Getting Started
Richifi keeps your plan in this browser and, when you connect one, in a JSON file on your disk. Unlocking with your passphrase also switches on DB Sync, which mirrors that plan to Richifi’s own database so your devices stay in step — Data & Saving below spells out exactly what is stored where. Add your numbers and every chart, table and projection updates instantly.
- The left navigation opens with a row of top-level pages — Home (where you stand today, coaching included), Projection (the projection and life events), Goals (your target & the milestones on the way), Retirement, Income and Expenses (money in, and money out). Scenarios (how solid the plan is — confidence, stress tests and big questions, plus the What-If sandbox and your saved scenarios) and Accounts (bank, brokerage and loan feeds linked through Plaid) sit in that same top-level list. Below them a Portfolio group — Businesses, Stocks, Crypto, Savings, Real assets, Debts — carries what you own and owe, with its own running total in the divider. Settings (profile, appearance, currency, tax & location, data and your change History) is pinned at the foot of the rail. Most items show a live value beside them; Retirement shows your retirement year and Accounts the number of linked institutions. Your page is remembered in the URL — refresh or bookmark and you’ll land back where you were (old page links like
#stocks, #expenses or #scenarios still route to the right place).
- Getting in. A new browser opens on a gate with three doors. Start my own plan goes straight to the short form described next, with no account and no passphrase. Explore a sample plan loads someone else’s finished numbers and saves nothing. And the passphrase field is only for a plan you already sync from another device — entering it is what opens that plan and switches syncing on; you do not need one to begin. The sample is filled in end to end — a filing status and state (so Income’s Roth-versus-traditional step and the withdrawal-tax estimate have what they need), a Paid via method on each loan and debt payment, and a Projection Year that runs past both people’s retirement so Retirement and Projection open on a plan that actually retires — and the rail footer reads Sample prices rather than claiming a fetch that never ran. Once you are in, click the save-file line in Data & backups (Settings) to connect a JSON file, and every change is written to it as well; on later visits Richifi reconnects that file on its own, or asks for one click if the browser needs the permission again. That same panel holds Export, CSV, Import, Log, a price Refresh, and the save-file, DB Sync and Accounts status lines.
- Starting your own plan. Start my own plan on the gate (or in the bar at the top while you are exploring the sample) asks where your numbers should begin. Start fresh opens one short form, in five groups, with your age the only required answer (each label says required or optional; a default for a blank answer, like a 6.5% mortgage rate, is printed as a hint under the field rather than shown as a grey value). About you — a retirement age, an optional partner, and an optional filing status and state: with both, the Retirement page’s two withdrawal-tax rates are filled in exactly as picking them in Settings does. Money in and out — monthly take-home pay after tax and after 401(k), an optional salary per year before tax (stored beside the take-home as that income row’s gross, which is what Social Security’s estimate, the income percentile and the Roth-versus-traditional step read), and monthly spending excluding mortgage and loan payments, filed under its own Everyday living category rather than “Other”. What you save each month — your own 401(k) or workplace-plan contribution and, separately, your employer’s match (and the same for a partner), plus one household figure for other savings or investing, which is added to the Cash & savings account at its 4.5% rate; move it to an investment row later if that is where it goes. A 401(k) contribution comes out of your paycheck before take-home, so it is not subtracted from the take-home you entered. What you have — cash and savings, retirement accounts (one pre-tax row per person: taxed as ordinary income when withdrawn, so the 59½ gate and RMD modelling apply to it where those are on, and the Roth window can see it), and other investments as one taxable total. Home & debts — your home with its mortgage, and one line for other debts. It builds a clean plan from those answers alone (each one becomes a single editable row), turns saving on, lands you on Home, and leaves the Coach to say what to add next. Contributions to a person’s retirement row stop when that person retires; the shared savings deposit stops when the later of you does. Nothing is saved until you submit; Cancel, or Esc, leaves the sample as it was — or, if you came from the gate, takes you back to it. Keep the sample numbers (from the bar) turns saving on with the sample’s rows as your starting point instead — and if this browser already holds a saved plan, both choices replace it, which the dialog says before you commit, including when you arrive from the gate.
- Whose money is whose. Every row — each holding, account, business, debt, income and expense — carries an owner: you, your partner, or joint. Once you name a partner in Profile, each row shows whose it is, and every list gains a subtotal line reading You · Partner · Joint · Total. Under the Snapshot portfolio the same split is shown as net worth by person, and its total is exactly the net worth at the top of the page.
Joint is its own column, never split in half. Halving a shared house or mortgage would assert something the app cannot know — who put in the deposit, whose name is on the loan — and it is a one-way door: you can always work out halves from three columns, never the three columns back out of halves. So the three columns are a true split of the total, with nothing counted twice.
A few subtotals count slightly more than the rows directly above them, and say so where they do: Debts folds in loans recorded against your real assets, so its total matches the Total Debt figure at the top of that page; Income follows whichever basis the page headline is using, gross or take-home.
Retirement age can differ per person, and each person’s money now follows their own retirement date — their pay stops when they stop working, and their contributions stop with it. The household starts living off its reserves when the later of you retires, and the “will the money last?” test runs to the younger of you turning 90, since shared savings have to outlive whoever lives longest.
Where a figure depends on whose age it is, it now says so: net-worth milestones read Ray 43 · Madi 29 rather than a bare “at age 43”, and the money-lasts verdict names whose 90 it ran to.
There used to be a You / partner / Everyone toggle in the page header that filtered whole pages to one person. It was removed — it could only show one person by hiding the other, which destroyed the total in the act, and a shared row appeared under both people so the two personal views overlapped by the entire joint balance sheet. The subtotal columns answer the same question without ever computing a plan for half a household.
- Set the horizon. On the Projection page, choose the Projection Year (up to 55 years out) and an inflation rate — these drive every forward-looking page. On a brand-new plan, until you choose a Projection Year yourself, it follows your retirement: it starts five years out and is lifted to five years past the household’s retirement year as soon as you enter an age and retire age (once you have moved it, or reopened a saved plan, it stays exactly where you left it).
- Three words for what you spend. Wherever Richifi shows a spending figure it is one of these, by these names: Living costs — your expenses, with no loan or debt payments and no saving; Bills incl. debt — living costs plus loan and debt payments; All outflows — bills incl. debt plus the saving and investing you pay from take-home. The FI number and your retirement spend are both about living costs; the Expenses rail badge and headline are bills incl. debt.
- Explore safely. Use What-If to test changes without touching your real data, and save Scenarios to compare alternate futures side by side.
Tips: ⌘K (or the “Search or jump to…” box) jumps to any page or plan row and runs commands — add an income, expense, stock, crypto, savings account, asset, debt, business or life event (type add to list them all), run the market simulations, enter What-If, open the annual review, export a snapshot, JSON or CSV, jump to the guardrails and RMD switches, open the change log or this help; a page hidden from the rail in Settings is still reachable here · the first Tab stop on every page is a Skip to content link · forecast figures (nest egg at retirement, the Scenarios projections, Coast FI, lifetime interest) print to three significant figures, since they are projections, while today’s balances stay exact · drag the ⋮⋮ handle to reorder rows · Remove has an Undo toast · Duplicate clones a row · arrow keys move between nav items when the rail is focused · the light/dark switch sits in the page header (on a phone it is under Settings → Theme, and the search box becomes an icon that opens the same ⌘K palette) · the ? button (bottom-right, or in the top bar on a phone) opens help for the page you’re on.
Home
Home is a picture of today with the answer first. The headline is your net worth, with a 30-day change pill and percentile pills beside it and a two-line read of the plan underneath — the verdict (when you retire, whether the money lasts) and the figures it rests on. Beside it, a Needs attention card carries the Coach's top finding in full with the button that fixes it, the next two as one-line rows, and a footer counting what else is waiting; it reads Nothing urgent when nothing is wrong. Below sits a four-cell band: Assets, Debts, Liquid (with its share of assets) and Monthly surplus (what's left after bills, debt and saving), the first three carrying a sparkline of your last 30 daily snapshots. When there is a surplus of $100 a month or more, the surplus tile adds a line saying what the plan does with it — assumed spent — change by default, or N% kept as cash once you have set a share — and change takes you to the Leftover money card on Projection with the cursor in its box. Because that assumption moves the projection more than almost any other, a one-time question sits under the band the first time it applies: Where does your $6,230/mo surplus go? with Spent (keeps the default and records that you answered), Saved as cash (sets the share to 100%, the same way typing it into Leftover money would, so it shows in History like any other edit) and Some of each (takes you to the Leftover money box to type a share). The × dismisses it with the same record. It is asked only while the share is 0%, never in the sample plan and never inside What-If, and your answer is stored in the plan itself — it appears as a Dismissed entry at the foot of Coach, where Restore brings the question back — so it is not asked again on another device. Beneath it, while the plan is both unfinished and new, a compact Finish your plan — 6 of 8 card shows the same count as the Plan detail meter at the foot of Coach, with each part of the model still empty as a button to the page that fills it (Add income, Add property & vehicles, Add a net-worth goal and so on). It shows only while fewer than all eight parts are modelled and nothing this browser has recorded about the plan — a daily net-worth snapshot or a change-log entry — is 14 or more days old; it is never shown in the sample plan or inside What-If. The × hides it, the dismissal is stored in the plan itself, and it appears as a Dismissed entry at the foot of Coach with a Restore button, the same as the surplus question. The sticky bar of six figures that follows you down every other page stays out of the way here; your savings rate and emergency runway — savings (the spendable balance wherever your bank reports one, crypto excluded — it's a poor emergency asset) divided by Bills incl. debt (living costs plus every debt's minimum payment) — live on Coach and Savings.
