Your first forecast

The fastest way in is to not start from scratch.

Start with a demo plan

Open the app and look at the left sidebar. Under Demo plans there are four complete households already built: a family with a mortgage and kids, an engineer trying to retire at 37, a couple whose house is most of their plan, and a Wall Street exit at 55.

Click one. Every tab works immediately, because the plan is already full of numbers. Nothing you do to a demo can break anything: they are read-only, and the moment you try to edit one, the app offers to make you an editable copy instead.

Poke at a demo for two minutes before you build your own. It is much easier to recognize what a projection is telling you when you did not also just spend twenty minutes typing in balances.

Then build yours

New plan is the + in the sidebar’s Plans header. You can also start from a copy of any demo, which is often less work than starting blank.

Six things need to be there before a projection will run:

1. Household. Single or couple, and each person’s birth month and year. The birth month is not decorative: it decides RMD ages, early withdrawal penalty ages, and when the extra standard deduction at 65 kicks in.
2. State of residence. Required, because state income tax is modeled for all 50 states and DC. There is no national average to fall back on.
3. Planning-till age. How long the plan should run. The default is 90. It must be at least 15 years past the person’s current age.
4. Savings and investments. Balances by account, and cost basis on taxable accounts. Savings and investments only: not your house, not your cars.
5. Income and expenses. What comes in and what goes out, and for which years.
6. Portfolio allocation. Stocks, bonds, and cash. The default is 60/20/20. This is your target for the portfolio as a whole, and it is what new savings buy. Each account also carries its own mix, set when you add it, and the projection grows each one at the rate its own mix earns. A rebalancing strategy sits next to it: the default steers toward the target without forcing a taxable sale, and Let it drift never trades to a mix at all. How rebalancing works.

If Projections, Cash Flow, Details, and Simulations are blocked, one of the first three is missing. Inputs will tell you which.

What you will not be asked for

A rate of return. There is no box for it, and that is deliberate. Typing “7%” into a retirement calculator is how you get a forecast that has quietly assumed the market never has a bad decade at the worst possible moment. Returns, inflation, and taxes are all simulated or taken from statutory tables instead. See where the market numbers come from.

A tax rate. Same reasoning. See how taxes are estimated.

Where to look first

Once a plan runs, two tabs are worth your time in this order:

Projections shows one possible future in detail: a line for your liquid assets, with income, spending, and taxes as yearly bars underneath. The line is jagged, and that is not a bug. It is one real simulated path rather than a smooth average, and watching it is the point. When the tab loads it flashes through fifteen neighboring simulations before settling, so you can see how differently things could have gone.

Simulations shows the distribution instead: the chance of success across all 500 paths, and a fan showing where the middle of the pack lands each year. This is where the headline number lives. What that percentage means is worth reading before you act on it.

Then try breaking it

The forecast is more useful as a comparison than as a prediction. Clone your plan and change one thing: retire three years earlier, spend $500 a month more, move the allocation to 40% stocks. The market is held constant across plans, so the two are genuinely comparable and any difference you see came from your edit, not from a different roll of the dice.