This playbook walks you from an empty workspace to a fully run simulation. Each step is small on purpose. Don't worry about getting the numbers perfect on the first pass. You can refine them once you see the Proof view come to life.

1. Add a Person

Open the People tab and add yourself. The birth year drives every age-gated rule the engine uses (early-withdrawal penalties, RMDs, Social Security claiming windows, Medicare). For couples, add a second person.

Next: People tab reference

2. Add a Brokerage and a tax-deferred account

Move to the Accounts tab. Add at least one Brokerage Account — this is required, because it is the only account type that can absorb post-tax surplus into your target asset allocation without a contribution cap. Then add a tax-deferred account like a 401k or Traditional IRA. For each, fill in a balance and an asset allocation across stocks, bonds, and cash.

Next: Accounts tab reference

3. Add Social Security as an Adjustment

On the Inflows / Outflows tab, add a Social Security adjustment. Pick the person it belongs to, set the claiming age, and enter the projected monthly benefit. The engine will start the income flow at that age and inflate it each year.

Next: Income types reference

4. Set base spending in the Spending Plan

Still on the Inflows / Outflows tab, look at the Expenses column. Spending lives in two tiles, and which ones you see depends on whether you're already retired.

Base Living Expenses (the retirement number)

The Base Living Expenses tile is always there. It represents your steady-state yearly spending once you're in retirement, and it runs from your retirement year through the end of the simulation. Click the tile to open the Spending Plan editor.

The simplest starting point is Inflation Adjusted Spending: enter a yearly amount and the engine inflates it every year using your CPI assumption. You can switch to VPW, Guyton-Klinger, CAPE, or one of the other rules later. They all need a base number first, and the rule choice is what drives whether spending is steady, market-reactive, or portfolio-percentage-based.

Pre-Retirement Living Expenses (the working-years number)

If your retirement year is in the future, a second amber tile appears just above Base Living Expenses: Pre-Retirement Living Expenses. This is your yearly spending from today through the year before retirement. It's a separate input because working-years spending usually looks different from retirement spending. Different fixed costs, different discretionary patterns, and often a different inflation behavior.

Click the tile to set:

• Amount. Your current yearly spending.
• Inflation rule. CPI (track inflation), Flat Rate (a custom % per year, useful when you expect lifestyle creep above CPI), or Not Inflation-Adjusted (hold the dollar amount flat, but loses buying power over time).

During the working years, the engine will try to cover this spending out of any pre-retirement income you've added (a Job, Take-Home Salary, or other income adjustment). If pre-retirement income falls short, or you haven't added any, the difference is pulled from your accounts, which can quietly drain your starting balance before retirement even begins. Plan Diagnostics will flag this on the Proof view.

Next: Spending plan rules at a glance

5. Hit Run

With the inputs in place, click Run at the end of the navigation tabs, or click Proof in the sidebar. The engine plays your portfolio against every available historical cycle (1871 onward) and aggregates the results. First runs typically complete in a few seconds.

Next: Proof cheat sheet

6. Read about the success rate

The big number on the Proof view is your success rate: the share of historical cycles in which your portfolio survived to the end of the plan. 95% means 95 out of 100 historical paths made it. 95% also means that in 5% of the historical paths, you would have had to change your plans for your portfolio to survive. I don't always like to frame that 5% as failure, because history is yours for the making.

Next: What success rate means

7. Open the year-by-year analysis

On the Proof view, click Analyze Year-by-year data to open the year-by-year modal. This is where you can step through any single year of any single historical cycle and see exactly what the engine did.

Two sliders at the top of the modal control which year you're looking at:

• Cycle slider. Picks which historical cycle to inspect. Each cycle is one full run of your plan against a different starting year of market history (1871, 1872, and so on). Drag the slider and the panels below re-render against that cycle's returns and inflation.
• Simulation Year slider. Picks which year inside the selected cycle. The label shows the absolute calendar year and each person's age at that point, so you can quickly find a milestone (the year you retire, the year Social Security kicks in, the year an RMD starts).

With both sliders set, the Year Analysis tab gives you two side-by-side panels:

• Allocation. The donut of stocks / bonds / cash for that year, plus a tax bracket progress bar showing how much taxable income you generated and which federal bracket the last dollar landed in.
• Events. The per-year waterfall: incomes received (Social Security, pensions, jobs, payroll detail), spending applied, real-estate cash flow (taxes, insurance, maintenance, mortgage payments), withdrawals from each account, taxes paid, ACA subsidy breakdowns when applicable, and any cash deposits or transfers between accounts. If you've modeled real-estate purchases or 1031 exchanges, those show as their own banner cards.

A third panel, Bucket Strategy, only appears when your spending plan is Bucket Strategy; it shows that year's bucket-decision events.

The second tab, Account Details, is a per-account ledger view of every transaction in the selected cycle. It's a Pro feature. You can ignore it on a first pass.

Next: How a simulated year flows