- Percentile pills beside the headline rank your net worth against US benchmarks — Federal Reserve SCF 2022 for the household ranking, plus an age-band ranking once you set your age in Profile. A Profile set to a single earner, or the “You”/partner view of a couple's plan, ranks against a single-person table scaled down from the household one — an approximation, since no comparable published individual distribution exists. Income percentiles are a separate ranking and live on the Income page.
- Plan — one panel for where the plan is headed: the projection chart, its figure and horizon in the head beside What if… and “Open plan →”, and a ring showing your own retirement year and age (with a partner who retires in a different year, theirs is named beside it), how many years away it is, the nest egg you reach and the living costs you'll have then — each stated in the dollars of that year with today’s equivalent beside it, e.g. “in 2052 dollars (≈ $90K today)” — and whether the money lasts. The headline’s second line gives the nest egg at retirement and, when your Projection Year is not earlier than your retirement year, the figure at the Projection Year too; with the Projection Year earlier than retirement it carries the retirement figure alone (the Projection Year’s figure is on Projection). With no Profile age the ring reduces to a prompt to set one.
- Portfolio — a stacked bar of where your wealth sits, then the rows: Real assets, Businesses, Stocks, Savings, Crypto and Debts, largest first — a class you have never entered a row in, and that is $0 today, is left out (a class you have rows in stays, even at $0) — each with its value, its share of total assets and its 30-day change (the 30d column appears once two daily snapshots exist). Click any row to open that page. Once you set a target mix on Scenarios, the bar draws Stocks, Crypto and Savings first and marks the target boundaries with thin ticks inside that span; the rows stay largest first.
- Reading the charts. Figures are drawn on the chart itself, so you do not have to hover to read them: every pie slice carries its amount and its share, and bar charts label each bar. Dense year-by-year charts (the projection and the drawdown) stay on hover instead — a label per year would be a wall of text rather than a reading aid. Each series has its own colour, and no two in a chart repeat.
- Daily history — a snapshot of your figures is stored each day you open the app (never while What-If or the sample plan is active). On Home it surfaces as the 30-day change pill, the band sparklines, the 30d column and a History — Net Worth chart at the foot of the page; it is also what makes Forecast accuracy on the Projection page possible, since grading a past prediction needs a real measurement from the day it was about. Each class has its own day-by-day chart in the History card at the foot of Businesses, Stocks, Crypto, Savings, Real assets, Debts, Income and Expenses. A History chart appears once two days are stored.
- Since your last visit — a single muted line under the plan read, such as Since your last visit (12 days ago): net worth +$4,210 · biggest mover Stocks +$3,900 · 1 new Coach item. The change is measured against the daily snapshot from the last day you opened the plan; the biggest mover is the class (Stocks, Crypto, Savings, Business equity, Real assets or Debts) whose move shifted your net worth most, and new Coach items counts the findings and suggestions on Coach now that were not there then. Richifi remembers that visit with one small marker in this browser, updated the first time you open the plan on a new day. The line stays hidden on your first visit, until at least a day has passed, and while you are in the sample or What-If.
Coach
Coach is its own page in the menu — the rail badge shows how many things are open, or All clear when nothing is. Home’s Needs attention card shows the top three and counts the rest; the notes themselves live here.
- Coach — a rules-based read of your plan. Red dots flag things to fix (thin emergency runway, a debt whose payment doesn't cover its interest, a projected cash deficit, retirement savings running out, an employer match recorded against none of your own contribution — almost every match is conditional on your deferral, so it is either a typo or money that stops — or a pre-Medicare health-coverage gap: retiring before 65 means self-funding premiums until Medicare, which the plan otherwise funds at $0. One click, Try adding $1,000/mo for 2050–2052, puts it in What-If for each person who has a gap. Without a Spend in retirement figure it is one editable bridge expense for exactly those years. With one, an expense line from the household retirement year on would be ignored — that figure replaces every line — so the years before the household retires stay an expense line and the years from then on go in as one yearly Life Event each (growing 5%/yr from the first gap year), which the retirement drawdown does count; either way the row recognises what was added and stops); gold dots are suggestions (low savings rate, once your runway is past six months, cash beyond a month of costs parked in an account paying well under your own best rate — with a Try that moves it between your own accounts in What-If — crypto concentration — or, once you have set a target mix on Scenarios, the class that has drifted furthest past its band, which takes the concentration row's place — a goal you're behind on, missing prices, no connected save file, an employer plan you fund with no match recorded, or taxable contributions while a tax-advantaged account takes nothing); three more suggestions end in a Try button, each of which stops showing once it has been applied: Unallocated surplus (the surplus described under Home is assumed spent — Try keeping 50% as cash sets the Leftover money share to 50%; it fires only while the share is 0% and quiets once you have answered the Home question), a vehicle with no replacement modeled (Try replacing every 8 yrs fills the asset’s own replacement cycle at its value today, so a new one is bought every eight years), and an essential expense that ends with no successor — for Childcare only, where the cost truly stops: Try redirecting $1,250/mo to savings from 2040 adds a savings account whose deposit starts the year after the expense ends, at your best entered savings rate, and the row recognises it; green dots are positive signals worth noticing (solid runway, a strong savings rate, every debt shrinking, a goal on track, retirement funded through the horizon). Each actionable row's button jumps to the page where you can fix it. Everything lives in one Needs attention panel on its own Coach page in the menu, sorted worst-first; the green rows are shown too — the panel opens fully expanded, and All checks folds the working-well rows away if you would rather see only what needs attention. Clicking any row reveals the math behind it. Some rows also offer a gold Try … button that runs the change through What-If so you can see the impact before keeping it. Beside each of those sits a quieter Compare → button that saves that same change as a named scenario instead — it does not enter What-If and does not touch your live numbers, so you can line the change up next to your real plan on the Saved Scenarios card on the Scenarios page rather than in place of it; it is not offered while you are viewing the sample plan, because a sample session never saves anything. The contribution rules are deliberately formula-free: a match is stored as employer dollars per month, not as a rule like “50% of the first 6%”, so Richifi never tells you that you are leaving a specific amount of match on the table — it cannot know that. It reports only what it can see, and account types are matched loosely so an imported
401k or Taxable Brokerage still classifies correctly. The Coach reads only the numbers you entered and applies fixed rules to them — it is educational, not financial advice.
- Rows that carry their numbers. Starting withdrawal rate compares the draw on liquid reserves in the first retirement year that draws on them with the reserves at the start of that year: above 5.0% it is a red row (“11.1% — 4% is the classic sustainable rate”) with Try retire N years later and, when you have set a Spend in retirement figure, Try −$X/mo retirement spend, each the smallest step that brings the rate to 5.0% (checked by running the plan, and withheld if no step within reach does it); between 4% and 5% it is a quiet gold note with no button. High-interest debt flags any debt, or loan on a real asset, at 15% APR or more whose payment covers its interest but does not clear it in three years, with Try paying $X/mo extra — the extra that clears it in three years by the same month-by-month arithmetic the payoff card uses, capped by your monthly surplus — and stops once the payment clears it or the rate falls under 15%. Cash goes negative names the first year, how far short the cash gets at its worst, and that year’s arithmetic; a gap that opens before retirement offers Try trimming living costs N%, the smallest whole percent that closes it. The savings rate Try never adds more than your monthly surplus: with a surplus smaller than the step it offers the largest $25 step that fits, and with none it says the saving has to come from spending less. A passing retirement verdict that depends on guardrail cuts is named in its row, and one that reaches the floor turns into a red Retirement holds only with spending cut to half of plan row.
- Plan detail sits under the notes on the same page: how many parts of the model your plan has something to work with yet, and a shortcut to whichever is still empty — or, when the Coach above is already pointing at the empty part, a sentence naming it. During a plan’s first two weeks, Home shows the same count as a Finish your plan card.
