Getting Started
Richifi keeps your plan in this browser and, when you connect one, in a JSON file on your disk. Unlocking with your passphrase also switches on DB Sync, which mirrors that plan to Richifi’s own database so your devices stay in step — Data & Saving below spells out exactly what is stored where. Add your numbers and every chart, table and projection updates instantly.
- The left navigation opens with a row of top-level pages — Home (where you stand today, coaching included), Projection (the projection and life events), Goals (your target & the milestones on the way), Retirement, Income and Expenses (money in, and money out). Below them a Portfolio group — Businesses, Stocks, Crypto, Savings, Real assets, Debts — carries what you own and owe, with its own running total in the divider, and a Tools group holds Scenarios (how solid the plan is — confidence, stress tests and big questions, plus the What-If sandbox and your saved scenarios), Connections for linked accounts, and Settings (profile, appearance, currency, tax & location, data). Most items show a live value beside them; Retirement shows your retirement year and Connections the number of linked accounts. Your page is remembered in the URL — refresh or bookmark and you’ll land back where you were (old page links like
#stocks, #expenses or #scenarios still route to the right place).
- Getting in. On a new browser Richifi asks for your passphrase — that is the only door, apart from Explore a sample plan, which loads someone else’s finished numbers and saves nothing. Once you are in, click the save-file line in Data & backups (bottom of the rail) to connect a JSON file, and every change is written to it as well; on later visits Richifi reconnects that file on its own, or asks for one click if the browser needs the permission again. That same panel holds Export, CSV, Import, Log, a price Refresh, and the save-file, DB Sync and Accounts status lines.
- Whose plan you're looking at. Name a partner in Profile and a You / partner / Everyone toggle appears in the page header. Every row — each holding, account, debt, income and expense — carries an owner, and the toggle filters the whole app to one person or shows the household together. It's a lens, not a change to your plan: switching it edits nothing, saves nothing, and is remembered per device. Retirement age can differ per person too.
- Set the horizon. On the Projection page, choose the Projection Year (up to 55 years out) and an inflation rate — these drive every forward-looking page.
- Explore safely. Use What-If to test changes without touching your real data, and save Scenarios to compare alternate futures side by side.
Tips: ⌘K (or the “Search or jump to…” box) jumps to any page or command · drag the ⋮⋮ handle to reorder rows · Remove has an Undo toast · Duplicate clones a row · arrow keys move between nav items when the rail is focused · the light/dark switch sits in the page header · the ? button (bottom-right, or bottom-left on a phone) opens help for the page you’re on.
Snapshot
Snapshot is a picture of today. The headline is your net worth, with a 30-day change pill and percentile pills beside it and a one-sentence read of the whole plan underneath — where the present course lands you, when you retire, and how many things need attention (the notes themselves are on the Coach page). Below it sits a four-cell band: Assets, Debts, Liquid (with its share of assets) and Monthly surplus (what's left after bills, debt and saving), the first three carrying a sparkline of your last 30 daily snapshots. Scroll and a sticky bar follows you with six figures, including your savings rate and emergency runway — your savings (the spendable balance wherever your bank reports one) plus crypto, divided by your monthly spending.
- Percentile pills beside the headline rank your net worth against US benchmarks — Federal Reserve SCF 2022 for the household ranking, plus an age-band ranking once you set your age in Profile. A Profile set to a single earner, or the “You”/partner view of a couple's plan, ranks against a single-person table scaled down from the household one — an approximation, since no comparable published individual distribution exists. Income percentiles are a separate ranking and live on the Income page.
- Projection and Retirement — a chart of where the plan is headed with an “Open plan →” link, and a ring showing your retirement year, the nest egg you reach, what you'll spend, and whether the money lasts. With no Profile age the ring reduces to a prompt to set one.
- Portfolio — a table of where your wealth sits: Businesses, Real assets, Crypto, Stocks, Savings and Debts, each with its value, its share of total assets, a share bar and its 30-day change. Click any row to open that page.
