Your plan vs. your real spending

Two different questions

The app keeps two things apart on purpose:

• My Plan holds what you expect to spend. These lines — and only these lines — drive your forecast and your run-out date.
• Spending holds what you actually spent: imported statements and anything you add by hand. It's a record of the past.

Importing a statement, or adding a transaction by hand, never changes your forecast on its own. That surprises people, so it's worth saying plainly: if actual spending silently rewrote your plan, one unusual month — a new roof, a car repair, a wedding — would quietly reshape a thirty-year projection, and you could never be sure which numbers your forecast was running on.

Instead the two meet in one place, where you decide.

Plan, Actual, or Compare

At the top of the Spending tab is a three-way switch — Plan, Actual, Compare — that decides what the tab shows. The same switch appears in the Forecast tab's month detail once you've imported something, and it's one setting: change it in either place and both follow.

• Plan — the fixed figures your forecast runs on: your expense lines, and this month's spending picture built from them. Nothing imported is shown.
• Actual — only what your statements show: what you spent, by category, and the transactions behind it. No plan figures, no differences.
• Compare — both, side by side, with the difference.

Whichever you pick, your forecast is unchanged. The switch changes what's on screen, never what the projection is calculated from — and a line under the switch says so, so you never have to wonder.

Throughout the app, plan figures are blue and actual figures are teal, so you can always tell which kind of number you're looking at.

The one readiness line

In Actual and Compare, one line above everything else answers is my imported spending finished enough to trust? — with a short checklist underneath when it isn't:

• Too few complete months — under three, an average is one odd month away from meaningless. Import a few more statements (or, if you picked a custom range, widen it).
• Too much still uncategorized — over about a tenth of your spending has no category yet. Work through the review queue; each correction teaches a rule.

Those two block the verdict. A few gentler notes may follow — a plan category your statements never show (a bill paid from an account you haven't imported), a category that appears in only some months, or transactions that still look like transfers or card payments. Mark those 🚫 Excluded (see Transfers and exclusions) or the same dollars get counted twice.

While a blocking step remains, Home and the Forecast summary judge your plan on its own figures alone. Half-sorted spending is a different number, not a rougher one, so it isn't used against you. This is the only place the app passes judgement on your spending data; the comparison table below never repeats it.

The comparison

In Compare, the table lists every category with three columns:

Difference is actual minus plan. A positive figure (shown in amber) means you spend more than the plan assumes; a negative one (green) means less. The Actual column is an average over the months in your chosen window — the small tag on the heading says how many.

Each button makes one ordinary edit to one expense line — the same edit you could make by hand under My Plan → Expenses & debts, where you'll see it afterwards and can change it again. Add $310 to plan creates a line for a category your plan doesn't have yet. Update plan to $845 sets a line your plan already has to what you really spend, if you decide the plan should follow reality. There's no hidden switch and nothing to remember to turn off. Hover a button (or open the ⓘ beside it) to read exactly what it will write, before you click.

Nothing happens wholesale: Add all adds the missing lines at once, but an existing line is only ever changed one row at a time, on purpose.

There is no undo button. Changing a line replaces the figure that was there, so the row tells you afterwards what it was — ✓ Updated — was $600 — and you can type the old figure back under My Plan whenever you like. Your run-out date moves as soon as the change lands, because the forecast runs on that line.

Above the table, one sentence sums it up: what you spent per month across the window, and what your plan assumes. That plan figure counts the lines active this month, in today's dollars — the same number Home shows — so a line that starts later, or has already ended, isn't in it even though it's listed in the table.

Which dollars get entered

Your plan's expenses are written in the dollars of the month your plan starts, and the app grows them by inflation for you. Your statements are in the dollars of the months they happened. Where your plan started years ago those are not the same money, so the app enters the plan-start equivalent — $845 of recent spending might go in as $692 — and the forecast then grows it straight back to $845 for the months you actually spent it. Entering $845 itself would inflate your own spending a second time, every year for the life of the plan.

Whenever the two figures differ, the row says which one it enters (entered as $692/mo in Jan 2016 dollars) and the button's explanation shows the arithmetic. If your plan starts inside the window you're comparing, or the line is fixed at 0% inflation, they're the same figure and no note appears.

What the rows mean

• You spend more (or less) than you planned — one plan line covers this category; the difference shows how far the plan figure is from your actual average, and Update plan to $X sets that line to it. One exception: a line that wasn't active in the months you're comparing — one that has already ended, or hasn't started yet — is still listed and still compared, but it isn't offered, because this spending has nothing to do with it. Edit that one under My Plan.
• Not in your plan — you spend here but have no plan line for it. Adding one makes your forecast honest about a cost it was ignoring.
• Several plan lines cover this — "Mortgage" and "HOA" are both housing, say. You get the comparison against their total, but the app won't guess how to split a change, so edit those two under My Plan.
• No matching spending — a planned cost your statements don't show: paid in cash, from an account you haven't imported, or still ahead of you (like replacing the car). Listed so nothing is quietly dropped.

Average or typical month?

Where one month is far above the others in a category, that row also offers a typical (middle) month beside the average. Use the average when the spike is a real annual cost — an insurance premium, a renewal — because spreading it over twelve months is how you plan for it. Use the typical month when the spike was a one-off you don't expect again. The app also warns when a single month is more than about a third of the whole window's spending.

Choosing the window

Pick last 12 months, 24 months, or a custom range. The last-12 and last-24 windows use whole months only and skip the current, part-elapsed month — partway through a month your recurring bills may not have posted, and including them would undercount a bill you actually pay in full. A $510 loan payment shows up as $510.

The window you choose here is the one the whole app uses: the readiness line, the Forecast tab's summary, and Home all quote the same average over the same months.

Average, or the most recent month?

Beside the window there is a Monthly figure control with two settings.

• Average of these months (the default) — each Actual figure is the average of the complete months in the window. This is the right reading for a cost that varies, or one that lands once a year and has to be spread across it.
• Most recent month only — what you spent in the most recent complete month of that window, on its own. This is the right reading for a fixed bill like a mortgage, where one heavy month can otherwise lift the figure for the life of the plan. Anything you don't pay every month reads low here, or drops off the list entirely.

The setting belongs to the plan, so each of your plans can use a different one, and the Actual column says which is in force.

Loans and other costs that end

Some expenses aren't forever. A car loan or mortgage ends on a payoff date, unlike groceries. Lines that look like debts are tagged "loan?"; after adding one to your plan, open My Plan → Expenses & debts and give it a payoff month and 0% inflation, so it doesn't run for your whole retirement. See Expenses and debts.

If you add transactions by hand

Manual entries record what happened — useful for cash spending and anything your statements never show. They don't change your forecast, and the app says so right after you add one, offering to add the cost to your plan if it's genuinely recurring and your plan has no line for it yet.

One thing to watch: a manual entry is never treated as a duplicate of an imported one. If you record a purchase by hand and later import the statement containing it, you'll have it twice, which inflates that category's average. Delete the manual copy once the statement arrives.

Which dollars are these?

Expenses in My Plan are in today's dollars — the app grows them by inflation for you, so enter what something costs now, not what you think it'll cost in

1. Your run-out date always comes from those plan lines.

For more on reading the result, see Understanding your numbers. This is an educational estimate, not financial or tax advice.