App

• “Maximize my lifestyle” plans are rebuilt around one honest idea: your spending rule decides your PORTFOLIO WITHDRAWAL each year — as the rules' authors wrote them — with Social Security and pensions spent on top, and your total spending never below the floor you set. The old design got this wrong twice: an essentials layer stacked under the rule (two floors that silently added), and guaranteed income quietly reduced the rule's payout instead of adding to it. Every floor+variable result moves with this fix. That is the point of the release.
• The rule setup now tells you what you actually get to live on — “≈ $40k/yr from your portfolio + $30k guaranteed income ≈ $70k/yr to spend” — and flags a floor your guaranteed income already covers, or a ceiling below it.
• The rule preview teaches how each rule behaves — the same illustrative crash-and-boom cycle for every rule, showing the cuts, raises, and where your floor catches the fall — while the Spending results page narrates what actually happened in your plan, including the early years before Social Security starts, when the portfolio draws extra to hold your floor. And leaving the floor at $0 is now a conscious choice: the page tells you exactly what that means before you run.
• A real rule menu, with the authors' names kept honest: Guyton-Klinger (the full published rule set — new plans start here), Simplified guardrails (what this app previously ran, now honestly named), Bengen's floor & ceiling, Clyatt's 95% rule, the Kitces ratchet, plain % of portfolio, and VPW. Picking a rule starts it at its author's published numbers; change a defining lever and it relabels itself “Custom (based on …)” automatically.
• The spending results page now leads with the question a floor can actually fail: “Did your floor hold?” — the share of futures where spending never fell below your floor, and when it did, how many years and how far below.
• Loading a plan saved before this release maps your old essential spending onto the new single floor (never summing the two old floors) and says so with a banner on Expenses until you dismiss it.
• The Spending results page replaces the old static input gauge with a live withdrawal-rate corridor — your actual median rate and its spread across markets, plotted against the cut/raise bands your rule defends — plus two redesigned charts showing raises, cuts, and floor/ceiling binds by age.
• Medicare's IRMAA surcharge no longer distorts your tax-rate chart. IRMAA is billed on income from two years earlier, so a year your income dropped — right after a big Roth conversion, say — could show an absurd “effective tax rate” that folded in a surcharge from a very different year. IRMAA now has its own line everywhere (Tax & Cash Flow, the Roth conversion ledger) instead of being silently mixed into “tax.”
• Fixed: the hub's Investment Strategy, Insurance, Taxes, Optimize, and Income status rows could get stuck reading “Default” even after you'd customized them.
• Fixed: the sensitivity tornado chart could render as empty bars for spend-down rules (VPW, % of portfolio, Clyatt) that structurally can't fail — it now explains why instead of looking broken.

Engine & model

• One composable spending policy runs every rule (a generator, trigger adjustments, and bounds), with each named preset pinned to its source paper's constants by tests — and verified to reproduce the previous engine's behavior exactly for existing rules.
• Variable rules are withdrawal rules now, per their sources: the rule governs the portfolio draw, guaranteed income is consumed on top, and the floor/ceiling bound total spending. A household with $30k of Social Security running a 4% rule on $1M draws $40k and lives on $70k — the engine previously read the $40k as total spending and quietly spent the Social Security first. A broke household with Social Security is now short the floor-minus-income bridge, not the whole floor.
• New floor-integrity statistics: the share of futures that ever fell below the floor, years below, and how far below — a path that runs out of money counts as below its floor, not as a rounding footnote.

App

• Answer-first results: choose what you're solving for — retire earlier, keep the most after tax, will it hold, leave a legacy, or save enough — and “Your Plan” leads with a plain-language answer to that question, with the supporting numbers one tap below.
• New setup index you can fill in any order (nothing is gated until you run), and a reorganized navigation: Your Plan, Details, and Refine.
• Redesigned Overview: a net-worth projection with retirement / Medicare / RMD milestones and the ending-wealth range read right off the chart, plus gateway cards (balances, spending, taxes, sensitivity) that fill in in the background as their analyses finish.
• Multi-model stress test: see how the plan holds up across several market models — including a replay of the actual 1928–2025 record — not just one, with a safe-withdrawal band across them.
• Optimizers you can adopt and lock in: Roth conversions, withdrawal order, and Social Security claim age, each shown as a before/after ledger with its net benefit; lock the winner in as a strategy layer.
• Rebuilt inputs in one consistent “datasheet” style across Household, Accounts, Income, Insurance, and Investment Strategy.
• New timelines: guaranteed income (with a peak-income figure and the spousal Social Security benefit applied) and scheduled spending by category, both anchored to your retirement age.
• Reworked, customizable Tax & Cash-Flow tables with readable dollar axes.
• Guardrails: when a plan can't run as configured (for example, banked surplus with no account to hold it), the run is blocked with a clear explanation instead of returning a misleading result.
• New plans start with a cash account and contributions off, for a clearer baseline; a confidence target you set is now honored everywhere the plan is judged or optimized.
• Spending results now speak your plan's language. If you set a floor and a variable rule, the page reads back what you actually chose — your floor, your rule, and what it paid out — instead of a fixed-spending story, and a new “How your spending behaved” panel shows how often spending was cut, the worst run of back-to-back cuts, how often it rose, and how much of retirement you spent at your floor.
• Two spending charts that had never once drawn — guardrail cuts and raises by age, and how often a floor or ceiling binds — now render, and the variable-percentage view finally shows what's left at the end.
• Corrected several figures that described a plan you weren't running: an invented discretionary amount, a “you could spend up to” ceiling taken from a fixed-spending solver, and a “discretionary” goal that was always ~100% funded because a spending rule cannot underfund itself.