Projection, Retirement & Goals
Three pages look forward: Projection — the projection and life events — Goals — your target and the milestones on the way — and Retirement. They sit near the top of the rail rather than in a group of their own; the Projection Year & Inflation sliders (top of the Projection page) drive every forward-looking page, including Goals and Scenarios next door.
Projection — your net worth year by year to the horizon: the figure with its percentile pills, and beside it a Does this plan work? card — the year you retire (yours first, then your partner’s when it differs), whether the money lasts, and goal status (the balance-sheet detail — current net worth, total growth, projected assets and debt — sits inside the Year-by-Year fold below), the net worth chart (whose business line is one series, Business → sale proceeds: the equity while you hold the business and the after-tax proceeds from the sale year on, so a sale reads as a continuation rather than a drop — the tooltip says which part you are hovering, and every dollar axis uses the same compact $M / $K labels as Home) with a Nominal / Today's $ toggle that sets the dollar frame for every projected figure in the app — on this page the chart, the year-by-year table and its drill-in, the headline, the header and the sticky bar, and beyond it Home, Goals, Retirement, Scenarios and the ledger pages’ projected tiles, each labelled with its frame; the change log and the forecast-accuracy card stay nominal and say so — and your choice is remembered across reloads and a Show range overlay driven by the Scenarios page's Plan Confidence run, a Leftover money card — by default Richifi assumes anything left over each year is spent, because money you save is money you entered; set a share above 0% and the plan keeps that much of each year’s surplus instead, landing it in cash where it compounds at your best savings rate, and the card tells you next year’s surplus and what your setting keeps of it — a Forecast accuracy card that grades the projection against itself — each day's snapshot records what the plan predicted for 30 days and 1 year out, and once a target date arrives the card compares the prediction to what the archive actually measured, reporting the typical miss and, more usefully, the bias: whether the plan runs optimistic or conservative. A forecast is graded only when a real measurement exists near its target date; nothing is interpolated, and until the first prediction matures the card says when that will be. Once the archive is two months old the same card calibrates each class — how stocks, crypto, savings, real-asset equity, business equity and debt actually moved against the pace today's plan assumes, and for the classes whose pace is a rate you typed, the rate the realized move implies (your own deposits stripped out, annualized) with a Try button that runs it through What-If; and once a snapshot is about three months old it reads drift: where net worth sits against the trajectory the plan itself recorded then, and which classes explain the gap. Both also appear on Coach when they are large enough to matter. Then the Life Events editor (one-time dated cash flows — inheritance/windfall +, or a home down payment/tuition −; each marked with a gold ✦ in the table). The editor also suggests events your own plan implies — a home purchase when a Housing line ends with nothing after it, a replacement when a depreciating asset nears zero, a tuition year eighteen years after a Childcare line began — as dismissible Model it → chips that prefill the row for you to complete, and offers three templates for what the plan cannot yet see coming: a career break (your largest income pauses for a year and resumes after it, built from your own row), a new child (a Childcare line for six years, after which the tuition suggestion takes over) and elder care (a five-year Medical line). Templates fill in the shape — names, years, categories — never a dollar figure you did not enter: the row opens in its editor with the amount blank, and Undo in the toast puts everything back. Then the full year-by-year Net Worth table (a Cash column appears once income or a life event puts money through the cash sweep). The deeper “how solid is this” analyses — Plan Confidence, Stress tests and Big questions — now live one click away on Scenarios.
Retirement — retirement is modeled automatically whenever your age is set in the Profile menu; there is no checkbox to tick. The page reads top-down: a KPI strip of three (your nest egg at retirement, your living costs in retirement — each in the dollars of that year with today’s equivalent beside it — and how much of that is income-funded — when you retire is the headline above it — your own year and age, and when a partner retires in a different year their year follows, with assets drawn from the later of the two — and whether the money lasts is the Will the money last? card below, each said once, in one wording everywhere, which names the bar the test really used: “lasts to 2076 (age 95) — 30 years of retirement” when retirement plus 30 years is the later term, “lasts to 2071 (age 90) — past age 90” when the younger of you turning 90 is (beside a younger partner the age carries their name). A single 65-year-old retiree is therefore held to 95, not 90. With spending guardrails on, a pass that depends on cuts says so — “with spending cut to half of plan from 2053” — and a plan that has to reach the guardrails’ 50% floor reads amber, not as a green pass), then The Plan (your retire age, an optional spend in retirement, the two withdrawal-tax rates covered below, and a read-only Model through echo of the Projection Year, which sets the Projection chart only — plus a partner retires at age field once you’ve named a partner in Profile, and two opt-in settings covered below: a Model required minimum distributions checkbox and a separate Spending guardrails card), a When can you stop working? card that sets three answers side by side, one sentence each — your plan (the retire age you set), the earliest retire age that holds (the Big questions search, with no cash gap before everyone has retired; shown when it has been run or the Coach has already worked it out, otherwise behind a Find it button) and the financial-independence year (net worth first covering 25× today’s spending — a rule of thumb, not a retirement date) — a retirement timeline, How retirement is funded (a first-year reconciliation — bills incl. debt = living costs + debt payments, what income covers, and what's drawn from assets; where Social Security is part of that income it is named and sized on its own line, and when it starts after you retire the card says so with the year it begins, since the reconciliation itself only shows your first retirement year — plus a How each year’s spending is funded chart that stacks Social Security beneath the asset draws, so a bar is the whole of that year’s funding rather than only the withdrawal), Will the money last? (a verdict and a liquid-reserves chart with a ⏸ retire marker — plus, once you've run Plan Confidence on the Scenarios page, a line showing in what share of 500 randomized-market simulations the plan survives), a Roth conversion window card (an estimate, covered below), and a withdrawal schedule — which now leads with a Social Security income column beside the per-bucket asset draws, so each year shows what arrived as income before what had to be sold. At your retirement year wages, Ends: At retirement incomes, and contributions stop while spending continues; shortfalls draw down liquid assets in order — by default (no withdrawal-tax rates set, below), cash → sale proceeds → savings → stocks → crypto — each withdrawal also forgoing its growth; setting withdrawal-tax rates changes this order, see below. Set Spend in retirement to override what you'll actually spend per month once retired, in today’s dollars (a figure that replaces your current living costs from the retirement year on and grows with your plan’s inflation assumption the same way they would have — debt payments keep amortizing separately, unaffected by inflation, and saving stops when you retire). The echo beside it names both frames — the figure in today’s dollars, the same figure in your retirement year’s dollars — and shows the living costs you have today, the like-for-like comparison; leave it blank to carry your current living costs forward. Expenses grow with your plan’s inflation assumption (set on the Projection page) by default; give an expense its own growth % to use a different rate for that one line instead — a medical-heavy expense running above general inflation, say. The timeline, the How each year’s spending is funded chart, the liquid-reserves chart and the withdrawal schedule run on the money-lasts simulation — from today (or your retirement year) to the end of that test — the later of 30 years after you retire and the younger of you at 90 — so they are drawn in full whatever your Projection Year is; that setting only decides how far the Projection chart goes. At the bottom, FIRE benchmarks · 4% rule are rules-of-thumb independent of the simulation above: your FI number (25× today's living costs), progress, projected FI year (when net worth crosses your FI number — not your retire year; it looks across the whole money-lasts simulation, not only to the Projection Year, and says “beyond” only past the simulation’s end), Coast FI (measured to your own retire age), and 4% passive income.
Estimated Social Security — with your age and some earned income entered, Estimate Social Security automatically (on by default) adds a benefit to the projection, claimed at your retirement age (kept between 62 and 70). The line under the toggle states it in today’s dollars and, when you are not claiming this year, echoes what it becomes in the claim year (“$2,788/mo in today’s dollars (≈ $5,668/mo in 2050)”); the same wording appears on the life timeline’s Social Security marker. The projection grows the today’s-dollar figure at your plan inflation until the claim year, so each stream starts at its claim-year amount and then rises 2.5%/yr for COLA. The Methodology page has the formula and why inflation is the indexing rate.
When to claim Social Security — a card under The Plan on Retirement, shown while the estimate has someone to estimate. Compare claim ages re-runs the whole plan once for each person at 62, at full retirement age (67) and at 70, and lists for each choice the monthly benefit in today’s dollars, the year it starts, whether the money lasts, and your liquid reserves at the end of the money-lasts test (in today’s dollars when the dollar view is switched to that). Ages already behind you are left out; the row marked Your plan today is the baseline. By default each person claims when they retire; Try in What-If on a row sets that person’s claim age in the sandbox (the other person is untouched), and Apply keeps it — it then shows in History, and the card offers a Claim when you retire row to go back. The comparison is computed when you click, never while you type, and it disappears after any edit; it is not saved. Spousal and survivor benefits are not modelled.
