Wealth Planner FAQs

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!

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.

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.

In order for your mortgage debt payoff projection to be as accurate as possible, we'd recommend figuring out what your average monthly payment will work out to be. E.g., if you make biweekly mortgage payments (26 annually), determine what that annual amount divided by 12 is to get the average monthly payment. The timeline would then respond according to that accelerated pay-down schedule. Beyond that, updating the balance in your Net Worth tab will allow you to see how your Net Worth is changing, but won't directly impact the FI timeline.

Here’s our guide to the Net Worth tab, including how your net worth is calculated.

If you want to track your Net Worth for a full year (i.e., 365 days apart), you can fill in the EOY balances on the last day of that year. For example, you can fill in the first column for January 1, and fill out the EOY balance for December 31. Or, if you begin your Planner on December 1, you can fill out the EOY balance for November 30.

The “Investments” box up top shows your total investments overall, but if you want to see your assets by tax status, these are broken down in the top bar as well.

We take the total value of your Real Estate and subtract your remaining Mortgage Balances to determine your real estate equity.

Learn more here about financial independence and how we use this table.

The most likely reason this would occur is because you’ve picked a year to stop working before you reach financial independence. Make sure to pick a year that’s after you reach FI.

Here are the best practices we recommend for accommodating rental property investments.

We improved the calculation this year! Here’s how we calculate your FI number now, and what to keep in mind.

In order to project your Long-Term Contributions over time, we're looking at your contributions this year and increasing them by your assumed annual inflation rate each year. If you change the Assumed Annual Inflation Rate, this will change your total amount.

That amount is inflation-adjusted, which makes it look enormous in “today’s” dollars.

We look at your long-term invested assets and divide that by your FI number—for example, if you have $500,000 invested and your FI number is $3,000,000, you are approximately 17% to FI. However, keep in mind that because of compounding, your progress to FI will accelerate as your investments grow. For example, it might take you 5 years to hit 5% but only 3 years to hit 10% or 15%. For the most accurate timeline, check out the Financial Independence tab.

Learn more about how your savings rates are calculated.

The first section, Paycheck Contributions, is where you’ll enter contributions made directly from your paycheck before receiving your net pay (i.e., 401(k) contributions, HSA/FSA contributions, etc.). You can also enter any employer matches here as well. Then, once you get your take-home pay, you can enter any other saving and investment contributions you’re making, like to savings accounts, sinking funds, emergency funds, or taxable accounts.

For truly irregular expenses that can’t be planned for (unlike one-time annual or biannual expenses; think emergency pet surgery or a last-minute flight), you can include them in this section. If you check the “exclude from budget” box, it won’t be counted towards your overall spending that month. For more information about how you can use this section to plan for known biannual expenses, check out this guide.

Be sure to select a Starting Month that has data already; most people choose whatever month is “Month 1”. You’ll need to choose an end month within 365 days of your starting month; if you try to pick a longer timeline, it won’t work!

This typically happens if you set a range that’s longer than the amounts you’ve already filled in. For example, if you choose January–March, but you’ve only filled in the Monthly Tabs and Net Worth tab through February, the data will look funky.

This figure is based on this year's data adjusted upward for your assumed inflation rate. If you select a review period range of less than 12 months, it’ll show you your projected spending for the same time period the following year. After you fill out and select the full 12 months, it will provide an annual estimate.