I'm About 10 Years From Retirement, So I Started Building My Own Money Tools

The Moment the Math Got Personal

For most of my working life, "retirement" was a word that lived in the same drawer as "estate planning" and "long-term care" — important, vaguely stressful, and easy to defer. Then one ordinary evening I plugged my numbers into one of those big-name retirement calculators, and it spit out a single figure with a red-ish tint and the emotional warmth of a parking ticket.

I'm a builder. I've spent the last couple of years making small AI tools for everything from my kids' reading practice to my own content workflow. And my honest reaction to that calculator wasn't fear — it was irritation. Not because the number was wrong, but because the tool clearly didn't care whether I understood it. It gave me an output and no comprehension. No plain-English "here's what this actually means for someone in your situation." Just a number, and the door.

That's the moment personal finance stopped being a someday topic and became a building problem. If I'm roughly ten years out from retirement — a "pre-retiree," in the industry's term — then I am exactly the person these tools are supposedly for. And they weren't serving me. So the question got interesting: what would the tool look like if it were built to make me understand, not just to make me anxious?

Why Pre-Retirees Are Strangely Underserved

Here's the odd thing. There is a staggering amount of financial content aimed at people my age. Articles, podcasts, newsletters, "7 mistakes" lists. What there isn't much of is financial clarity — tools that take your actual situation and reflect it back in language a smart, busy person can absorb in two minutes.

The content tells you what to worry about. The calculators give you a number. But there's a missing middle: the part where someone says, in plain words, "Here's where you stand, here's what that means, and here are a few things worth thinking about." Not advice — clarity. The difference matters, and I'll come back to it.

Pre-retirees are underserved for a structural reason, too. We're not the most profitable customer for a lot of the financial industry — we're past the high-fee accumulation years and not yet at the big decisions that generate revenue. So we get content (cheap to produce) and scary calculators (great for lead generation), but rarely the calm, comprehension-first middle layer. That gap is exactly the kind of thing a small AI tool is weirdly good at filling.

Clarity Is Not Advice — and That Distinction Is the Whole Point

I want to be precise here, because it matters both legally and ethically: I am not a financial advisor, and nothing I build gives financial advice. I'm not telling anyone what to buy, how to allocate, or what they'll have at 65. I can't — I don't know your full picture, and predicting markets is a fool's errand anyway.

What a well-built tool can do is reflect your inputs back to you in plain English and surface general things worth thinking about. "You're nine years out, you've built a real base, here's what people in a similar spot often consider about healthcare timing." That's education. It's the friendly, comprehension-first layer that the scary calculator skips entirely.

This is also where AI earns its place. A good language model is genuinely excellent at taking a structured situation and explaining it like a patient, plain-spoken teacher — without jargon, without a sales motive, without making you feel dumb for asking. Used carefully, with guardrails, that's a real gift for exactly this audience. (I'll dig into where AI helps and where it absolutely should not be trusted in the next post.)

The First Tool I Shipped: A Retirement Runway Snapshot

So I built the thing I wanted to exist. It's called the Retirement Runway Snapshot, and the design goal was almost defiantly simple: no scary number, no spreadsheet, no jargon.

You answer a few quick questions — your current age and target retirement age, a rough range for what you've saved and what you're adding each month, and the one thing weighing on you most (healthcare, running out of money, market swings, taxes, supporting family). That's it. Ranges are fine; precision isn't the point. Then AI turns those inputs into a warm, plain-English read on your "runway" — where you stand and what it means — plus five concrete things worth thinking about, tuned to what you told it.

Notably, it never invents a dollar figure for what you'll have at retirement. It only has ranges, so it stays qualitative on purpose. The output isn't "you'll have $1.2M" — it's "here's how to think about the next ten years, and here are the questions worth chewing on." Every result carries a clear, visible note that it's educational, not advice. That constraint isn't a limitation I tolerated; it's the entire design philosophy.

Why Build It Myself Instead of Just Reading More?

Fair question. I could have read another fifty articles. But building forces a kind of honesty that reading never does. To make the tool, I had to decide exactly what inputs actually matter, what the output should and shouldn't say, and where the ethical lines are. I learned more about my own retirement thinking by building the tool than I ever did by consuming content about it.

There's also a compounding effect I've come to love. The first tool is the Snapshot. But once you have the pattern — a clean form, an AI layer with strong guardrails, a plain-English result — you can build the next one, and the next. A fee explainer. A "questions to ask a professional" generator. An income-picture sketch. Each one makes the topic a little less intimidating for someone like me. I'll lay out the ones I most want to build in a later post.

Mostly, though, building these is just how I think now. When something I need doesn't exist in the shape I want, I make a small version of it. It turns out retirement — the most defer-able topic there is — responds really well to that treatment. The act of building turns dread into curiosity. And curiosity, ten years out, is exactly the mindset I want.

Where This Goes

This is the first in a short series about using AI to make personal finance feel less like a parking ticket and more like a conversation. Next, I'll get specific about what AI is genuinely good at here, and the places it must never be trusted — because the guardrails are the part that makes any of this responsible.

If you're somewhere in that ten-year window too, I'd love for you to run the Snapshot and tell me what it got right and what it missed. Every bit of that feedback goes into making the next tool better. That's the whole point of building in the open: the tools get sharper because the people they're for keep talking back.