Life timeline — a strip directly under the Retirement headline (and a compact copy, person lanes only, under the Projection Year & Inflation controls) that draws the plan’s dates on one shared set of years. Each person gets a lane: a working bar up to their own retirement year, then retired, with markers for their Social Security start (the same estimated claim year as Estimate Social Security automatically, or the start year of a Social Security income you entered yourself), Medicare at 65, age 59½ (the year pre-tax accounts open without the early-withdrawal penalty — the drawdown model applies that gate only when withdrawal taxes are set, and keys it to your own age) and the age RMDs begin (73 if you were born 1951–59, 75 from 1960) as a faint marker; whether required minimum distributions are actually modelled is the Model required minimum distributions switch on Retirement’s The Plan card, and the marker’s tooltip says which. Retirement also shows a Household lane of the shared events already in your plan: business sale years, income and expense rows that have an explicit start or end year (a row that ends At retirement is shown by the person lanes instead), loan payoff years (the same dates as Loan Payoff Dates on Debts), Life Events, your goal year, the chart horizon (faint) and the year the money lasts to — or runs out. Hover a marker, or tab to it, for the full sentence (“2039 · Childcare ends ($1,250/mo)”); markers that land close together stack so their labels do not overlap. On a phone or any touch screen, or in any narrow space, the strip becomes the same events as a list in year order. It is display only — nothing on it feeds the projection, and it appears whenever there is something to draw (a person lane needs that person’s age).
Withdrawal taxes (tax-aware drawdown) — by default every reserve dollar is treated as fully spendable, but real withdrawals are taxed differently by account type. Set two optional effective rates on The Plan card and the drawdown becomes tax-aware: pre-tax accounts % (traditional 401(k)/IRA/HSA — taxed as ordinary income) and capital gains % (taxable brokerage & crypto). Cash, savings, sale proceeds (already taxed at the sale) and Roth accounts are tax-free at withdrawal. When a taxed bucket has to cover $X of spending, it is depleted by $X ÷ (1 − rate) — the extra is tax — so taxable reserves run down faster and the Taxes column in the schedule plus the "incl. $X/yr withdrawal taxes" note in How retirement is funded show the bite. The draw order becomes tax-smart: cash → sale proceeds → savings → taxable stocks → crypto → pre-tax accounts → Roth last — crypto (the more volatile holding) is drawn down before pre-tax/Roth stock accounts to lock in its planned growth rather than ride it through the drawdown years, so if your stock holdings sit mostly in a 401(k)/IRA/Roth (not a taxable brokerage), crypto empties first even while those accounts still hold plenty. A 59½ gate keeps pre-tax accounts locked until the year you turn 59½ (computed from your Profile age); if nothing else is left before then they can still be tapped, with a flat 10% early-withdrawal penalty added to the rate. These are effective rates, not tax brackets (v1) — leave both at 0 and the model is exactly as before. Deliberately out of scope for v1: progressive brackets and state taxes. (Required minimum distributions are an opt-in setting; see below.)
Spending guardrails, RMDs and the Roth conversion window — three additions to the Retirement page. Spending guardrails is a card below The Plan, off by default. Turn it on and retirement spending stops being flat: the first retirement year that draws on reserves sets a benchmark withdrawal rate, and from then on spending is cut by the Move by percentage when the rate runs the cut percentage above that benchmark, and raised by it when the rate runs the raise percentage below (defaults 20 / 20 / 10), never below half or above one-and-a-half times your plan. Once on, the card says how the planned path fares — “spending is cut in N years (deepest −X%) and raised in M years” — and Plan Confidence applies the same rule in every simulated market, labelled with spending guardrails, with a Spending cuts needed figure showing how often and how deep. The cut applies to all non-debt retirement spending (the model cannot tell essentials from extras). Model required minimum distributions is a checkbox under the Social Security one, also off by default. On, the pre-tax accounts pay a forced minimum each year from age 73 (born 1951–1959) or 75 (born 1960 or later), by the IRS Uniform Lifetime Table, whether or not you spend it; the unspent part is taxed at your pre-tax withdrawal rate and lands in cash, and the Withdrawal schedule shows an of which RMD column. It uses the tax-aware drawdown even if both withdrawal-tax rates are 0, applies only in retired years, and leaves HSAs out. The Roth conversion window card is display-only — nothing in it reaches the projection. Between your retirement and the first RMD it estimates, in today’s dollars, how much pre-tax money could be converted to Roth each year while staying inside the 12% (and the 22%) federal bracket, from your projected income and the filing status in Settings → Tax & location (without one it asks for it), with the federal tax that conversion would cost now. It is an educational estimate, not tax advice: it ignores state tax, Medicare surcharges and the effect on Social Security taxation.
Goals & Milestones
Goals is its own page between Projection and Scenarios. Net Worth Goal — set a target amount and year and the page grades your plan against it: on-track status, what you’re projected to have by that year, the year you actually cross the goal (and how many years early) or the remaining gap, and the extra saving per month (invested at ~7%) to close a gap — or, when you’re ahead, how much you could dial back and still land on it. That figure is capped at what you actually put away today (stock contributions with employer match, plus active savings deposits): when the quick estimate would exceed it, the page re-checks your full plan with contributions scaled down and either says you could stop contributing entirely — only when the plan still reaches the goal with every contribution at zero — or gives the largest reduction that still does. The target is a nominal figure — the dollars of its own year, as you typed it — and the page says so and shows its today’s-money equivalent; the projected figure and the gap follow the Nominal / Today’s $ frame set on Projection (and, being forecasts, print to three significant figures like $6.63M — the target you typed stays exact), while the verdict is graded nominal against nominal, so it never changes with the toggle. The goal year can sit past the Projection Year and it is still graded (the goal projects out to its own year). Net Worth Milestones below show the year — and your age then — that your net worth first crosses $100K, $250K, $500K, then every million up to the plan’s peak — nominal thresholds, like the goal. Between the two, What You Put In vs. Growth plots a stepped, cumulative running total of every dollar swept toward the plan since today — take-home saving/investing, payroll-deferred 401(k)/HSA deferrals, and employer match — against the projected Net Worth line, so the widening gap between what you contributed and what it’s worth tells the growth story on its own; it stays hidden when the plan has no contributions to show.
Scenarios · Confidence & Questions
These analyses are where you poke at the plan without editing it — three automated reads of how solid it is, all driven by the same Projection Year & Inflation you set on the Projection page. Nothing here changes your numbers; every result is computed on demand and is session-only, so it clears after any edit rather than going stale on screen.
Plan Confidence (Monte Carlo) — the plain projection is a single path at your assumed returns, so it can't show sequence-of-returns risk. 500 simulations run on their own about a second and a half after you stop editing (in the background, in small slices, so typing is never held up) — there is nothing to press, and the result also puts a N% confidence pill on Home. They re-run the projection 500 times, each time keeping your return assumptions as the average but adding a random year-to-year market swing to stocks (σ 15 percentage points, or a value-weighted blend when you have set asset classes on holdings — see Stocks) and crypto (σ 60 pts), drawn from a normal distribution. The result is a headline — a big N% over “of 500 market simulations succeed” — plus the median outcome and the P10–P90 range at your horizon, rounded to three significant figures (like $6.63M) — a simulated outcome decades out is not good to the dollar. A trial “succeeds” if your liquid reserves last the full retirement (when retirement is modeled) or your net worth never goes negative through the horizon. The generator is seeded, so a run is exactly reproducible. Only stocks and crypto are randomized — savings APY, business revenue, and sale-proceeds growth stay fixed. With Spending guardrails on (Retirement page), every trial also cuts or raises spending by that rule, so the headline reads “with spending guardrails” and a Spending cuts needed figure shows in how many simulations spending had to be cut and how deep the typical cut ran. Turn on Show range (next to the Nominal / Today's $ toggle on the Projection page's Net Worth chart) to overlay the P10–P90 band and median there; it respects the dollar-basis toggle. Change any assumption and the card badges itself “assumptions changed — refreshing shortly” while the next run starts. The automatic run is for your live plan only: inside What-If nothing runs by itself, so press Run 500 simulations there (and Run again any time to repeat one). Results are session-only (never saved).
Stress tests — a card beside Plan Confidence that asks the other uncertainty question: not “how often does this hold across random markets” but “what if the next few years look like a bad stretch we have actually lived through”. Pick Dot-com bust (2000–2002), Financial crisis (2008–2009) or Stagflation (1973–1974) and those years’ equity returns are applied to your plan starting next year, after which it reverts to your own assumptions. You get a verdict — whether the plan still holds — plus where it leaves you as the episode ends and what it costs by your horizon (both rounded to three significant figures, like $4.82M, since they are projections). Two caveats worth knowing: the returns are applied as deviations from a 10%/yr long-run average rather than as absolute returns (a shock is added to whatever rate each holding already assumes, and there is no single assumed rate to replace), and crypto is left untouched because none of these episodes has a crypto history. Results are session-only, like Plan Confidence — re-run after any edit.
