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Explore the page
- 01
Choose a chart
Choose a chart from the menu above the forecast. The 15 built-in charts are grouped into Year by year, Income & Tax, and Where you stand. You can also create up to 12 custom plots with up to 8 figures each. Star a chart to keep it near the top.
The same row gives you What-If, Today’s money, Market Simulator, Spending Simulator, and Roth Conversion. Flow is available on the cash-flow chart. Log scale is unavailable while Flow is on and on the two income-tax charts. Every chart also offers CSV, which downloads the figures it draws as a spreadsheet file.
On the Guardrails chart, edit either rate directly in the legend. The default rails sit 20% above and below the initial retirement withdrawal rate. Reset restores those defaults.
- 02
Explore a year in detail
Click a bar to pin a year; hover over another year to preview it. The details panel follows the pinned year and the selected chart. It can show a cash-flow breakdown, changes in net worth, or income by tax bracket. Flow turns the pinned year’s cash flow into a diagram.
Timeline badges mark events such as retirement, property sales, required withdrawals, Medicare, and life milestones. What-If, plan comparisons, and selected resilience runs can add a dashed comparison line. The taxable-net-worth chart omits that line for a resilience run.
Drag the divider beside the chart to resize the panel, or the handle below to change chart height. Double-click either handle to reset it.
- 03
Viewing the full forecast
Every account can read the full forecast timeline. Explore any year through chart tooltips, keyboard navigation, pinned years, the details slider, and custom-plot previews.
- 04
Review your assumptions
Use the settings strip below the chart to review your household, inflation, investment returns, cash-flow priorities, selling order, tax timing, health coverage, and life milestones. Select an item to open its settings.
Changes to assumptions recalculate the forecast. Life milestones mark events found in the projection; they also affect the calculation when a retirement or another plan item uses a milestone as its date. Dimmed badges indicate milestones the plan does not reach or that are hidden from the chart.
Manage The year so far and any capital-loss carryforward from before the plan in Default settings; new plans inherit both. Selling a taxable account for less than you put into it always realises the loss against the year's gains, so there is nothing to switch on here.
- 05
Edit your plan entries
Income, Real estate, Spending, and Investments contain the entries behind your forecast. Open several sections together, or choose Only to focus on one. Select a card to edit it, or use the add button to create an entry.
You can add as many items as you need, during setup and after your first projection.
Card amounts reflect the year pinned on the chart. Moving between years changes the displayed amounts without editing the plan.
Shared plans are view-only. Viewers can explore them but cannot add entries, change settings, or use What-If, Spending Simulator, or Roth Conversion.
A link shared from a What-If opens with the sender's unsaved changes laid over the plan and the plan they were tried against drawn dashed underneath, as they stood when the link was made. The Shared What-If control's Show the plan as saved takes them off.
- 06
Wellness, action items & milestones
The Financial wellness bar summarizes your scorecard ratings and opens the full scorecard.
Action items list the real-world steps assumed by your plan, such as enrolling in coverage, completing a conversion, or taking a required withdrawal. Each item shows its due year; items due this year open automatically.
Milestones show retirements, income and spending changes, paid-off loans, property sales, major tax changes, and any year cash runs out. Each row shows the event’s annual impact and your projected net worth at that point.
What changes what
Controls & settings
Check what each control changes and whether it recalculates your forecast.
Chooses which of the built-in charts or composed plots is drawn, and, for the cash-flow chart, whether the pinned year is shown as a flow diagram instead of bars. The pick is remembered on an owned plan and favorites are kept in this browser; the projection itself is untouched.
Discounts every figure on the charts, the panel, the cards, the action items and the milestones back to what it would buy at today’s prices, at the inflation the plan assumes (3% unless changed) or, under a dealt run, the inflation that run lived. Tax was already worked out on the money actually earned and is not recomputed.
Bends the chart’s axis so that every multiplication by ten is the same distance up, keeping the working years visible beside a house-sale year. Below about $10,000 the axis stays straight. Only the geometry changes; dollar labels and tooltips keep the settled amounts.
Downloads the figures behind the chart on screen as a spreadsheet file: one row a year, with the plan year, calendar year and ages, a column for every band the chart draws, its total, any rate traced over the bars, and the year’s milestones — in the money the chart is showing. On the cash-flow chart in Flow, the file holds the opened year’s sources and destinations instead. The export uses the full forecast timeline; nothing is recomputed.
Grows the chosen accounts by an index’s actual calendar-year returns from a chosen start year, landing on a chosen year of the plan — or replays one of four named crises (1929, 1973, 2000, 2008), landing on the first retired year where the plan retires.
