Gather information and start a plan

Begin with a coherent first plan, not a perfect one

The purpose of Plan Setup is to create a believable first version of retirement, using the information you can reasonably assemble today. It asks for the facts that shape nearly every later calculation: who is in the household, when work may end, when dependable benefits may begin, how much the household expects to spend, and what savings are available to fund the difference.

A useful first plan is complete enough to expose the important questions. It does not need every holding, future purchase, or tax detail on the first day. An honest estimate marked for later refinement is more useful than false precision, and it is much more useful than postponing the entire plan because one statement is missing.

Plan Setup creates Home, the scenario you will maintain as circumstances change. Later, you can use What-ifs to test alternatives without replacing that baseline.

Gather the few facts that control the first result

Start with birth dates, possible retirement dates, a planning horizon for each person, current annual household spending, gross employment income, Social Security or pension estimates, and recent balances for meaningful accounts. Use values from statements when they are available. If a figure is uncertain, choose a reasonable planning estimate and remember what evidence would cause you to revise it.

Pay special attention to whether an amount is monthly or annual, gross or after tax, and expressed in today’s dollars or a future nominal amount. Those distinctions can move a projection far more than filling in a minor optional field.

You can begin before every question is settled. You should pause, however, if you cannot yet describe the household, the broad retirement timing, the resources available, or the lifestyle the plan is meant to fund. Without those anchors, a favorable result would answer no clear planning question.

Build Home in layers

Complete the guided questions and review the summary before creating the plan. The quick-estimate path is intended to establish broad tax buckets; detailed setup is appropriate when actual account ownership and account types already matter to the question. Whichever path you choose, inspect the resulting Home plan instead of treating setup completion as proof that the inputs are right.

After Home is created, use Scenario Editor to replace broad estimates with real accounts, holdings, pensions, temporary income, housing, debts, healthcare, and spending changes. Add detail in the order it affects the decision. A missing pension start date is usually more important than the ticker symbol of a small holding.

The initial proportional withdrawal approach is a neutral baseline, not a recommendation. First make the household facts credible. Strategy Comparison is useful only after the underlying plan describes the retirement you actually want to evaluate.

Use the first projection as a diagnostic

Read the first Projection to find obvious timing and magnitude problems. Confirm that salary stops when work ends, benefits start for the correct person, spending resembles the intended lifestyle, and account totals agree with a common balance date. Find the first year in which the portfolio begins funding spending and make sure that transition is plausible.

Do not judge the plan from ending wealth alone. A high balance can coexist with understated spending or a missing goal; a low balance can be caused by a single incorrect date. Correct the earliest wrong assumption before interpreting later years.

Once the deterministic cash flow makes sense, run Stochastic Analysis to examine uncertainty. That sequence keeps an input error from being mistaken for market risk.

What a first plan cannot establish

The first plan is a planning model, not a verification of account ownership, benefit eligibility, tax treatment, or the feasibility of a life decision. YARCalc cannot know whether an estimate is reasonable merely because the form accepts it.

Keep the statements, benefit records, agreements, and professional advice behind consequential assumptions. Improve Home when better information arrives, and preserve uncertain alternatives in What-ifs instead of quietly replacing the baseline with an optimistic guess.