure goes stale, the tool says so loudly instead of quietly guessing, and a page whose data has not been verified does not get published at all. That trail is the whole basis on which we ask you to trust the arithmetic — how every figure is checked describes the process in full, and our editorial policy sets out who writes what, how corrections are handled, and exactly how the site is funded.

Built for reading, not for skimming

Nothing on this site is set below 16 point, and the body text is larger than that. There is a text-size control and a separate high-contrast switch in the header, every page prints cleanly with its sources attached, and every calculator can be worked without a mouse. Fine print is where a site hides the things a reader most needs, so there is none here.

Your numbers stay on your own device

Every calculator runs entirely inside your browser. Your income, your benefit amount, your birth date, and anything you save to the Numbers Card never leave your device — they are not sent to us, to an analytics service, or to anyone else, because there is nowhere for them to be sent to. There is no account system and nothing stored on our side. Advertising and analytics load only after you accept cookies. The full privacy policy spells out the rest.

Where we send you instead

The most useful thing this site can do for some readers is get them off it and in front of the right person. Choosing between coverage options is one of those times, and there are three free, unbiased places to take that question: Medicare Plan Finder (medicare.gov), 1-800-MEDICARE (1-800-633-4227), and Your state SHIP — free, unbiased counseling. Our who to ask page routes ten common situations to the right free help, and we earn nothing from any of them.

Who we are

The Wise Senior is a product of Cosyslabs Inc., an independent software studio in Ontario, Canada that builds practical, privacy-first web tools. The same studio runs a number of other free calculator sites, and one or two of them cover the neighboring questions this site deliberately leaves alone:

• 📈Budget Build Invest — Retirement, savings, and investment calculators — and the home of our HSA and FSA tools and contribution-limit pages.
• 🎖️Gov Money Benefits — VA disability rating and back-pay math, federal-employee retirement (FERS and TSP), GS pay, and military pay charts.
• 🩺My Health My Wellness — Health calculators with every formula cited to a primary source — A1C and blood sugar, body composition, and a private numbers log.
• 🧾Work, Money & Tax — Unemployment benefits by state, severance and layoff math, and take-home pay for every US state and Canadian province.

Corrections and contact

If a figure here disagrees with the official table it claims to come from, please tell us. Corrections go to the front of the queue ahead of everything else, and what we changed and when is logged in public on our corrections page. Write to us through the contact page or by email at [email protected]. We read every message; email is the only address we have, and it is the only one we ask you for.