- Reading the charts. Figures are drawn on the chart itself, so you do not have to hover to read them: every pie slice carries its amount and its share, and bar charts label each bar. Dense year-by-year charts (the projection and the drawdown) stay on hover instead — a label per year would be a wall of text rather than a reading aid. Each series has its own colour, and no two in a chart repeat.
- Daily history — a snapshot of your figures is stored each day you open the app (never while What-If or the sample plan is active). On Snapshot it surfaces as the 30-day change pill, the band sparklines and the 30d column; it is also what makes Forecast accuracy on the Projection page possible, since grading a past prediction needs a real measurement from the day it was about. The full day-by-day charts live in the History card at the foot of Businesses, Stocks, Crypto, Savings, Real assets, Debts, Income and Expenses.
Coach
Coach is its own page in the menu — the rail badge shows how many things are open, or All clear when nothing is. Snapshot’s one-sentence read still tells you the count; the notes themselves live here.
- Coach — a rules-based read of your plan. Red dots flag things to fix (thin emergency runway, a debt whose payment doesn't cover its interest, a projected cash deficit, retirement savings running out, an employer match recorded against none of your own contribution — almost every match is conditional on your deferral, so it is either a typo or money that stops — or a pre-Medicare health-coverage gap: retiring before 65 means self-funding premiums until Medicare, which the plan otherwise funds at $0. Where you have no Spend in retirement override, one click adds an editable bridge expense for exactly those years; where you do have one, the note says so rather than adding a row the override would ignore); gold dots are suggestions (low savings rate, crypto concentration, a goal you're behind on, missing prices, no connected save file, an employer plan you fund with no match recorded, or taxable contributions while a tax-advantaged account takes nothing); green dots are positive signals worth noticing (solid runway, a strong savings rate, every debt shrinking, a goal on track, retirement funded through the horizon). Each actionable row's button jumps to the page where you can fix it. Everything lives in one Needs attention panel on its own Coach page in the menu, sorted worst-first; the green rows are shown too — the panel opens fully expanded, and All checks folds the working-well rows away if you would rather see only what needs attention. Clicking any row reveals the math behind it. Some rows also offer a gold Try … button that runs the change through What-If so you can see the impact before keeping it. Beside each of those sits a quieter Compare → button that saves that same change as a named scenario instead — it does not enter What-If and does not touch your live numbers, so you can line the change up next to your real plan on the Saved Scenarios card on the Scenarios page rather than in place of it; it is not offered while you are viewing the sample plan, because a sample session never saves anything. The contribution rules are deliberately formula-free: a match is stored as employer dollars per month, not as a rule like “50% of the first 6%”, so Richifi never tells you that you are leaving a specific amount of match on the table — it cannot know that. It reports only what it can see, and account types are matched loosely so an imported
401k or Taxable Brokerage still classifies correctly. The Coach reads only the numbers you entered and applies fixed rules to them — it is educational, not financial advice.
- Plan detail sits under the notes on the same page: how many parts of the model your plan has something to work with yet, and a shortcut to whichever is still empty.
Projection, Retirement & Goals
Three pages look forward: Projection — the projection and life events — Goals — your target and the milestones on the way — and Retirement. They sit near the top of the rail rather than in a group of their own; the Projection Year & Inflation sliders (top of the Projection page) drive every forward-looking page, including Goals and Scenarios next door.
