About
Retirement is more than a math problem.
Most tools for this stage of life treat it as one big calculation. How much do you have. How long will it last. What are the odds. The questions are precise, the answers are precise, and the part of the problem that isn't arithmetic gets nothing.
But the hard part of leaving work was never only the money. It's the Tuesday morning with nothing on it. The marriage that suddenly has more hours in it than it's had in decades. The body that's changing. The friendships built around a job that's ending. The question of what any of it was for.
Bearings is built around a simple idea: retirement is nine things at once, not one. Money, work, body, place, people, time, meaning, legacy, and — if you own a business — succession. It measures where you stand across all of them, shows you what needs attention, and gives you something honest to read and a quiet place to think.
Who it's for.
People approaching retirement, or recently in it, who want to do it thoughtfully. Not the optimizers trying to escape work at forty. The rest of us — who spent thirty years or more building a life and now want to think clearly about the next part of it.
Bearings treats you as a capable adult who happens to be new to this particular terrain. It's intelligent without being cold, intimate without being saccharine, and honest about the things most products in this space are too polite to name.
What it refuses to be.
What a product says no to matters as much as what it builds. These are the lines Bearings holds.
Plenty of good tools will model whether your money lasts to ninety-five. We point you to them. Bearings is about the seventeen other questions a calculator can't answer.
No chat tab, no AI advisor, no expert to message. Coaches and therapists are worth seeing; we'll say so when it's time. We won't pretend to be one.
No streaks, no badges, no confetti for showing up. You're an adult making a serious decision. The dashboard tells you where you stand and trusts you with the answer.
No feed, no comments, no seeing what strangers wrote. Your assessment, your journal, your goals are yours. Privacy is the brand, not a setting.
The writing is by people. The reflection is your own. Nothing in the product talks back at you in generated text dressed up as insight.
FIRE is its own world with its own tools. Bearings is for the common case — leaving work in your sixties, on a normal timeline, wanting to do it well.
Who's behind it.
Bearings is small, and made in Canada. It was built by someone who looked at the tools meant to help with this transition and found them either cold spreadsheets or cheerful nonsense, with very little in between. This is the in-between: a tool that takes the whole of the thing seriously.
The writing is done by people and reviewed by people. Your data is yours alone — protected on every record, never sold, never shared, never turned into something other users can see. That isn't a feature we'll add later. It's the foundation.
Find your bearings.