Engine & model

• The app now runs on a separate, versioned calculation engine (FEAsibleEF 1.1) reached over an API; every result still carries its engine version and a config fingerprint, so any number can be reproduced and traced.
• Historical return models — resample real multi-year blocks of the 1928–2025 record, or replay it start to finish — alongside the parametric default, with returns and inflation now drawn together so their real relationship (e.g. stagflation) is preserved. Safe-withdrawal “triangulation” across models feeds the stress test.
• Honest goal funding: the funded figure is the share of scenarios that fully fund every goal, read directly from the engine (no optimistic rounding).
• Reads richer engine output — cash flows, realized gains, long-term capital-gains tax, and per-scenario goal funding — behind the new tables and charts. Optimizer and sensitivity runs are parallelized for speed.
• The engine now reports what a variable spending rule decided each year — the share of scenarios cut, held, or raised at each age, and how often a floor or ceiling bound — as well as how often spending rose. Only the lifetime totals were reported before, which is why the by-age spending charts had nothing to draw.

Engine & model

• Cash-flow modeling fix: a required minimum distribution larger than the year's spending now keeps the surplus (reinvested rather than lost), so projections in cash-flow modes are more accurate — some figures shift.

App

• Already-retired plans: enter a retirement age at or below your current age and the plan starts drawing down right away.
• State income tax now starts off (federal-only) so results aren't tied to one state's rules; pick your state of residence (preset states, a custom flat rate, or none) in Quick Setup or on the Assumptions page, and results pages flag when it's off.
• Filing status is now set automatically from your household (joint through the year of a spouse's death, then single) instead of being a manual choice.
• Tax & Cash-Flow tables now show net investment income tax (NIIT) and your marginal tax rate alongside the existing columns.
• A consistent action bar — run, export, today's-$ vs future, and edit assumptions — now sits below the title on every results page.
• Plans bank surplus guaranteed income from retirement (held as cash) by default, for a more conservative baseline.
• Sensitivity analysis now labels each factor by person for couples.

Engine & model

• More accurate inflation compounding in the year-by-year projection (a correctness improvement; some figures shift slightly).
• Honest-uncertainty reporting: a margin of error on the headline confidence figure, with optional confidence bands on ending wealth.
• Steadier results from the same number of simulated paths (variance reduction on by default).

App

• Quick Setup wizard seeds a starting plan in a few questions — for one person or a couple, with retirement accounts for each.
• Save a plan to a file and reload it later to keep working — no account, and nothing is stored on a server.
• Inputs for household, accounts (taxable, Traditional, Roth, HSA, 529, cash), guaranteed income (Social Security, pensions, annuities, rental), insurance (term life, annuities, long-term care), goals, and one-time cash events.
• Investment Strategy page: one household mix, a per-account mix (asset location), or an age-based glide path; rebalancing and fees.
• Roth conversions, withdrawal order, and Social Security timing — set by hand or let an optimizer choose, with the net benefit shown.
• Results in one place: plan confidence, wealth fan charts, spending, tax & cash-flow, scenario comparison, and sensitivity analysis; CSV export.
• Plain-language labels and contextual help throughout; light & dark themes; desktop-first layout.

Engine & model

• Monte Carlo simulation over thousands of market paths using a correlated multi-asset return model.
• Per-account asset allocation and age-based glide paths, with periodic rebalancing.
• Tax modeling: federal brackets, bracketed state tax, capital gains, Social Security taxation, required minimum distributions, and Medicare (IRMAA) surcharges.
• Spending policies: constant-real, guardrails, variable-percentage withdrawal, and floor-and-ceiling.
• Optimizers that weigh lifetime taxes together with the deferred tax embedded in any leftover pre-tax balance.
• Guaranteed-income and insurance / annuity / long-term-care modeling.