In the Dashboard tab where you enter your Sources of Income and Expected Gross Annual Income, put in your best estimate for your household’s annual income (except for dividend income from investments). This includes things like: your W-2 base pay, 1099 pay from a side hustle, net rental income, bonuses, RSUs, and more—basically, anything that's taxed like income (again, with the exception of dividends)! People with salaried positions will find this easiest; people who work jobs that are heavily commission-based or have many sources of income may find this more challenging. Give it your best conservative estimate!

Here’s how we recommend accounting for rental property income throughout the planner.

The initial “average take-home pay” estimate in the first tab is used for the purposes of making budgeting recommendations, but shouldn't impact anything elsewhere in the Planner! If you want to see recommendations based on your “lower paycheck months” or your “bonus-free” income, you can always subtract the amount from your overall salary to get a more “realistic” monthly estimate for recommendation purposes. The intent is to see how your annual income averages out every month for planning purposes, but if that’s throwing you off, feel free to be more conservative.

Yes! Updating your gross annual income estimate shouldn’t materially impact anything else in your Wealth Planner, since each monthly tab uses your real take-home pay numbers.

I like to count my vested equity (things like RSUs, startup equity, my own business, etc.) in the Investments Accounts section. As for unvested equity, I recommend waiting until the vesting period to “count” it as yours, as it’s almost impossible to know what the share price will be in the meantime.

Use the SmartAsset Tax Calculator. We recommend using this resource to determine your state and local tax rates. Once you know both rates, you can combine them; for example, if your state tax rate is 5% and your local tax rate is 2.5%, you’d enter 7.5%.

The estimates in this section are directional and may not be exact; you can learn more about how we calculated the tax liability here.

Estimates here are determined by what you input for your gross annual income, investments and contributions, and tax rates, so if it’s off, you can adjust your inputs until it becomes accurate. However, the “Estimated Take-Home Pay” is not used throughout the rest of the Planner besides the “Example Monthly Goal Breakdown,” so you’ll input your actual information in the rest of the Planner.

See all the parameters and considerations we used here.

Most users start their Planner during the first month of the year, but you can use any 12-month period you prefer (i.e., December 2024–November 2025).

Yes, you can write over the main categories ("Housing," "Food"). To change a subcategory in a dropdown menu, open the dropdown and select the pencil icon.

Checking the “Recurring Fixed Bill” box will bring those exact values over to the Monthly Tabs in the Planner so you don’t have to input recurring bills every single month. For example, if your rent is always $2,500 and you check the box, you’ll see “$2,500” as the “Actual Spent” on each Monthly Tab. If your recurring payment slightly changes (i.e., your Electric Bill was $105 instead of $100), you can also overwrite that amount in the Monthly Tab.

Check out our guide here to plan for large expenses that happen irregularly.

I would recommend only including your half of the mortgage payment in the Monthly Tabs so it accurately reflects your income and expenses. However, in the "Debt" section of the Net Worth tab where you're tracking the mortgage balance, you can "count" the full amount going toward the debt each month to accurately reflect it there.

This number combines your leftover, unspent take-home pay with the contributions you’ve said you plan to make to your employer-sponsored investment accounts. As you enter your Monthly Contribution Goals below, this number will dynamically adjust to help you assign every dollar a job. For more information, check out our full guide to this function here.

Only the contributions earmarked as “Long Term (Financial Independence)” will count towards your FI calculation. Here’s more on why that is.

You’ll only need to check this box if you're actively making contributions to an account (like a 401(k) plan that you’re still funding). No need to check the box if the only "contributions" are coming from your paycheck being deposited, like the checking account where you're paid.

You’ll find the IRA in the “Investments” dropdown, and then you’ll assign the tax status (Traditional or Roth) in the Tax Status dropdown.

Do not include employer matches or employer contributions here; you’ll have the chance to enter it in the Monthly Tabs as well as in the Financial Independence tab.

If your employer contributes to a pension for you, that'll be accounted for in the Financial Independence tab, so feel free to omit a "Monthly Contribution" for pensions here. (You can still track it as an account here and track the overall balance in the Net Worth tab, though!).

If the result says N/A or Infinite, that means the current plan will never completely pay off the debt. Try a higher monthly payment.

Learn more about how we recommend treating rental properties here.