Sharing a plan

The share button sits at the top right of one of your own plans, next to rename and delete. It gives you a link. Send that link to your spouse, to a friend who knows more about this than you do, to an advisor, to a forum thread where you want the plan pulled apart, or to us at feedback@ForecastYourMoney.com when a number looks wrong and a screenshot will not settle it.

Whoever opens it sees the plan, read only: the projection, the cash flow, the year by year detail, the simulations, all of it. They do not need an account, because there are no accounts.

The link is the plan

Planners with this level of detail typically save a copy of your plan on their server, so they’re able to hand you a short link that points at it. We do not have your plan on a server, and this feature did not change that. Instead the whole plan is encoded into the link itself.

That is the one decision everything else on this page follows from. It is why the link is long, why it works with no account, why nothing is uploaded, and why we cannot turn one off for you later.

What travels with it

Everything the forecast needs to reproduce itself:

Balances, cost basis, and account types
Income and expenses, their amounts, and the years they run
Debts, their rates and payments
Your stock, bond, and cash mix
Household shape, single or couple
Birth month and year
State of residence
Each account’s last-updated month (stamped when you change Current value) and each debt’s Balance as of month. These travel as the month on the row, not as the month you made the link, so a balance last updated in 2026 still says 2026 to someone opening the link in 2029, next to how long ago that was
The month you made the link

What does not

Any name or label you typed. Not the plan’s name, not “Dad’s rollover IRA”, not “Maui 2031”. The person opening the link sees generic labels instead: Primary and Spouse, 401(k) 1, Education.
Anything about you as a user. There is no account to leak, no email address, and no identifier that ties one link to another.
Your other plans. A link is one plan, the one you were looking at.

The names are dropped because the forecast never used them. They are labels for your benefit, so leaving them out costs the reader nothing but a nicer word for a row.

A file that keeps the names, useful as a backup or a move to another browser, lives under Settings › Your plans, not in this dialog. Plans and what is saved.

Why the link is so long

Because it is carrying a household. Written out plainly a plan runs to several thousand characters, so it gets packed down hard: field names disappear, categories become single letters, and anything you left at its default is not written at all. The four demo plans come out between 285 and 382 characters, which is about what a real plan looks like.

That is longer than a link you are used to and shorter than anything that breaks. Email, chat apps, and forum posts all handle it. The one thing worth doing is pasting it in one piece: some chat clients and email programs wrap a long link across two lines, and half a plan does not open.

It still does not go through our server

Look at the shape of the link. Everything after the # is the plan:

https://forecastyourmoney.com/app/s#f2~hc-CO-1984-5-92-1986-9-92~m65-25-d-b~Ak-340k-70-30…

The part after the # is called the fragment, and browsers treat it as a note to themselves. It is never sent to the web server, so it does not appear in server logs, it is not in our analytics, and it is not sent onward to any other site you click through to. Your browser keeps it and hands it to the app, which unpacks the plan locally. This is also why we put it there rather than in a normal query string, where it would end up in logs everywhere.

What that does not mean is that a link is private. You are sending it to someone, which means they have it, and so does whatever carried it: their inbox, the group chat, the forum thread, a screenshot. See Privacy for the full picture of what stays in your browser.

Anyone with the link can open it, forever

There is no way to switch a link off, because there is nothing on our side to switch off. The plan is in the link. Someone who saved it can open it again next year.

Posting one publicly is a fair use of this. Asking a forum to pick holes in your plan is the sort of thing these links are good at, and one beats a stack of screenshots. Just decide before you post that you are comfortable with the numbers being public, because you cannot take the link back afterward.

A link is a snapshot

The link carries the plan as it was when you copied it. Editing your plan afterwards changes nothing for anyone holding an older link, which is usually what you want, since a conversation should keep discussing the plan it started with.

When you do want someone to see the newer version, copy a fresh link and send that. It will be a different link, not an updated one.

What the person you send it to sees

The plan opens read only, on the Projections tab, with a banner saying where it came from. Every tab works, so they can read the inputs, the cash flow, the year by year detail, and run the simulations.

If they change anything, the app offers to save it as a plan of their own in their own browser. That copy is theirs, it is not connected to yours, and you are not told about it. The plan they were sent is not saved anywhere by itself: close the tab without saving a copy and it is gone until the link is opened again.

If a link will not open

The app will say so rather than show half a plan. Almost always it is one of these:

The link got cut in half on its way over, usually by line wrapping. Ask for it again and paste it in one piece.
Only part of it was copied. Everything after the # is the plan, so a link that stops at /app/s has nothing in it.
It was made by a newer version of Forecast Your Money than the one your browser has loaded. Reload the page first. If it still will not open, ask for a fresh link.

Old links keep working when the app changes. That is deliberate, and it is why the packed format carries a version tag.