Withdraw mode turns "I need $X" into a funding plan: which accounts and holdings supply the cash, in what order, and what it costs in tax. You pick the strategy; the engine builds the orders. The strategy picked here is this session's choice. The saved defaults it starts from (default strategy, reserve floor, equity drawdown band) live in Settings → Withdrawals, which the Withdrawal defaults link beside these controls opens in Settings.
- Trim overweight: sell what you're over-target, so the withdrawal doubles as a rebalance. Natural when markets are up.
- Cash & fixed income first: spend cash, then maturing bills/CDs, leaving equities untouched. Natural when equities are down. A bill or CD counts as maturing only if its maturity is still ahead of you and within a year. One that has already matured, or whose maturity date the app can't read, is marked Reconcile, because the broker has probably swept it to cash already and your ledger hasn't caught up.
- Proportional: sell everything pro-rata, keeping the allocation.
- Income first: accrued cash and money-market balances before any invested principal.
Within a strategy, orders run in tax-aware account order: taxable first, tax-deferred next, then Roth, and tax-exempt (HSA, 529) last. Least tax-advantaged dollars go first so the sheltered ones keep compounding; an HSA is the last balance a plan should spend, not the first. Only accounts with both their Rebalance and Withdrawals flags on participate. "Overweight" is measured against targets sized to the post-withdrawal portfolio, so trims land where the slices should end up, not where they started.
Before asking for or interpreting an amount, Withdraw checks the selected scope. No eligible account routes to Accounts to enable both flags; a missing or dangling model assignment routes to Accounts; an invalid current allocation routes to Target Models; no holding or cash balance routes to Holdings; and held rows with no usable value route to Settings → Price data. An ordinary positive-weight slice needs a positive-weight fund to be executable, while ladder and self-directed slices may intentionally be fundless. This keeps a missing prerequisite from becoming a false Enter an amount result.
The tax estimate
Security sales in a taxable account walk your real lots by your chosen lot method (HIFO by default), split gains short- vs. long-term, and apply the flat assumed rates from your Profile. This is an estimate, not a tax return. Loss sales are flagged as Harvest; a harvest is warned as a wash sale if the same ticker was bought within ±30 days in any account, including reinvested dividends.
Selling inside a tax-deferred account, a Roth, or a tax-exempt HSA/529 is not a taxable event, so those orders show $0 and carry no harvest or wash-sale flag, because there is no loss to disallow. They show $0 even with no cost basis loaded, where a taxable sale would show an unavailable estimate. A taxable sale also shows an unavailable estimate when the lots that are loaded fall short of the shares being sold: a partly imported position would otherwise quote the tax on the covered fraction as though it were the tax on the sale. What this figure does not cover is the tax on the distribution itself: money taken out of a tax-deferred account is ordinary income in the year you take it. That belongs to the plan, not the trade. See the draw order.
Flagged rows are also collected in an expandable Wash-sale review that names the account and ticker. The table pins account identity left and Action / order right, so the funding instruction remains readable at the app's minimum width.
Now or defer
Rebalance now adds the trades that restore the model at the new, smaller size. Defer leaves the drift standing. The page tells you how far equities sit from target, and the correction resurfaces at your next contribution or scheduled rebalance.