Big questions — a card below Stress tests that works the other way round: instead of you picking a number and reading what happens, you pick a question and it searches your own assumptions for the answer. Up to four appear, and each is only offered when your plan can actually answer it. When could I retire? needs your age set in Profile; it tries every retire age from the year after your current age (or 40, whichever is later) up to 75, one projection each, and reports the earliest one where your reserves last the whole retirement and your cash never goes negative before everyone has retired (the household draws on its assets only once the last of you has retired, so with two people retiring years apart an early age can leave the first pay cheque short for years even though the money lasts afterwards; the card says when an earlier age was rejected for that reason) — one age at a time rather than by halving the range, because a later retirement can genuinely fail where an earlier one held, so there is nothing to halve safely. How much could I spend in retirement? needs the same, and narrows in on the largest flat monthly spend that still lasts, to the nearest $100, then re-runs the projection at the figure it shows you; the number it compares against is what your plan actually spends in your retirement year, so it still makes sense when you have left Spend in retirement blank. What if [business] sold later? needs a business with revenue and a sale year, and moves that one sale three years out (clamped to your projection horizon), reporting the net-worth difference in whichever direction it falls — a later exit is not automatically the better one. What’s driving this plan? is its own card (below the saved scenarios) now, not one of them. It needs at least two of six kinds of assumption to be present — investment returns, monthly contributions, spending, income, business growth, and debt and loan rates — and moves each one on its own: returns and business growth up a percentage point, contributions and income up 10%, spending down 10%, borrowing rates down a point. Each is measured against your unchanged plan, never stacked, and ranked on two axes: what the change is worth at your projection year, and how far it moves the year you reach financial independence (25× today’s spending, grown at your inflation rate). The bars are a tornado — widths relative to the strongest mover — so the shape is the ranking. A class earns its row by moving either axis, which is why spending can appear with a $0 figure beside it: while your plan runs a monthly surplus the model treats that surplus as spent, so trimming it moves no balance, yet it still lowers the FI target and pulls that year earlier. It reports which single move changes your net worth at the horizon most, ranked, and names any it left off as worth under $1,000. Income and spending are often among those: while your plan runs a monthly surplus the model treats the surplus as spent — unless you set a share to keep on the Projection page’s Leftover money card — so neither reaches the balance sheet until the plan runs short or retirement drawdown starts — the card says so when it happens. Because each is tested alone and never in combination, those figures do not add up to what doing all of them together would be worth — and this one question has no Try it button, since a ranking is not a single change to apply. Three limits worth knowing: answers are computed when you click, never while you type, and they are session-only like Plan Confidence, so they vanish after any edit rather than going stale on screen; the retirement scan moves the shared retire age, so a partner retire age you have set yourself stays exactly where it is. For the other three, Try it in What-If → loads the answer into the same sandbox as everything else — nothing touches your real plan until you press Apply.
Your mix — the last card on the page, below Return assumptions, for the money you can actually move: stocks, crypto and cash as shares of that investable total, against a target you type into the card itself (three shares and a band, in percentage points). Business equity and real assets are named as the illiquid remainder and never targeted — nobody rebalances a tenth of a house. With a target set, each row shows its drift in points, coloured only when it is outside the band, and the bar carries the target as ticks. The same reading appears on Coach, as the class furthest out of band (it takes the place of the crypto-concentration row, so one page never carries two rows about the same money), and on Home’s portfolio bar as ticks. Shares that do not add to 100 are read as typed and the card says so, rather than normalising them behind your back. Try rebalance → runs the move through What-If as if every holding were sold and bought at today’s prices — no tax and no trading cost, because the model has neither, so the impact it shows is what the mix alone does — and it is withheld when the target does not add to 100 or a targeted class has nothing to hold it, with the card saying which. Stocks is one class for the target and the drift. Once you set an asset class on a holding (see Stocks), the Stocks row grows indented sub-rows — US stocks, International, Bonds, Cash-like, REITs, Other, and Unclassified for the holdings you have not tagged — each with its dollars and its share of the investable total, and the Stocks segment of the bar is split the same way. That breakdown is informational: it adds up to the Stocks line, and the target, the drift, the Coach row and Try rebalance still read Stocks as one class. While no holding has a class, the card says it cannot split stocks from bonds.
Return assumptions — a card above Your mix that states what this plan assumes each class earns, weighted by today’s balances, beside the references the app already cites: the S&P 500’s long-run total return since 1957 (about 10%/yr before inflation, roughly 7% after it) and the 8% a holding left blank uses. Each reference that differs from your current assumption carries a Try that sets every holding of the class to that rate through What-If, so “what if stocks only do 7%” is one click rather than a dozen edits — Apply or Exit & Revert as usual. Crypto is shown without a reference, because the app does not believe it has a long-run average worth projecting from (only the 15% default is offered), and savings without one because APYs track the Fed funds rate rather than any long-run mean. Plan Confidence’s year-to-year swing is fixed, not a preset. Every reference is labelled a historical average and not a forecast; the Methodology page names the source.
What-If & Scenarios
What-If is a sandbox. Click “Enter What-If” in the What-If Sandbox card on the Scenarios page — or press “What If?” beside the Projection Year slider at the top of the Projection page, or “What if…” on Snapshot. Then change anything anywhere — nothing is saved while it's active. A KPI strip at the top of that section tracks your mode (Live vs What-If), saved-scenario count, projected net worth, and — once you're in the sandbox — the running impact of your changes versus the plan you started with. The impact panel below shows the net-worth delta at the horizon, an Outcome · before → after card, every input you changed, and the impact by category. The outcome card answers the question a retirement experiment actually asks: Money lasts (whether the reserves last through the retirement simulation, or the year and age they run out, before and after), Retirement (each person's own retirement year and age), FI year (the first year net worth covers 25× your spending), and Confidence. Confidence is read only from Plan Confidence runs that already exist — your last run on the plan you started from, and a run you made inside the sandbox — and never starts one: until you run it in the sandbox the after figure reads “—” and the row offers Run in Plan Confidence, which takes you to the card without running anything.
Quick starters in the What-If Sandbox card are one-click experiments — retire five years earlier or later, a bear-case growth cut, delaying a business sale, or trimming retirement spend. Each drops you straight into What-If with that change applied (only the starters your data supports are shown) and scrolls to the impact panel, so you can see the result instantly and then Apply, Save as Scenario, or Revert.
While the sandbox is live, a What If bar is pinned to the top of every page carrying the same three buttons, so you can finish from wherever you were editing. Once you have changed something, the bar also carries a one-line result — Net worth 2051: +$526K · Money: runs out 2074 → lasts to 2076 ✓ · Confidence 32% → — — the same figures as the outcome card, so you can read the answer from any page; on a phone it takes its own row above the buttons and wraps rather than clipping. Before any change it shows the reminder that changes are temporary instead.
- Save as Scenario keeps the sandbox as a named scenario to compare — without changing your real plan. This one doesn't end the session; you stay in the sandbox.
- Apply Changes commits the sandbox as your new plan and saves it.
- Exit & Revert restores everything to how it was.
Scenarios let you keep and compare alternate futures. “Save as Scenario” snapshots all inputs under a name (works inside What-If too — the scenario survives a revert). Saved scenarios live on the Scenarios page (old #scenarios links still route there).
The comparison is an outcome table: a Current baseline row (green swatch) plus one row per scenario, side by side. Columns: net worth at the horizon, Today's $ (that scenario's own inflation applied), vs Current, FI Year (25× that scenario's spending, grown at its inflation), Hits Goal (your current goal target, compared across all scenarios), and — when your plan or any scenario models retirement drawdown — Lasts Until (the year the money runs out for good, or, when the money holds, “past 90” or “to 95” (the age that scenario’s own test ran to); “runs out” means reserves stay negative through the end of the simulated retirement — a dip that recovers, say on a later business sale, is reported as a dip, not as running out, and that test deliberately runs past your projection horizon so it covers a full retirement). Row swatch colors match the comparison chart's lines. Click any scenario row to expand exactly how it differs from Current, field by field. Load opens a scenario in What-If so you can inspect it on every page — then Apply to keep it or Exit to discard. Scenarios are stored with your data and included in export/import.
