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A one-time license with no subscription, including 12 months of updates, plus a 30-day free trial that needs no card and no account. The license itself never expires and nothing ever locks: when the update year is up, every version you already have keeps working exactly as it did, and renewing is optional and never automatic. macOS, Windows and Linux are all available now — the Windows build ships through the Microsoft Store, signed by Microsoft, so it installs with no security warning. Current figures live on the pricing section; the retirement planning assumes the US tax system, and if it is not right for you, reply within 30 days for a refund (terms).

Nothing changes in the app you're running. Every version released inside your 12 months is yours permanently — it keeps opening, importing, projecting and exporting, with no feature switched off and no nag. What lapses is only your claim on newer builds, and it is checked when you install one, never while you work. The renewal buys the annual calibration: each tax year's brackets, RMD ages and Social Security parameters, plus everything else shipped that year. Coverage runs continuously rather than from the day you pay, so the new year picks up where the old one ended — renewing late costs you nothing and renewing early loses you nothing. If you never renew, you have a working copy of RangefinderInvest for as long as you own the machine.

A rangefinder is the instrument that tells you exactly how far away something is before you commit to the shot. That's the whole job here: read where you actually stand, measure the gap to the mix you chose, and read the distance to retirement — three ways, each with its error bars. You design a target mix; RangefinderInvest turns the gap into exact Add / Reduce moves and tells you when a rebalance is due. And unlike "rebalancing software" that wants your brokerage login, it never connects, never trades — you place every order yourself.

No — and that's by design. You import a CSV transaction export from Fidelity or Schwab, or type in your monthly statement. RangefinderInvest never has your login, never moves money, and never places a trade. It shows illustrative Add / Reduce moves toward the target you set; you place every order yourself.

In a single SQLite file on your own machine. There's no cloud, no account, and no usage analytics. You can see exactly where the file lives, move it to a synced folder or external drive, and keep automatic timestamped backups.

Your data, no — never. Holdings, transactions, cost basis and plans are computed and stored on your machine, and no request the app makes carries any of them. It makes exactly two kinds of outbound call: (1) the market-data lookups you configure — a ticker symbol and a date range to Tiingo, tsp.gov, treasury.gov, or Yahoo Finance if you switch that opt-in source on; and (2) a once-a-day check asking rangefinderinvest.com whether a newer version exists, carrying the running version number, the operating system, and — once in an install's life — a flag that the install is new. No identifier is in that request and nothing is kept beyond a daily counter, so we can tell how many people run RangefinderInvest and never which ones. Turn it off in Settings → "Check for updates automatically"; Microsoft Store builds never make it at all. Don't take our word for it: block rangefinderinvest.com in your firewall and everything except those two calls keeps working. Full detail in the privacy policy.

Yes — first-class. One click downloads the official daily share prices for all 16 TSP funds — G, F, C, S, I and every Lifecycle (L) fund — with full history from tsp.gov, back to 2003. Your TSP sits as real holdings next to your brokerage accounts: tracked, compared, backtested and included in the retirement projection.

No. RangefinderInvest is a calculator for a plan you design — it shows illustrative Add / Reduce moves toward the target allocation you set, and hypothetical projections from assumptions you enter. It is not financial, investment, or tax advice, and it doesn't recommend securities. Confirm prices, tax lots, wash-sale rules and suitability with your broker or advisor before acting; the app carries the same note at the point of each result.

The CSV importer auto-detects Fidelity and Schwab formats, and brokerage-aware ordering plus NTF (no-transaction-fee) filtering cover both. The model layer itself is brokerage-agnostic — implement the same target with whatever tickers you hold, wherever you hold them.

Yes — it's the whole second half of the app. The Projection runs a seeded Monte-Carlo simulation of your household in today's dollars, starting from your real balances by tax class. It models working-years contributions, spending phases, Social Security, one-time flows, taxes (federal brackets, a flat state rate, the Social-Security provisional worksheet, ACA/IRMAA ceilings) and per-owner RMDs. On top sit the optimizers: fill-to-bracket Roth conversions, a "when can I retire?" age sweep, a home-affordability frontier, a spending guardrail that flexes only the spending you've marked discretionary, and a survivorship model that shows the widow's penalty honestly.

Because one number would be pretending. The same plan is scored under a forward Normal model, a fat-tailed Student-t model, and a historical replay of 1928–2025 — and the historical replay itself offers four sampling methods, because how you reuse history quietly decides the answer. The spread between the lenses tells you how much your plan depends on one lucky reading of the past. Most planners pick one method and hide the choice; RangefinderInvest shows you the whole spread.

Deliberately so. It runs in today's (real) dollars, so Social Security and tax brackets are treated as inflation-indexed rather than double-counted. It's seeded and deterministic, so optimizer comparisons are never sampling noise. The tax model is ordinary-income only — no LTCG/NIIT stack — a simplification documented right on the reference panel. Where a number can't be precise, the app says so instead of implying false confidence.

It's a risk-adjusted, Sharpe-like ranking: blended multi-period returns clear a risk-free hurdle, get divided by volatility, shrunk by how much history backs them, and penalized for expense ratio, max drawdown and year-to-year inconsistency. Every weight is tunable in Settings and the rankings update instantly. The Optimizer uses the same composite scoring to rank substitution candidates across every slice at once.

They apply the model-weight version actually in force on each rebalance date, hold cash slices flat instead of redistributing them, and state the true common data window — presets the data can't cover are disabled, not silently truncated. Extending a backtest past a model's first version date discloses the extrapolation on the banner, and every statistic follows the window the chart shows. You can also overlay any ticker — a target-date fund, say — or another model as a benchmark, with excess CAGR, beta, tracking error, information ratio and up/down capture.

Held-to-maturity Treasuries, brokered CDs and bonds live in a Fixed Income view priced by accrual toward par — no fake $0 prices, no false dips on your value chart. You get the ladder by maturity date, FDIC issuer exposure, a forward income calendar, and a Builder that models a target ladder off the live Treasury par-yield curve. A model's ladder slice counts every held rung in rebalancing automatically.

The shipping app uses Tiingo, a properly licensed market-data provider — you connect your own Tiingo API key at setup, and Tiingo's free tier is enough for a personal portfolio — plus official tsp.gov data for TSP funds. "Update prices" grabs only the missing recent days; "Rebuild" re-downloads from scratch. An optional Yahoo/yfinance source exists as an off-by-default, personal-use opt-in, and you can pin a source per ticker.