Projection is the retirement planner: it takes your live balances (by tax treatment, from your real accounts), your assumptions (spending, income, returns, ages), and simulates thousands of future paths to answer will the money last, and what would make it last better?
Before it can run
Every person in the household needs a birth year on file in your Profile. It supplies the age and RMD clock the whole simulation runs on, so the page can't render a plan while one is missing. Preview with an example runs a sample persona instead: a 35-year-old single filer with $150,000 saved, adding $18,000 a year until 65, then spending $48,000 a year with Social Security claimed at 67. Every part of that household belongs to the persona: the age, the balances, the saving, the spending, the benefit and the tax status alike. Nothing of yours is mixed into it, so the success rate it reports describes one household and not a blend of two. Your own answers stay exactly where you left them and come back the moment you turn the preview off.
How the page is laid out
- The KPI strip stays pinned: success rate, ending value, and the withdrawal-rate check under each of the three market lenses, for the scenario you're editing.
- Section chips jump between the areas: income, expenses and health coverage, money flow, assumptions, goal-seek optimizers, and the year-by-year detail.
- Scenario chips at the top save and switch whole what-if plans; every assumption travels with its scenario, and your live balances are never written by this page.
Reading the results
Everything is in today's dollars. The fan chart shows the range of outcomes, not a prediction. The median is the middle path; the bands are how differently the same plan can play out. For any number you want to trace by hand, zero every volatility input (Blended's Volatility %, or the three per-asset vol fields) and read the deterministic path in the year-by-year table.
Start simple: confirm spending and Social Security first. They move the answer more than any return assumption. Then let the optimizers explore conversions, home timing, or retirement age against your real plan.