What the figures are measured at. A business that is sold is measured at its own sale year, not at the Projection Year: Value at Sale is what the stake is worth the year you sell it, and Sale Proceeds is the after-tax cash in that same year. Measuring at the horizon instead used to report $0 of equity and a loss the size of the whole company — true only in the sense that the business had become cash and the cash had been spent over decades of retirement, which is a fact about your retirement rather than about the business. From the sale onward the money is tracked on Projection and Retirement, not here. A business with no sale year set is projected to your retirement year, the same rule the Stocks, Crypto and Savings pages follow.
Business Equity
Model an editable list of businesses you hold equity in — Businesses in the left rail. Each business’s stake value = current annual revenue × sale multiple × your stake %. Use + Add Business, Duplicate, or Remove (with an undo toast) to manage the list — you can have as many as you like, or none. Like every other list in the app, each business shows as one line (stake, revenue, multiple, growth, sale year, and today’s equity); click it to open the full card, and Done or Escape folds it back.
- Name & Stake % — both editable. Stake is your ownership percentage; change it any time (dilution, new grants). Charts and the detail table use each business’s live name.
- Growth — a single overall rate, or switch to Per Year for a custom rate each projection year.
- Sale Year & Cap Gains Tax — selling converts that stake to after-tax cash at the sale year using the per-business tax rate on its card. Proceeds then compound at the Sale Proceeds Growth rate (in Sale Assumptions), so your total wealth line stays continuous. After a sale, that business’s revenue and growth columns go blank — it’s no longer yours.
- Sale Structure — three optional controls that model how a real acquisition pays out, each defaulting to today’s single-lump-sum behavior:
- Proceeds payout — Lump sum (default) books all after-tax cash at the sale year. 2–5 years models an installment sale: the stake still leaves the business at the sale year, but the after-tax proceeds arrive in equal annual tranches, each taxed as received. Undelivered tranches sit as a receivable — counted in your net worth (inside the Sale Proceeds column) but earning no proceeds growth until the cash actually lands, at which point it joins the compounding pool. A lump sum ends up richer than installments because more of the money compounds sooner.
- Valuation basis — Revenue (default) values the stake as revenue × multiple × stake. Switch to EBITDA to value it as revenue × EBITDA margin × multiple × stake; the multiple then reads as an EBITDA multiple and a margin field appears. Growth still applies to revenue either way.
- Multiple range — enter an optional LOW× and HIGH× to see the after-tax stake value across that range on the card, and a one-line “Exit range” note under the Net Worth Projection chart showing how your net worth at the horizon moves across every business’s range. Both boxes are required — leave either one blank and the range is off. (For a full probabilistic band, use Plan Confidence / Monte Carlo instead.)
- Charts — equity over time (total = held equity + sale cash), stake breakdown at the projection year, revenue projection, and year-over-year growth. The first three break out per business; the growth bars are a single series over the combined total (held equity + sale cash), so a sale steps the bars down to the proceeds rate instead of showing a −100% cliff.
- Ownership — each business card carries an owner (you, your partner, or joint), shown on the card and totalled by person under the list. A business you add starts as yours; change its owner on the card.
Stocks
Your equity holdings: shares × price, per brokerage and account type.
- Live prices come from Yahoo Finance through Richifi’s own
/api/price endpoint, so your ticker list never reaches a third-party proxy — a public proxy is the fallback only when that endpoint isn’t there (opening the file straight off disk, say). Click the price status line at the foot of the left rail, or Refresh in Data & backups, to refresh anytime.
- Monthly + Employer Match contributions compound monthly; Growth % per holding overrides the class default — 8% for stocks, 15% for crypto — and a holding left blank shows that default muted, like 8% (default) (rates are treated as effective annual returns).
- Track by balance (per holding) swaps the Shares and Price/Share fields for a single Balance field — the right fit for a 401(k) or any account you only know the total value of, not a share count; contributions, employer match and growth all still work the same, and that holding is left out of live price fetches so its balance is never overwritten.
- Asset class (per holding, in the editor’s header row beside the owner) is optional: US stocks, International stocks, Bonds, Cash & money market, REITs or Other / mixed. Leave it blank and the holding counts as stocks, exactly as before. When you finish typing a ticker, a short built-in list of very common funds fills it in for you — VTI and VOO as US stocks, VXUS as International, BND and AGG as bonds, SGOV as cash-like, VNQ as REITs, target-date funds as Other — but only while the field is blank; your own pick is never overwritten, and an unlisted ticker is left for you to set. The class shows as a small tag beside the account on the holdings list, breaks the Stocks line on Scenarios’ Your mix card into its classes, and sets how widely Plan Confidence lets the stock bucket swing (bonds and cash-like calmer, International and REITs a little wider — assumptions, not benchmarks; the Methodology page lists them). It never changes a holding’s growth rate — set Growth % for that — and a change to it is recorded in the change log.
- Total Growth in the page’s KPI strip is measured to your retirement year, with the contributions that went in beside it. Once retirement spending starts drawing on these holdings, the money drawn is shown as its own term (“−$X drawn in retirement”) instead of being counted as a loss.
- Brokerage totals and per-holding history build up from the daily snapshots as you use the app over time.
Crypto
Coin holdings priced live via CoinGecko. 31 symbols map automatically — BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, DOGE and most other large caps; anything outside that list is sent as the lowercased symbol, which prices only when that happens to be CoinGecko’s own id, so coins like TRX, XMR and HBAR need a hand-typed price. Default 15% annual return, compounded annually — override per holding. Click the price status at the foot of the left rail to refresh.
Like Stocks, Total Growth is measured to your retirement year, and money drawn out for retirement spending is shown as its own “drawn in retirement” term rather than counted as a loss.
Savings
Cash accounts with an APY and monthly deposits. APY is treated as an effective annual yield and converted precisely to a monthly rate — $100k at 5% APY is exactly $105k after a year. Savings also feed the emergency-runway metric on Snapshot, and the Emergency tile on this page’s own KPI bar. The runway counts each account’s Spendable balance where you have one — what the bank will release today, with pending activity already taken out — and falls back to the Balance where you don’t; net worth and every projection always use the Balance. Each account's deposit can carry an optional Starts / Ends window — set Ends to the last year you want deposits made (say a partner’s paycheck stopping in 2031 — deposits run through 2031 and stop in 2032), while the balance keeps compounding at its APY; leave it on At retirement for the default. Deposits always stop at retirement regardless of the window.
Total Growth splits the change in balance into deposits, interest and — when retirement is modeled and spending draws on these accounts — the amount drawn out for retirement spending (“≈ $X deposits · $Y interest · −$Z drawn in retirement”), so spending a balance down never reads as negative interest.
Real Assets
Property, vehicles, and other big assets, with optional loans attached.
- Value moves at the Annual % you set, in the direction the Direction control beside it picks — Appreciates adds that rate each year, Depreciates subtracts it, and Stable holds the value flat and ignores the rate entirely. The collapsed row echoes the result as “+4%/yr”, “−12%/yr” or “flat”, so a mis-set direction is obvious without opening the row.
- Loans amortize monthly: interest accrues, then your payment reduces the balance. If a payment doesn't cover the interest, the balance grows (negative amortization) — the projection shows it honestly.
- Orig Loan (optional) is what the loan was when you took it out. Fill it in and a Paid to Date column — dollars and percent — appears in Loan Payoff Dates on the Debts page, where every asset loan is listed beside your standalone debts. Equity = value − loan balance.
- Replace Every (yrs) and Replace Cost (both optional, set together) model buying a new one on a cycle instead of letting it depreciate to nothing forever — every N years the projection books an outflow at today's price and resets this asset's value to that price, resuming its own rate from there (the old asset's trade-in value is ignored, which is conservative).
Debts
Payoff strategy answers the two questions a list of debts cannot: does the order you clear them in matter, and is putting a freed-up payment into the next debt better than investing it? It compares avalanche (highest rate first), snowball (smallest balance first) and investing instead — showing when you are debt-free, total interest, and what you are worth on one shared date so the slowest option is not flattered by a shorter clock. Every row spends the same monthly total — the payments you already entered — and differs only in where a payment goes once its debt is gone; nothing asks you for a new number. The month-by-month arithmetic is the same the projection uses, promotional rates included, so a payoff date here cannot disagree with the Debt Payoff Projection chart. It appears once you have two or more debts with balances and payments, since with one there is no ordering question — unless you are testing one of the controls above the table, which one debt can still answer. Those controls are scratch, not saved with the plan: Extra each month adds that amount to every strategy’s pool and the note says how many months sooner and how much less interest the winner pays for it; Consolidate at N% adds a fourth row — every participating balance rolled into one loan at that rate, paid with the same monthly total — so a consolidation offer can be judged against simply paying the debts down; and Include loans on real assets brings mortgages and other asset-linked loans into the ordering question. Under the winning strategy the card lists the order you would actually follow, debt by debt with the month each falls. With an extra payment set, a Try button raises the first debt in that order by that amount in What-If — the projection pays each debt its own amount and does not pass a freed payment on, so that first step is what it can model, and the card says so. Caveats it states on the card: the investing side assumes the projection's own return, and both sides are nominal and before tax, which cuts the investing side harder.