Cash accounts keep their own rate; years before the landing and past the end of the data grow at each account’s own rate. Under a dealt run from Plan resilience, the button names the run instead.
Lets retired years bend their spending with how the portfolio is doing under one of five rules — Guyton-Klinger guardrails, a share of the portfolio, variable percentage withdrawal, the 95% rule or a raise-only ratchet — inside a floor and ceiling. Off, every retired year spends exactly what the cards say.
Opens the compact form of the tax-planning sweep: the plan is rerun against six federal brackets (10% to 35%) from a conversion-free baseline, and the chosen bracket becomes a saved year-by-year conversion schedule that every chart follows.
What-If freezes the projection as it stands and lets every edit stay on the page unsaved, drawing the old projection as a dashed line under the new one, with three ways out: keep, revert, or save the edits as a new plan. Share with these changes opens the share dialog with the edits included: the link opens the plan with them, for whoever the plan's sharing already reaches, and is not a way out — the edits stay unsaved.
Compare lays another saved plan’s projection — computed on this device from that plan — under the charts; it changes nothing and saves normally. Neither projects this plan again by itself; the edits made under What-If do. The menu is absent on a shared plan and while a dealt run is on, except as Shared What-If when a link carried one.
Each item opens the settings dialog on one assumption — household and state, inflation, default returns, cash-flow priorities, selling order, health cover, life milestones. Saving any of them projects the whole plan again. Life milestones are the partial exception: a milestone is a question asked of the projection, and one nothing depends on moves no figure.
Two things can depend on one — a retirement decided by a milestone instead of by an age, and anything on the plan that takes its date from one — and where either does, changing that milestone’s chain moves the moment with it and the plan is projected again like any other setting.
Reading the result
Read the results
A net-worth bar’s solid height is net worth; the hatched cap above it is what is held but already owed. The net-worth ledger beside it nets every transfer to zero, so a contribution, a Roth conversion or a mortgage principal payment is not growth and does not appear — only earnings, employer money, investment and property gains, tax, costs, interest and transaction costs move the bar.
A milestone row carries two different figures: the impact is a full year of that item in that year’s money (wages that stop, a payment freed), and the net worth is where the plan already stands by that year’s end. Neither is recomputed; both come from the same series as the charts.
Today’s money changes what the answer is counted in, never which answer it is: which moments exist, which years the tax bill moves sharply in and the year the cash runs out are all found in the plan’s own arithmetic, and a shortfall does not become a surplus by discounting.
With the Market Simulator on, the average return is not the point — the order is. The same returns arriving worst-first leave the plan somewhere else entirely, and the dialog draws the sequence as bars and names the worst year and the deepest drawdown for that reason.
Under Log scale the slices inside one bar are no longer to scale against each other, and a segment that looks twice as tall is not necessarily twice the money; hover a year to read the dollars.
One plan, several readings
Related pages
Plan resilience →
A run dealt on the Plan resilience page can be read here as the market the accounts grow by; the Market Simulator button then names the run, the dashed line under the bars is the plan’s own assumptions, and the dialog offers the way to let the run go.
Wellness →
The Financial wellness bar above the milestones is the same scorecard the Wellness page holds, shown as counts per verdict; the link opens the full scorecard in a new tab so the projection stays where it was.
Tax Planning →
The Roth Conversion button is a second presentation of the Tax Planning page’s calculation, run from the same conversion-free baseline so a schedule already on the plan does not consume the bracket room being considered.
The plan’s own sections
The four sections under the chart are the same Income, Real estate, Spending and Investments the guided setup walks through, described once so the walkthrough and the projection can never disagree.
Keep following the math
Key concepts
Keep in mind
Model limits
The page does not grade the plan or say how often it makes it: whether it is a good plan is the wellness scorecard’s question and whether it survives a bad market is the resilience page’s. What is drawn is one projection at the plan’s own assumptions, or one real or dealt sequence when the Market Simulator says so.
Action-item years come from a plan that knows everybody’s age and nobody’s birthday; the exact deadline has to be checked with the agency before it is relied on.
A life milestone is a question asked of the projection, answered with the first year it says yes or with ‘not reached’, and one nothing depends on changes no figure at all. It moves money once something is dated by it — a retirement decided by a milestone instead of by an age, an income that starts at ‘debt-free’, a house bought the year the household is worth a million — and then the milestone’s answer is that date, so changing the chain moves whatever is dated by it.
The projection is computed in the browser over the whole horizon. Nothing on the page is a guarantee about what markets, prices or tax law will actually do.
What-If edits are not saved, and leaving the page drops them; comparing another plan only reads it and changes neither plan.
This guide documents the page as built. The figures on it follow the plan’s own assumptions; none of it is individualized tax, legal, Medicare, or investment advice.