FIREproof Help

Guides, references, and concepts

Browse topics

Cycle Spreadsheet Export

Download every cycle and every year as a two-sheet Excel workbook: a big-picture Summary and a Full Detail sheet whose columns sum so each year's ledger balances.

TL;DR. The Export action, in the three-dot menu beside the success-rate badges at the top of the Proof view, downloads one Excel workbook covering the entire run: one row per historical cycle and year, with every cash flow the simulation made that year. The charts summarize; this file lets you audit. You can follow every dollar of, say, year 8 of the 1973 cycle, and check the arithmetic yourself in Excel, Google Sheets, or Numbers. It is a Pro feature, available once a standard historical run has finished. On Risk-Based Guardrails and Monte Carlo results the action shows disabled with a note saying so - their per-year detail lives on the async engine and cannot be exported here yet.

Two sheets: Summary and Full Detail

The workbook has two sheets over the same rows. Summary carries the big-picture ledger in narrative order: the year's starting balance, cash in, cash out, the rounding surplus, market change, and ending balance, so a year reads left to right without scrolling. Full Detail carries every column: per-reason withdrawal breakouts, taxes by category, the deposit split, and informational extras. Start on Summary; switch to Full Detail when you want to see where a number came from. The Summary sheet ends with Ending Balance (Real), the today's-dollars value that matches the app's portfolio chart (Full Detail carries it too).

Each row is identified by Cycle Start Year and Year Index (Calendar Year is their sum). All money columns are nominal dollars for that simulated year, rounded to cents, unless the name ends in (Real); Cumulative Inflation is the price-level index at full precision, so any nominal column divided by it gives today's dollars. The Full Detail columns are grouped left to right:

  • Cash coming in: Income Adjustments (pension, Social Security, and other income events), Job Net Pay (take-home pay after payroll deductions), HELOC Draws, Dividend Income (dividend cash that funded spending), and the withdrawal columns (Withdrawals: Total with per-reason breakouts for spending, RMDs, Roth conversions, QCDs, and other draws).
  • Cash going out: Base Spending, Expenses (expense events, including net real estate costs and any IRMAA surcharge), Discretionary Spending (surplus cash flow the plan spends when excess cash flow is set to "spend" rather than saved), the taxes-paid columns, and the deposit columns (money moved into your accounts).
  • Balances: Starting Balance, Market Change (growth, reinvested dividends, and fees), Ending Balance, Property Equity, and Rounding Surplus (cash in minus cash out; about zero on every row when the ledger reconciles).

Each cycle is its own block: two blank rows and a repeated header row separate one cycle from the next, so a cycle reads as a unit while scrolling. If a cycle fails, its remaining years are still present as blank-value rows with Failed set to TRUE, so every cycle has an identical row count. One caveat: if you sort, filter, or pivot the data, exclude the separator and repeated-header rows first (filter Cycle Start Year to numeric values).

How to check that a year's ledger balances

The Summary sheet's columns are exactly the two sides of the ledger. Pick any row and add them up:

  1. Cash in = Income Adjustments + Job Net Pay + HELOC Draws + Dividend Income + Withdrawals: TotalRoth ConversionQCD. Roth conversions are subtracted because that money moves between your own accounts and never leaves the portfolio; QCDs go straight from an IRA to charity.
  2. Cash out = Base Spending + Expenses + Discretionary Spending + Taxes Paid + Deposits: From Cash Flow. Tax withheld from paychecks is not added here because Job Net Pay is already net of it; on Full Detail, Taxes Withheld From Pay plus Taxes Paid make up Taxes Paid: Total.
  3. Their difference equals the Rounding Surplus column to the cent, on every row.

On Full Detail, a few columns are informational breakouts of numbers already inside an identity column, so do not add them again: Real Estate Net and IRMAA Surcharge are inside Expenses, the per-type tax columns sum to Taxes Paid: Total, and Deposits: External (payroll deferrals and employer contributions, which never pass through your hands) plus Deposits: From Cash Flow sum to Deposits: Total.

The balance columns close the loop the same way, also entirely on the Summary sheet: Ending Balance equals Starting Balance + Market Change + Deposits: External + Deposits: From Cash Flow − (Withdrawals: TotalRoth Conversion), within pennies of rounding.

What-If scenarios

The export always matches what is on screen. If you are viewing an ephemeral What-If comparison, the workbook is generated with the same What-If set and the filename carries a -what-if marker so baseline and scenario downloads do not get mixed up.

Related

Was this helpful?

For sim-specific issues, open Plan Diagnostics from the Proof view. For everything else, reach out to support.