Lifetime Interest (and the matching figures in the payoff table) is a forecast, so it prints to three significant figures (like $224K); your balances and payments stay exact.
Standalone debts — cards, student loans, personal loans. Each accrues interest monthly and amortizes with your payment. Loans attached to a real asset are not re-entered here: they appear below the list as read-only AUTO rows headed Asset-linked loans (edit them on Real Assets), and they count toward this page's totals, breakdown and payoff dates.
You'll see the Debt Payoff Projection chart, a year-by-year Debt Payoff Schedule, and Loan Payoff Dates — a per-loan table giving each loan's payoff month and the months remaining (“Mar 2031 (67 mo)”), or Paid off when the balance is already clear, No payment when none is set, and a red Never (payment < interest) when the payment can't cover the first month's interest. With two or more loans the highest-APR one is flagged ▲ highest APR — pay this first. Enter an Original balance and a Paid to Date column joins the table, in dollars and percent.
Promo APR (optional) models a temporary intro rate: enter the promo rate and the last month it applies, and both the projection and the payoff date use that rate through that month, then revert to the normal APR the month after. The collapsed row then reads “0% until Dec 2026 · then 17.49%”. Clearing the promo rate clears the end month with it.
Paid via (optional) labels how the payment is made — it carries through to the auto-generated payment row on the Expenses page.
Income
Where the next dollar goes ranks your unallocated monthly surplus in the order the tax code rewards — employer plan up to the match, debt above the plan’s own return hurdle, HSA, Roth or traditional by bracket, then taxable — and reads each step’s status from your own rows: what each account takes today, which loans sit above the hurdle (your assumed stock return), and your marginal federal bracket against the Retirement page’s withdrawal tax rate. It does not know your match formula, contribution limits or eligibility, and says so; where a fact is missing it tells you what to enter. Each step shows its headline and figures; the reasoning behind the order sits in a closed Why this order fold under the list.
Take-home (net) income by source and frequency, with annual raises. Add the optional Gross amount to unlock tax & deduction views and a gross-based savings rate. The Income Over Time chart and the projection table show your income year by year with raises compounded.
Starts / Ends give each source an active window — model "consulting ends 2030" or a Social Security/pension stream that starts when you claim it (the amount you enter is the amount in its start year, and raises compound from there). "Ends: At retirement" stops a stream in your retirement year (retirement is modeled automatically once your age is set in Profile). Future-dated streams don't count toward today's income figures.
Income feeds the projection's cash bucket, but only in one direction. A year whose income doesn't cover spending, debt service and contributions drains cash, and that shortfall is what retirement drawdown and “will the money last” are built on. A recurring surplus is assumed spent rather than banked — money you save is money you entered, so raise a savings deposit or a contribution if you want the projection to keep it. The exception is a Life Event you type in: an entered windfall lands in cash and earns your best savings APY.
How contributions are treated: account type on the Stocks page decides the cash-flow source. 401(k), Roth 401(k), HSA, and SIMPLE IRA contributions are payroll-deferred — taken from gross pay before your take-home, so the sweep doesn't subtract them from net income (and employer match is employer money — it grows the balance but never touches your paycheck). Brokerage, IRA, Roth IRA, and Other contributions are paid from take-home and are subtracted, together with savings-account deposits — a SIMPLE IRA is the one IRA that isn’t, because it’s a payroll plan. Enter your net income as your actual paycheck deposit and everything lines up.
Expenses
Monthly outflows by category and payment method. Mark a row as Debt Pmt when it’s a loan payment — it then stops counting as spending in the page totals, the category chart — doughnut or treemap, your choice via the switch above it, same totals either way — and the projection, so it can’t double-count against the payment the app already reads from your loan. It doesn’t become debt service itself: every debt-service figure comes from your Real Assets and Debts rows.
Loan payments from your Real Assets and Debts appear automatically as read-only AUTO rows filed into the matching category (and a "Debt payments" group), so you never need to re-type them. Set any hand-typed copy you already have to Debt Pmt and it’s flagged “manual copy — safe to remove” and dropped from the totals; left unmarked, it keeps counting as ordinary spending on top of the AUTO row.
The month’s shape is a card below the charts that appears once at least half of your monthly outflows (by dollars) carry a due day — below that it would draw a minority of the month, so it stays hidden and a one-line hint under the expense list says how many do now. When shown it has 31 columns, one per day, showing when the bills that carry a due day actually land, with the heaviest day and the day by which half of them have gone. Above the bars it states what a month needs in total to clear every bill, loan and debt payment, and how many times over your savings cover that. Two things it says plainly rather than hiding: what share of the month the bars represent (only lines with a due day are placed — loan and debt payments carry no due day anywhere in the plan, so they count toward the total but not the bars), and that there is deliberately no running balance, because income carries no payday in this plan and a balance line would rest on a date nobody entered. Due days repeat monthly and the plan’s inputs move by year, so the next three months have the same shape.
What the bank sees is a card that appears once a bank feed is connected on Accounts: the recurring charges Plaid detects, audited. It states what leaves the bank each month across those merchants and how much of it your plan carries (a merchant counts as in the plan once you have added it as an expense or linked it to one), then lists what crept up — only a merchant whose earlier months were steady and whose latest month is 10% and a dollar above them, a price rise rather than groceries’ ordinary swing — where plan and bank disagree on a linked expense (the same $50-or-10% test Accounts and Coach use), what started recently (absent from the first month of the window, present since), and what is not in your plan at all. Figures are medians of the three complete months before this one, so the current month never drags one down. The card only reads: adding, linking or ignoring a merchant happens on Accounts, one click away.
What a line actually costs you. Open any expense and it says what that line costs between now and your projection year, in both nominal and today’s money, and what the same money would be worth invested at your plan’s assumed stock return instead. The window is the row’s own: its start and end years where it sets them, otherwise the end of your projection — or your retirement year, if you have set a Spend in retirement figure, because from that year the plan replaces individual line items with it. The invested figure is an alternative use of the money and deliberately not a saving the plan books: while your plan runs a monthly surplus the model treats that surplus as spent, so cutting a line does not by itself buy the investment.
The list shows its eight largest lines (or the first eight in whatever order the toolbar has set) and folds the rest behind Show N more lines; group subtotals and the total line always count every line, folded or not, and opening an expense past the fold unfolds the list.
Starts / Ends / Grow % make spending time-aware (Starts and Ends are year boxes — blank means Now and Never; an editor reads Name, Amount, Category, Paid via, Type, Starts, Ends, Growth, Due day): a mortgage that ends in 2038, childcare for a fixed window, or healthcare that grows 5%/yr. The amount you enter is the value in the expense's start year, and growth compounds from there — future-dated or ended expenses drop out of the cash sweep in those years.
Give a bill an optional Due day and it gets its own column in the list, so you can scan the month down the page and sort by it; it's a reminder, not a schedule the projection reads, so the amount still lands the same way every month no matter which day you set.
Sort & filter — the toolbar above the list narrows and orders the view only. The filters you reach for most stay in the strip: a text box that matches a row’s name, category, pay method or start/end year (or, typed as >500 / <=100, filters by monthly amount instead) and, once you have named a partner, a chip for Everyone, each of you, and Joint. Everything else sits behind one Filter button — category, Paid via, line type, the Active in year (Starts/Ends aware; leave it blank for any year) and the Sort by choice — and each filter you turn on appears as a removable chip beside the button, with a count on the button itself, so a closed panel still says the list is filtered. Clear all removes every filter, the text and the person chip included, and leaves the sort as it is. The list opens flat, biggest bill first — sorting by anything other than Custom order shows that flat sorted list, and both a sort and any active filter pause drag-reordering. Choose Custom order and clear the filters to get the category grouping and the ⋮⋮ handles back. Page totals, charts, and the projection always use the full plan regardless of the view.
Spending drives three things: the emergency runway, how deep a shortfall the projection has to cover in any year, and the FI number. The FI number is 25× your current living costs (a rule of thumb, debt payments excluded); to see how retirement spending actually plays out with growth, use the Retirement page (modeled automatically once your age is set in Profile). The three names used everywhere: Living costs are your expenses alone; Bills incl. debt adds loan and debt payments — the figure on the Expenses rail badge, in this page’s headline and on the total line under the list; All outflows is wider still, adding take-home saving and investing on top — hover any KPI's i icon for its exact formula and denominator.
