How to factor in pre-retirement taxes

Income Lab offers tax calculations for and before retirement. However, there are a few extra steps needed in order to properly calculate pre-retirement taxes. 

In pre-retirement, you'll want to make sure that you list the pre-tax contributions as deducted from another income source (for example, from wages); otherwise, you won't see a difference in pre-retirement taxation. Here's a screenshot of where you can do that. (In practice, we'd also want to include anything else that comes out of wages pre-tax.) 

Overall, you'll need both wages (and the deductible amount) and the account contributions. If you have different time phases of contributions, you'll have to enter two pairs of wages and contributions:

1. wages without deductions + post-tax contributions
2. wages with deductions + traditional pre-tax contributions