Setting your plan beside the standards

‘Is this enough?’ sits under Planned spending on the plan page. Choose it and you see your household as a boat sailing towards three islands, one for each standard, across a scale of yearly spending. The gold marker is what you plan to spend, in today’s money and after tax, so it stands on the same scale as the standards. The dotted course runs to the island your spending reaches.

You also see your figure and the three standards in the money of the year you retire. If your plan cannot keep up its own spending, the course bends back to the island it can pay for.

What you see compares one figure, what you plan to spend in a year. It does not tell you whether your plan can afford that spending for every year of your retirement. So you can reach the Comfortable island and still be in trouble. Your stress test may pay for everything in few of its runs. Your mortgage or rent may carry on past retirement, and no standard includes those. The verdict on your plan page says whether your money lasts, and the stress test says how often it lasts when markets vary. Those two answer whether your plan is sustainable. The islands do not.