The People tab establishes who the simulation is for. Ages drive nearly every age-gated rule in the engine: HSA contribution caps, retirement-account access, Social Security timing, RMDs, and Medicare-related healthcare presets.

Fields

• Name. Display label used across Inputs and Proof.
• Birth Year. Drives age-based simulation behavior.
• Birth Month. Improves age timing precision for adjustments and account rules.

A simulation can have one or two people. Two people switches tax filing to married-jointly assumptions and unlocks per-person account ownership.

Modeling a spouse passing away

A person's editor carries an optional passing year. It is the single most under-modeled risk in a two-person retirement plan: the household loses one Social Security benefit while the survivor moves onto the single tax schedule, whose brackets and standard deduction are roughly half the joint ones. Less income, more tax. That is the widow's penalty, and this is how you see it. For now the control appears on US plans only; the survivor rules below are US tax and Social Security rules. It is a Pro feature: without a subscription the editor opens a read-only preview of the inputs behind a Get Pro prompt and stores nothing.

What the simulation does automatically

From the year after the passing, with nothing else to configure:

• Filing status becomes single, federal and state. That flows through the brackets, the standard deduction, the senior deduction (one instead of two), how much Social Security is taxable, long-term capital-gains thresholds, IRMAA tiers, the NIIT threshold, and IRA deduction phase-outs.
• Their own income ends: job, side hustle, custom income, Roth conversions, 72(t) payments, QCDs. Household items are untouched: a mortgage does not end because a co-owner died.
• Social Security follows the survivor rule. The household keeps whichever benefit is larger, with a floor of 82.5% of the deceased's full-retirement-age benefit.
• A pension follows its survivor election. That is the Survivor percentage on the pension itself. Blank or 0 ends it; 50% continues it at half.
• Accounts move to the survivor and become their own. Required distributions then follow the survivor's age and their own start age, so a younger survivor can pause an inherited pre-tax account for years.
• Taxable cost basis steps up. An account the deceased owned alone steps up in full; a joint account steps up by half. In a community-property state (AZ, CA, ID, LA, NV, NM, TX, WA, WI) a joint account steps up in full.
• One person drops off the ACA household and Medicare IRMAA, the survivor moves to the single IRMAA tiers, and joint-account dividends split across whoever is left. A Medicare expense linked to the person who passed ends with them; the survivor's own Medicare expense is untouched.
• Base living expenses scale by the Spending after the passing percentage on that person. 75% is the range most planners assume. Your entered expenses are not scaled. Only base spending is.

Not modeled

• Qualifying Surviving Spouse filing status (two more years of joint brackets with a dependent child). It is rare for the retirees this feature is for.
• Appealing IRMAA with an SSA-44 life-changing-event form. The two-year income lookback keeps using the joint years, which is what happens to a widow who does not file one.
• Claiming the survivor benefit first and switching to a larger own benefit at 70.
• Holding the deceased's IRA as an inherited IRA instead of rolling it over. The rollover is the better election for a spouse in nearly every case; if you want the other one, add an inherited account on the Accounts tab.
• Estate tax and portability, and a second passing. The plan duration already sets the survivor's horizon.

Two things to add by hand

• Life insurance is a one-time Inheritance in the year after the passing.
• Downsizing is a sale year on the Real Estate event.

Comparing it against the plan you have

A passing year lives in the plan, not in a scenario, so the comparison is a copy: Duplicate the simulation, set the passing year on the copy, run both, and open Compare Sims. That shows you the two side by side and, importantly, shows you the years before the passing. The Roth-conversion window while joint brackets still apply is the actionable half of the widow's penalty.

Only one person in a plan can carry a passing year, and a one-person plan cannot: the plan needs someone left to plan for. The editor says so when it applies.

Dependents

The Dependents section is where you add college-bound children to the plan. Dependents are optional. They don't affect tax filing status, but they unlock two features that key off each child's college timeline: 529 beneficiary linking and the FAFSA optimizer.

Participants vs dependents

Plan participants fund the plan: they own accounts and earn income, and their ages drive the tax and retirement rules above. Dependents are children who don't fund the plan but drive FAFSA aid and college tuition. A child entered as a participant can't be a 529 beneficiary or appear in the FAFSA optimizer, which is why the two groups sit side by side with their own Add buttons.

If you added someone to the wrong group, use Convert to dependent in a person's editor, or Convert on a dependent's row. A conversion copies the name and birth fields and moves the row; it does not rewire anything else, so it is only offered when there is nothing to break:

• A participant who owns accounts, or is named on an inflow or outflow, can't convert until those are reassigned or deleted. A plan also needs at least one participant, so the last one can't be converted away.
• A dependent who is a 529 beneficiary, or is picked in an Education Expense's For dependent selector, can't convert until those links are cleared.

In every blocked case the button stays visible and names exactly what is in the way.

Per-dependent fields

• Name and Birth year / month. Identify the dependent and drive their current age.
• College start year and Duration. Define the award window (e.g. 2030-2033 for a 4-year program starting in 2030).
• Annual cost of attendance. Today's-dollar yearly cost; the simulation inflates it automatically.
• Linked 529 account. Picks which 529 (from the Accounts tab) is earmarked for this child.
• Optimize FAFSA in base years. Opt-in toggle that shapes withdrawals during the FAFSA base years.

How dependents relate to 529 accounts

Linking a dependent to a 529 is reporting, not spending. The link drives the FAFSA projections, the "529 won't cover projected college costs" plan diagnostic, and the warning that offers to match the account's expected first withdrawal year to the year the child actually starts college. On its own it moves no money.

Spending a 529 takes an Education Expense that names it as the funding account. Without one, the account is never drawn on: it keeps compounding through college and past it. Both the dependent's editor and the 529's editor offer a Create college expense button that builds the right expense in one click, prefilled with the child's college years and cost of attendance and linked back to them. See Expense types for the full behavior of an Education Expense.

You can add the 529 in the Accounts tab and link it from either side; the relationship is stored on the dependent.

Because the link lives on the dependent, one 529 per child is the model. Adding a second 529 for a different child is expected and will not warn you about duplicates, even though both accounts are owned by the same parent, because FIREproof compares beneficiaries, not owners. Two 529s pointed at the same child, or two with no beneficiary at all, still raise the duplicate-account note.

How dependents relate to FAFSA

FAFSA bases a family's Student Aid Index on income reported two years before each award year. Those are the base years. With Optimize FAFSA turned on for a dependent, the simulation avoids Traditional / pre-tax withdrawals during that child's base years (college start − 2 through the last award year − 2) to keep reported income and SAI low. The dependent card shows the exact base-year range so you can see which simulation years will be affected.