Retirement Forecast Help Back to the app →

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Everything about using Retirement Forecast — how the numbers work, planning your future, tracking your spending, and stress-testing your plan. Search, or browse by topic.

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A 5-minute walkthrough from a blank plan to your run-out date.

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Getting started

What Retirement Forecast is
A plain-language tour of the app — the two halves (your Plan and your Spending), how they connect, and the four tabs.
Quick start
A ten-minute, first-run walkthrough — enter your numbers, read your outlook, add real spending, and stress-test the plan.

Core concepts

Understanding your numbers
Why the same category shows different dollar amounts — Plan, Projected, Actual, Target, and the trailing average — explained with a worked example.
The Home dashboard
How to read the Home screen — the outlook headline, this-month spending, the plan-vs-actual card, the two sparklines, and the alerts row.

Your plan (the forecast)

Profile & assumptions
Set who the plan is for, how long it runs, when it starts, and the default inflation rate.
Income streams
Add the money coming in — Social Security, pensions, work, and more — with start dates and raises.
Expenses & debts
Add what you spend and owe, with inflation overrides and payoff dates for loans.
Savings & investment accounts
Add your savings buckets, their growth rate, and the order they're spent to cover shortfalls.
Taxes & RMDs
Turn on an optional, realistic income-tax estimate — federal brackets, Social Security tax, and RMDs at 73.
Reading the projection
How to read the Forecast tab — run-out date, years of runway, the charts, and any month's detail.

Your spending (the budget)

The Budget tab at a glance
The Budget tab tracks your actual month-by-month income and spending against the monthly targets you set — kept separate from the retirement forecast.
Importing transactions from your bank
Upload a bank or credit-card CSV, map the columns, preview what's new, and import — the app auto-detects the amount sign and sets aside payments and transfers.
Managing your categories
Add, rename, or delete your own expense and income categories; deleting one moves its transactions to a fallback, and income and expenses have separate lists.
Categorizing your transactions
Five ways to sort transactions into categories — the review queue that learns, group-by-merchant, bulk select, AI auto-categorize, and search-and-filter.
Transfers, card payments, and exclusions
Use the Excluded option for money that isn't spending — transfers and credit-card payments — to avoid double-counting when you import both a checking account and a card.
Seeing your spending trends
The Income vs spending chart plots income, spending, and a Net line over time, with a Month/Year toggle — transfers and card payments excluded so it reflects real cash flow.

Connecting your plan & spending

Use your real spending in the forecast
Base your forecast on an average of your real, imported spending — a reversible toggle that averages over whole months, keeps each category, and skips excluded items.

Stress-testing your plan

Stress-test your plan
An overview of the four lenses — odds of success, what-if levers, Social Security timing, and AI review — that pressure-test your forecast.
Odds of success (Monte Carlo)
A probability-of-success estimate that runs ~500 randomized projections — how to read it, and what a 0% result really means.
What-if levers and Social Security timing
Two lenses — one-click what-if previews, and a side-by-side comparison of claiming Social Security at 62, 65, 67, or 70.
AI review
A grounded assistant that reads your real plan and results, then suggests concrete moves — and answers a question you type.

Account & data

Accounts and billing
How accounts work, what's free versus premium, the free trial, and where to manage billing or sign out.
Privacy and security
How your data is kept private and secure — hashed passwords, no selling of your figures, email verification, and regular backups.

Reference

Glossary
Plain-language definitions, A to Z, for every term the app uses — from run-out date to sequence-of-returns risk.
Frequently asked questions
Quick answers to the real questions — 0% odds, mismatched spending numbers, credit-card imports, taxes, averaging, doubled spending, and data safety.