The screens
Outlook
How Outlook tests your plan against simulated markets, what each result card means, and how to change the simulation settings.
Outlook tests your plan against many possible futures for the markets. It shows how often your money lasts, how wide the range of outcomes is, and what the bad cases look like.
The headline results
- Chance your money lasts is the share of simulated futures in which your plan pays every bill to the end of the plan.
- Net worth at the end, middle outcome is the median ending net worth in today's dollars, with weaker and stronger outcomes beside it.
- If money runs out, when shows the typical age of a shortfall in the futures that have one.
A high chance isn't the only goal. A plan that always succeeds may mean you're spending less than you could.
Range of outcomes by year
This chart shows percentile bands for each year. By default they're the 5th, 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, 90th and 95th percentiles. You can chart net worth, investments, spending or taxes, in today's or future dollars.
Each band is a range across futures at that year, not one path through time. To follow one path, use Look inside one future and pick a percentile from the 10th to the 90th.
Other cards
- Where you could end up summarizes ending outcomes.
- Years a shortfall first happens shows when failures begin.
- Stress tests: if history repeats replays your plan from difficult historical start years, such as 1929, 1937, 1966, 1973, 2000 and 2008. Choose Run.
- Net worth today lists what you own, what you owe and your net worth.
Simulation settings
Under Simulation settings, choose Change how futures are simulated:
| Method | What it does |
|---|---|
| Reshuffled history (block bootstrap) | The default. Strings together random multi-year blocks of actual historical returns and inflation. The block length is 5 years unless you change it. |
| Every historical start year | Replays history in order, once from each starting year. |
| Random (lognormal) | Draws each year's returns from a lognormal distribution with your means, volatilities and correlations. |
| Random (normal) | The same with a normal distribution. |
| Random with fatter tails | Draws with more extreme years than a normal distribution. |
| Fixed average returns | Every year earns the expected return. One future. |
You can also set the number of futures, the random seed, and when a future counts as a success: Money never runs out, Spending stays above a floor, or You leave a minimum estate.
The history used covers about a century of annual US returns and inflation. International stocks use the returns of non-US developed markets from 1975 on, and US large-company stocks for earlier years. The screen notes this.
Running and stopping
Results run in your browser. Choose Run again after changing settings, or Stop to cancel a long run. Free plans run up to a set number of futures, and paid plans can run more. The screen shows your limit.