Projection — your net worth year by year to the horizon: five KPIs (projected net worth, the year you retire, whether the money lasts, goal status, and CAGR — the balance-sheet detail moved inside the Year-by-Year fold below, as current net worth, total growth, and projected assets/debt), the net worth chart with a Nominal / Today's $ toggle (it restates only this chart, and your choice is remembered across reloads) and a Show range overlay driven by the Scenarios page's Plan Confidence run, a Leftover money card — by default Richifi assumes anything left over each year is spent, because money you save is money you entered; set a share above 0% and the plan keeps that much of each year’s surplus instead, landing it in cash where it compounds at your best savings rate, and the card tells you next year’s surplus and what your setting keeps of it — a Forecast accuracy card that grades the projection against itself — each day's snapshot records what the plan predicted for 30 days and 1 year out, and once a target date arrives the card compares the prediction to what the archive actually measured, reporting the typical miss and, more usefully, the bias: whether the plan runs optimistic or conservative. A forecast is graded only when a real measurement exists near its target date; nothing is interpolated, and until the first prediction matures the card says when that will be. Then the Life Events editor (one-time dated cash flows — inheritance/windfall +, or a home down payment/tuition −; each marked with a gold ✦ in the table), and the full year-by-year Net Worth table (a Cash column appears once income or a life event puts money through the cash sweep). The deeper “how solid is this” analyses — Plan Confidence, Stress tests and Big questions — now live one click away on Scenarios.
Retirement — retirement is modeled automatically whenever your age is set in the Profile menu; there is no checkbox to tick. The page reads top-down: a KPI strip (when you retire, your nest egg then, what you'll spend, how much is income-funded, and whether the money lasts), then The Plan (your retire age, an optional spend in retirement, the two withdrawal-tax rates covered below, and a read-only Model through echo of the Projection Year — plus a partner retires at age field once you’ve named a partner in Profile), a retirement timeline, How retirement is funded (a first-year reconciliation — outflow = spending + debt service, what income covers, and what's drawn from assets; where Social Security is part of that income it is named and sized on its own line, and when it starts after you retire the card says so with the year it begins, since the reconciliation itself only shows your first retirement year — plus a How each year’s spending is funded chart that stacks Social Security beneath the asset draws, so a bar is the whole of that year’s funding rather than only the withdrawal), Will the money last? (a verdict and a liquid-reserves chart with a ⏸ retire marker — plus, once you've run Plan Confidence on the Scenarios page, a line showing in what share of 500 randomized-market simulations the plan survives), and a withdrawal schedule — which now leads with a Social Security income column beside the per-bucket asset draws, so each year shows what arrived as income before what had to be sold. At your retirement year wages, Ends: At retirement incomes, and contributions stop while spending continues; shortfalls draw down liquid assets in order — cash → sale proceeds → savings → stocks → crypto — each withdrawal also forgoing its growth. Set Spend in retirement to override what you'll actually spend per month once retired (a flat figure that replaces your current expenses from the retirement year on — debt payments keep amortizing separately); leave it blank to carry your current expenses forward. Tip: expenses only grow if you set a growth % on them — put your expected inflation into expense growth for realistic drawdown, since the inflation slider never changes the projected balances — it only restates them in today’s money and sets how fast your FI target grows. The Projection Year reaches up to 55 years out — extend it well past your retirement year to see the full drawdown, not just the first year or two. At the bottom, FIRE benchmarks · 4% rule are rules-of-thumb independent of the simulation above: your FI number (25× today's spending), progress, projected FI year (when net worth crosses your FI number — not your retire year), Coast FI, and 4% passive income.
Withdrawal taxes (tax-aware drawdown) — by default every reserve dollar is treated as fully spendable, but real withdrawals are taxed differently by account type. Set two optional effective rates on The Plan card and the drawdown becomes tax-aware: pre-tax accounts % (traditional 401(k)/IRA/HSA — taxed as ordinary income) and capital gains % (taxable brokerage & crypto). Cash, savings, sale proceeds (already taxed at the sale) and Roth accounts are tax-free at withdrawal. When a taxed bucket has to cover $X of spending, it is depleted by $X ÷ (1 − rate) — the extra is tax — so taxable reserves run down faster and the Taxes column in the schedule plus the "incl. $X/yr withdrawal taxes" note in How retirement is funded show the bite. The draw order becomes tax-smart: cash → sale proceeds → savings → taxable stocks → crypto → pre-tax accounts → Roth last. A 59½ gate keeps pre-tax accounts locked until the year you turn 59½ (computed from your Profile age); if nothing else is left before then they can still be tapped, with a flat 10% early-withdrawal penalty added to the rate. These are effective rates, not tax brackets (v1) — leave both at 0 and the model is exactly as before. Deliberately out of scope for v1: required minimum distributions (RMDs), progressive brackets, and state taxes.
