What Retirement Forecast is

The one-sentence version

Retirement Forecast projects, month by month, whether and when your money runs out — and lets you check that projection against what you actually earn and spend. It's an educational estimate to help you plan, not financial or tax advice.

The mental model: two halves that connect

The app has two connected halves. Once you see them as separate, the numbers stop being confusing.

• Your Plan (the Forecast). A forward-looking projection. You enter your

income, expenses, and savings, and the app draws month by month into the future to show whether your savings last. Plan figures are in today's dollars — what things cost or pay *now* — so you can reason about them.

• Your Spending (the Budget). A backward-looking record. You import your bank

or credit-card transactions and the app tracks what you *really* earned and spent, category by category.

The bridge between them. Your real spending can calibrate your Plan. The app averages your actual spending over the last full year and offers to drop that figure into your Forecast — so your projection rests on what you truly spend, not a guess. This is the single number that legitimately crosses from the Budget side into the Plan side. See Understanding your numbers for exactly how that works.

The four tabs

Along the top you'll find four tabs:

• Home — your at-a-glance status and the screen you land on. It answers "am I

on track?" in one line, shows this month's spending, flags anything that needs attention, and links you into the deeper tabs. Read The Home dashboard to get the most from it.

• Forecast — the full projection: a balance-over-time chart, a per-account

drawdown view, a month-by-month detail you can scrub through, and stress-tests (odds of success, what-if levers, Social Security timing, and an AI review).

• Budget — import spending from a CSV, categorize it, set targets, and apply

your real spending to the Forecast.

• My Numbers — where you enter everything: your profile (birth dates, life

expectancy), income streams, expenses and debts, and savings accounts. This is where you'll spend your first few minutes.

Free vs premium

The core forecast is free forever — the projection, your run-out date, the charts, the month detail, and saving your plan to your account. Some features (the budget import, Monte Carlo odds, what-if levers, the Social Security helper, and the AI review) are premium. New accounts start with a free trial. See Accounts and billing for the details.

Where to start

Head to Quick start for a step-by-step first run. It takes about ten minutes to replace the sample with your own numbers and see your outlook.

New to a term? The glossary defines every word the app uses.