Savings & investment accounts

Where to find it

In the app, go to My Plan → Savings & investment accounts and click + Add account for each pot of money you've saved. These are the buckets the forecast draws from when your spending is higher than your income in a given month.

The fields

• Name — a label, like Joint brokerage or Rollover IRA.
• Type — Cash / Savings, Brokerage, 401(k), IRA, Roth IRA, or Other. Type controls two things: where the account sits in the default spending order, and how its withdrawals are taxed (see below).
• Balance — the current balance at plan start, in today's dollars.
• Annual return % — the growth you expect per year, entered as a percentage. Cash might be 1%, a stock-heavy brokerage account 6%. The app applies this growth every month.

How accounts get spent: the withdrawal order

Each month, the forecast compares your income to your expenses:

• A surplus month adds the extra to the first account that can sensibly hold it: cash, then a brokerage account, then a tax-deferred one — and never a Roth IRA. Money you have left over has already been taxed, and nobody can pay it into a Roth without earned income and within the annual limits, so the forecast doesn't pretend otherwise. (If the only account in your plan is a Roth — or you have no accounts at all — the surplus is held in an implicit Cash on hand pot, which appears in the month detail and the drawdown chart only if it is actually used.)
• A shortfall month draws the missing amount from your accounts, one after another, in a set order — emptying the first before touching the next.

The default order is cash → brokerage → 401(k) → IRA → Roth IRA → other. The idea is to spend easy, non-growing cash before dipping into accounts that are still earning returns or that carry tax advantages.

Reordering

The account list is shown in the exact order money is spent, each tagged Spent #1, Spent #2, and so on. Use the ↑ / ↓ buttons to move an account earlier or later. A common reason to reorder: spend a low-return cash account before a high-growth one so your investments keep compounding longer.

Tax treatment by account type

When the tax model is turned on, the type of account decides how withdrawals are taxed:

• 401(k) and IRA — withdrawals are taxable ordinary income, just like a paycheck. These accounts are also subject to Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs) — the IRS forces you to start withdrawing a minimum each year at age 73, or 75 if you were born in 1960 or later. See RMD in the glossary.
• Roth IRA — withdrawals are tax-free, and there are no RMDs during your life.
• Cash and brokerage — the money you put in was already taxed, so spending it doesn't create new ordinary income. Selling investments in a brokerage account does realize a capital gain on the growth above your cost basis, taxed at the 0/15/20% long-term rates; interest on cash counts as ordinary income. Set each brokerage account's cost basis so only real growth is taxed — see Taxes & RMDs.

If the tax model is off, none of this applies — every account is just a balance that grows and gets spent, with no tax.

Example

Suppose you have $40,000 in cash at 1%, $300,000 in a brokerage at 6%, and $250,000 in an IRA at 5%. Leaving the default order, a shortfall month first drains the cash, then the brokerage, then the IRA. With the tax model on, IRA withdrawals add to your taxable income in full, brokerage sales are taxed only on the gain above your cost basis — and the IRA also gets pushed to distribute its RMD each year once you turn 73.

What to do next

With income, expenses, and accounts all in, open the Forecast tab and read the projection.