How the Year-End Checklist is built

The Year-End Checklist is an orchestrator, not a calculator. It does not re-derive your RMD, your safe-harbor payment, or your harvestable losses. It assembles the situational list of actions that have a December 31 (or, in a few cases, an early-spring) deadline, drawn from your own profile, accounts, and current-year figures, and for each one it shows a one-line estimate, a countdown, and a deep link to the tool that owns the exact number.

How the list is assembled

The checklist is built from a normalized snapshot of your situation: filing status, date of birth, the account types you hold (a traditional IRA, an employer plan, a taxable brokerage), and current-year figures the rest of the product has already computed. Each rule decides for itself whether it applies. Items that do not apply to you simply do not appear, so the list is short and specific rather than a generic 20-point article.

Applicable items are ordered by severity, so the highest-stakes actions lead as the year closes: a missed Required Minimum Distribution carries a 25% excise tax (10% if corrected promptly under SECURE 2.0), and an underpaid estimated-tax safe harbor accrues a penalty, so those sort above lower-stakes opportunities like bracket-filling.

What it can surface

Depending on your situation, the checklist may include:

• IRA RMDs - the item is triggered by a traditional IRA, including a possible first-year RMD in its January 1 to April 1 grace window (the tool flags the open window from your age and the calendar; it does not track whether you have already taken the distribution, so confirm that in the RMD tracker). Employer-plan (401(k)/403(b)/457) RMDs at RMD age are not itemized from the plan alone; confirm those with the plan administrator.
• Estimated-tax safe harbor, including the prior-year fourth-quarter payment still open in its January grace window.
• Tax-loss harvesting when you hold lots showing a loss.
• Roth bracket-filling when you hold a pre-tax account (a traditional IRA or 401(k)) and have room in your bracket.
• Qualified Charitable Distributions once you reach the eligibility age.
• 529 contributions where your state offers a deduction or credit.
• Annual-exclusion gifting against the per-recipient limit.

Most items carry a one-line estimate, the days remaining, and a link to the owning tool such as "Open RMD tracker" or "Model this conversion." A few are informational and have no destination tool - the state 529 note, for instance.

Why "orchestrator, not calculator" matters

The load-bearing design rule is that a checklist item's bounded proxy is built to agree with the tool it links to, not to compute a second, divergent number. If the checklist flagged a harvestable loss the Loss Harvesting Scanner would not, the product would be talking out of both sides of its mouth. So the eligibility checks are tied to the same signals the destination tools use: tax-loss harvesting keys off a lot-level loss signal aligned with the scanner; the Roth item keys off a recorded pre-tax account (a traditional IRA or 401(k)), not merely bracket room; the 529 item reads your exact tax year and exact filing status; and the January grace-window items follow the same deadlines as the compliance tracker. The linked tool is always the authority for the exact figure - the checklist points, the owning tool computes.

Where a figure depends on data you have not entered, the item is withheld rather than guessed; and where a reference constant for a future tax year is not loaded yet (for example, an inflation-indexed limit), the tool can flag it rather than present a stale cap as current. The public year-end tool carries the most complete set of these disclosures.

Limitations (read these)

• It is situational from your inputs. A missing input means an item is correctly withheld, not that the action does not apply to you - fill in the relevant detail to surface it.
• The one-line figures are bounded proxies for triage, not the filing number. The linked tool owns the precise math, and that is the figure to act on.
• It covers the items above; it is not an exhaustive year-end tax plan, and it does not cover entity-level, multi-state, or trust filings.
• It is not advice. Ironlake surfaces the deadlines and the math; you decide what to act on, ideally with your tax professional.

You can try the public version on the Year-End Tax Moves checklist, or run the full situational list in the app.

Run your own year-end checklist