Use Your Planning Journey to explore YARCalc

Your Planning Journey is a map of useful work, not a score

Your Planning Journey helps someone who has created a plan answer a very ordinary question: “What should I look at next?” It groups activities into establishing the essentials, understanding the plan, and exploring alternatives. The recommendations are navigation help, not a judgment that retirement is ready or unready.

You do not need to complete every advanced activity. The right next step is the one that resolves missing foundational information or answers a real planning question. Running a sophisticated report simply to fill a circle can create more output without improving the plan.

Finish essentials before collecting advanced results

Begin with household dates, credible spending, dependable income, meaningful accounts, and a current balance date. If those are incomplete, correcting them is usually more valuable than comparing strategies or market implementations.

After the basic Projection makes sense, Test Market Uncertainty can show uncertainty, a What-if can test a decision, and the Action Plan can organize follow-up. Balance History and quarterly check-ins become useful over time; they cannot be completed meaningfully on the first day merely to advance the journey.

Next useful action puts missing savings, estimated balances, and missing or aging balance snapshots first. It then asks you to refresh out-of-date market analyses or annual guidance, complete a due check-in, and review open annual decisions before optional exploration. Balance reviews are prompted after 30 days; the first planning review is due three calendar months after main plan creation, and later check-ins are due three calendar months after the last completed review.

Treat the recommendation as a reasoned suggestion. If another issue is more urgent—an impending retirement date, benefit election, account error, or family change—go directly to that work.

Follow an activity to the page where the real work happens

Open a journey activity to reach its planning screen. Read the page-specific Help, complete the work, save it, and return to the Dashboard. The journey itself does not edit the plan or start an analysis.

Status comes from saved evidence such as accounts, dated balance snapshots, completed analyses, What-ifs, action-plan decisions, check-ins, and history across dates. Merely opening a page does not demonstrate that the planning question was answered.

Daily valuations do not reset your planning progress or create annual-guidance and market-analysis refresh tasks. Saved analyses retain their original dates, balances, probabilities, and conclusions. Valuations updated identifies those results without claiming they were recalculated for today. Rerun when you want an estimate using current values; applying a saved analysis recommendation still requires matching current inputs.

When an analysis says Recalculation needed, run it again before using its recommendations. You can still review the saved result with its original date and balances.

Changes to planning inputs or the planning year can require a fresh review. Rerun affected analyses and save current annual guidance before using changed recommendations for decisions.

A check means evidence exists, not that the conclusion is good

The counts and checks describe saved evidence, including past accomplishments. Read the status beside the activity to see whether a result is current or needs refreshing. A check does not say the result was favorable, the assumption was correct, or anyone reviewed it.

Projection says Available to review because calculating it does not record a human review. A saved Annual Action Plan baseline also does not mean you reviewed its decisions. Record individual decisions on the Annual Action Plan; accepted items stay quiet unless a reminder or target date is due, and completed, declined, or not-applicable items stay closed.

If an item remains open, confirm that the related save or background analysis completed successfully and belongs to the main plan where required. Some activities depend on time: Balance History needs snapshots from at least two dates, and a check-in becomes meaningful only after circumstances have had a chance to change.

Read the resulting report and decide what it means before moving to the next activity. The journey is valuable when it builds understanding, not when it is completed fastest.

Exploration cannot certify retirement readiness

The journey is not a financial health grade, fiduciary assessment, completeness certificate, or guarantee. It cannot know whether an omitted fact matters or whether an explored feature was used well.

Use it to find the next useful part of YARCalc. Use the Dashboard and detailed reports to understand the plan, and use current professional advice for consequential decisions outside the model.