Where a month goes draws this year's income and spending as a single flow diagram, in monthly figures — gross pay splitting into taxes, take-home, and (from take-home) your biggest spending categories, saving and investing — using the identical figures as the KPI tiles and the category chart above, so none of the three ever tells a different story. Loan and debt payments aren't a separate stop here; each one folds into the category it belongs to (a mortgage payment is part of Housing), exactly like the category chart does. A category big and varied enough splits open into the individual rows — and any AUTO loan/debt payment — behind it. Hover any ribbon for the annual equivalent.
Accounts
Accounts (in the rail’s main list) links real bank, brokerage and loan accounts through Plaid. Connecting is read-only: Richifi can see balances, holdings, liabilities and transactions, and can never move money.
Nothing a connection reports is ever written into your plan on its own. Everything Plaid finds is shown as a proposal — a balance beside the one already in your plan, a detected recurring charge, a loan's APR — and only lands when you click Apply, click Add as expense, click Link to an expense row you already have, or pick Create a new row from that row’s dropdown. Ignore anything you don't want and it won't be offered again.
An account with no plan counterpart at all — a bank account, card or position your bank reports that isn’t in your plan yet — gets its own Add to plan button right on that row: one click creates the right kind of row from it (savings, debt, real-asset loan, stock or crypto), prefilled from the feed and linked immediately, with growth, APY and rate left at 0% for you to set; the Accounts list also offers an Add N unmatched accounts button that reviews every such account at once, pre-checked, for one confirmation.
- Connect an account asks first what you are connecting — Bank or credit card or Investment or retirement account — because that choice decides which institutions Plaid will even list. Then Plaid Link opens: pick your institution and sign in there (Richifi never sees the credentials), and the connection appears with its accounts. An initial sync runs straight after.
- Linking ties a Plaid account to one row in your plan — a savings account, a debt, an asset’s loan, a stock holding, or a crypto holding. Where the institution supplies Plaid’s persistent account id, the link survives the account being renamed. Many institutions supply none, and those links fall back to an id the bank is free to change — Richifi marks them id can change, and a rename there means re-linking.
- LINKED chips mark those rows in the Savings / Debts / Real Assets / Stocks / Crypto / Expenses lists, with the institution name, so you always know which figures have an outside source. Linked rows stay fully editable — and if you edit a linked figure by hand, Richifi remembers and Apply all will skip it rather than silently overwriting you.
- Detected recurring spending already budgeted for under a different name doesn’t need a duplicate row: each detected merchant offers Link to an existing expense — a dropdown of your own non-debt expense rows, ranked by how likely a match (matching category, a close amount, a similar name), with a one-click Link chip when the match is confident. Linking writes nothing by itself; once linked, the row shows your plan’s amount beside the feed’s median, and offers Use $X/mo to pull the row up to date only when the two disagree by enough to matter ($50, or about 10%). Unlink at any time — the expense row itself is never touched by unlinking. The Expenses page’s What the bank sees card audits the same detections in one read — the monthly total, what crept up, what started, what is not in the plan — and points back here for the actions.
- Minimum payments are never imported. A card's minimum is not what you actually pay, and payment feeds the payoff math directly — it's shown labelled "minimum" and only ever used if you explicitly ask for it.
- Transactions, further down the page, is the raw ledger behind those balances — every synced transaction across every connected account, newest first, filterable by account, month and merchant search; it stays collapsed and loads nothing until you open it, and like everything else here it is strictly read-only.
- Rates and assumptions stay yours. A row created from a Plaid account brings no growth assumption of its own — 0% APY on a savings or crypto row, and the global default return on a stock row — because Plaid observes today’s balance and knows nothing about what you assume. A debt or an asset’s loan is the exception: the lender’s reported APR is a present-tense fact, so it is filled in for you, and a card reporting several rates falls back to the purchase rate — check it. Set the rest yourself.
- Connection health. Banks break links and consent expires; the status line beside DB Sync (open Data & backups in Settings to see it) goes red when a connection is already broken and needs re-authorising, and gold when one is merely scheduled to expire or its data is going stale.
Methodology & trust
Methodology & trust is its own page at the foot of the rail, and it is the long answer rather than a summary: what the projection actually computes (one year at a time, at assumed rather than simulated returns, treating leftover money as spent unless you opt out), a table of every figure in the app that did not come from you with its published source, and a plain account of where your data goes.
That last part is worth reading once. Richifi is not a browser-only app: entering the passphrase stores a sync token and your plan mirrors to this app’s own database from then on, which is the default path rather than something you switch on. The page names each place your data can sit — this browser, that database, a save file you pick, the price lookups, and Plaid if you connect it — and what puts it there. An earlier version of this guide claimed the opposite, which is exactly why the page exists.
Settings
Settings (pinned at the foot of the rail; the top-bar profile chip also opens it) gathers the things about you and the app rather than the plan. Profile — your name (used in place of “You” across owner labels, subtotals and Coach), your age (which unlocks retirement modeling), and, for a couple, your partner’s name and age (set Household to Just me and the partner fields hide; Couple brings them back); household plus partner drive the net-worth percentile rankings. Appearance sets light or dark, saved on this device and remembered across visits. Pages lists the six portfolio pages (Businesses, Stocks, Crypto, Savings, Real assets, Debts) with a checkbox each: uncheck one to drop it from the left rail on this device — all pages are shown by default, the choice is a view preference saved only in this browser (never in your plan or its backups, and not saved while you are in the sample), and a hidden page still counts in every total and stays reachable with ⌘K. A portfolio page with nothing in it yet shows one short card explaining what it is for and an add button instead of an empty $0 page. Currency picks the symbol shown on every figure (display only — amounts are never converted). Tax & location takes your filing status and state and estimates your effective retirement-withdrawal tax rates — your projected retirement income run through the 2026 federal brackets (ordinary and long-term gains) plus your state’s rate — and fills the two rate fields on the Retirement page, which still override. An estimate, not tax advice. Data & backups exports your plan as JSON and opens the connected-file / import / log / status panel, and History opens the change log described below.
Data & Saving
- Export snapshot (Data & backups) writes one self-contained HTML file — the app itself, running read-only against a copy of your plan as it stood that day — to hand to a spouse or advisor. It carries the plan document only: no passphrase, no sync token, no connected-account state, no change history, and nothing the recipient does in it is saved anywhere; Accounts and Data & backups are absent from the file, and its charts need an internet connection. A photograph, not a link: it never updates.
- Annual review (PDF) (Data & backups, beside Export snapshot) opens a print-ready review of the plan in a new window and starts the print dialog — choose Save as PDF as the destination for a file. It is one document: your headline numbers (net worth, assets, debts, liquid, monthly surplus, and with a partner, net worth by person), the retirement verdict with how it is funded and the life timeline as a list, your goal, what the Coach flagged (titles with one line each), the portfolio table, and a dated footer saying projections are estimates, educational and not advice. Every figure is read from what the pages already show, so it cannot disagree with them; it carries no connected-account names (the Coach’s bank-feed item is left out and any account nickname is scrubbed), and it works on the sample plan. Your browser must allow the pop-up; nothing is saved or sent.
- Where your data lives. Your plan is held in this browser and, when you connect one, in a JSON file on your disk. Unlocking with your passphrase also switches on DB Sync: from then on every edit is mirrored to Richifi’s own database, and your daily net-worth history goes with it — that is what keeps two devices in step. Clear the field on the DB Sync line in Data & backups to turn it off and keep everything local.
- Network traffic. The passphrase check reaches the server before you are let in. After that: price lookups (stock quotes through Richifi’s own endpoint, crypto from CoinGecko), and — while DB Sync is on — your plan document and history archive. Plaid calls happen only for accounts you have connected. Nothing else leaves the browser: every projection, chart and table is computed here.
- Auto-save. Click the save-file line in Data & backups to connect a JSON file — Richifi reconnects it for you on later visits — and every change is written to it. A red status means saving failed.
- Export / Import. Export downloads a full JSON backup; CSV downloads everything as a spreadsheet (all inputs + the year-by-year projection). Import replaces your data after validation — your prior data is backed up in browser storage first.
- Undo everywhere. Removing any row or scenario shows an Undo toast for a few seconds.
- History. History on the Settings page opens a running record of edits to your live plan and each change’s impact — today’s net worth where it moved, otherwise the figure at your horizon year — so you can spot an accidental change. What-If edits and the sample plan never reach it. What it journals: every row added, removed, renamed or edited (including which brokerage, bank, exchange, account type or payment method a row is attached to), your business assumptions and exit terms, and the plan-wide settings — your age and your partner’s, your names, whether the plan covers a couple, filing status and state, your net-worth goal and goal year, retirement year and spending, the withdrawal tax rates, inflation, projection year, the surplus-sweep share and the auto Social Security switch. Prices fetched from the market are deliberately left out: they are not your edits. Entries are kept 60 days, stored only on this device, and never exported or written to your save file.