Goals & Milestones
Goals is its own page between Projection and Scenarios. Net Worth Goal — set a target amount and year and the page grades your plan against it: on-track status, what you’re projected to have by that year, the year you actually cross the goal (and how many years early) or the remaining gap, and the extra saving per month (invested at ~7%) to close a gap — or, when you’re ahead, how much you could dial back and still land on it. The goal year can sit past the Projection Year and it is still graded (the goal projects out to its own year). Net Worth Milestones below show the year — and your age then — that your net worth first crosses $100K, $250K, $500K, then every million up to the plan’s peak.
Scenarios · Confidence & Questions
These analyses are where you poke at the plan without editing it — three automated reads of how solid it is, all driven by the same Projection Year & Inflation you set on the Projection page. Nothing here changes your numbers; every result is computed on demand and is session-only, so it clears after any edit rather than going stale on screen.
Plan Confidence (Monte Carlo) — the plain projection is a single path at your assumed returns, so it can't show sequence-of-returns risk. Press Run 500 simulations to re-run the projection 500 times, each time keeping your return assumptions as the average but adding a random year-to-year market swing to stocks (σ 15 percentage points) and crypto (σ 60 pts), drawn from a normal distribution. The result is a headline — a big N% over “of 500 market simulations succeed” — plus the median outcome and the P10–P90 range at your horizon. A trial “succeeds” if your liquid reserves last the full retirement (when retirement is modeled) or your net worth never goes negative through the horizon. The generator is seeded, so a run is exactly reproducible. Only stocks and crypto are randomized — savings APY, business revenue, and sale-proceeds growth stay fixed. Turn on Show range (next to the Nominal / Today's $ toggle on the Projection page's Net Worth chart) to overlay the P10–P90 band and median there; it respects the dollar-basis toggle. Change any assumption and the card badges itself “assumptions changed — re-run.” Runs on demand only, never while you type, and results are session-only (never saved).
Stress tests — a card beside Plan Confidence that asks the other uncertainty question: not “how often does this hold across random markets” but “what if the next few years look like a bad stretch we have actually lived through”. Pick Dot-com bust (2000–2002), Financial crisis (2008–2009) or Stagflation (1973–1974) and those years’ equity returns are applied to your plan starting next year, after which it reverts to your own assumptions. You get a verdict — whether the plan still holds — plus where it leaves you as the episode ends and what it costs by your horizon. Two caveats worth knowing: the returns are applied as deviations from a 10%/yr long-run average rather than as absolute returns (a shock is added to whatever rate each holding already assumes, and there is no single assumed rate to replace), and crypto is left untouched because none of these episodes has a crypto history. Results are session-only, like Plan Confidence — re-run after any edit.
Big questions — a card below Stress tests that works the other way round: instead of you picking a number and reading what happens, you pick a question and it searches your own assumptions for the answer. Up to four appear, and each is only offered when your plan can actually answer it. When could I retire? needs your age set in Profile; it tries every retire age from the year after your current age (or 40, whichever is later) up to 75, one projection each, and reports the earliest one where your reserves last the whole retirement — one age at a time rather than by halving the range, because a later retirement can genuinely fail where an earlier one held, so there is nothing to halve safely. How much could I spend in retirement? needs the same, and narrows in on the largest flat monthly spend that still lasts, to the nearest $100, then re-runs the projection at the figure it shows you; the number it compares against is what your plan actually spends in your retirement year, so it still makes sense when you have left Spend in retirement blank. What if [business] sold later? needs a business with revenue and a sale year, and moves that one sale three years out (clamped to your projection horizon), reporting the net-worth difference in whichever direction it falls — a later exit is not automatically the better one. What's driving this plan? needs at least two of six kinds of assumption to be present — investment returns, monthly contributions, spending, income, business growth, and debt and loan rates — and moves each one on its own: returns and business growth up a percentage point, contributions and income up 10%, spending down 10%, borrowing rates down a point. It reports which single move changes your net worth at the horizon most, ranked, and names any it left off as worth under $1,000. Income and spending are often among those: while your plan runs a monthly surplus the model treats the surplus as spent — unless you set a share to keep on the Projection page’s Leftover money card — so neither reaches the balance sheet until the plan runs short or retirement drawdown starts — the card says so when it happens. Because each is tested alone and never in combination, those figures do not add up to what doing all of them together would be worth — and this one question has no Try it button, since a ranking is not a single change to apply. Three limits worth knowing: answers are computed when you click, never while you type, and they are session-only like Plan Confidence, so they vanish after any edit rather than going stale on screen; every question is solved for the whole household, not the lens you happen to be viewing; and the retirement scan moves the shared retire age, so a partner retire age you have set yourself stays exactly where it is. For the other three, Try it in What-If → loads the answer into the same sandbox as everything else — nothing touches your real plan until you press Apply.
What-If & Scenarios
What-If is a sandbox. Click “Enter What-If” in the What-If Sandbox card on the Scenarios page — or press “What If?” beside the Projection Year slider at the top of the Projection page, or “What if…” on Snapshot. Then change anything anywhere — nothing is saved while it's active. A KPI strip at the top of that section tracks your mode (Live vs What-If), saved-scenario count, projected net worth, and — once you're in the sandbox — the running impact of your changes versus the plan you started with. The impact panel below shows the net-worth delta at the horizon, every input you changed, and the impact by category.
Quick starters in the What-If Sandbox card are one-click experiments — retire five years earlier or later, a bear-case growth cut, delaying a business sale, or trimming retirement spend. Each drops you straight into What-If with that change applied (only the starters your data supports are shown), so you can see the impact instantly and then Apply, Save as Scenario, or Revert.
While the sandbox is live, a What If bar is pinned to the top of every page carrying the same three buttons, so you can finish from wherever you were editing:
- Save as Scenario keeps the sandbox as a named scenario to compare — without changing your real plan. This one doesn't end the session; you stay in the sandbox.
- Apply Changes commits the sandbox as your new plan and saves it.
- Exit & Revert restores everything to how it was.
Scenarios let you keep and compare alternate futures. “Save as Scenario” snapshots all inputs under a name (works inside What-If too — the scenario survives a revert). Saved scenarios live on the Scenarios page (old #scenarios links still route there).
The comparison is an outcome table: a Current baseline row (green swatch) plus one row per scenario, side by side. Columns: net worth at the horizon, Today's $ (that scenario's own inflation applied), vs Current, FI Year (25× that scenario's spending, grown at its inflation), Hits Goal (your current goal target, compared across all scenarios), and — when your plan or any scenario models retirement drawdown — Lasts Until (the year the money runs out, or “beyond age 90”; that test deliberately runs past your projection horizon so it covers a full retirement). Row swatch colors match the comparison chart's lines. Click any scenario row to expand exactly how it differs from Current, field by field. Load opens a scenario in What-If so you can inspect it on every page — then Apply to keep it or Exit to discard. Scenarios are stored with your data and included in export/import.
What the figures are measured at. A business that is sold is measured at its own sale year, not at the Projection Year: Value at Sale is what the stake is worth the year you sell it, and Sale Proceeds is the after-tax cash in that same year. Measuring at the horizon instead used to report $0 of equity and a loss the size of the whole company — true only in the sense that the business had become cash and the cash had been spent over decades of retirement, which is a fact about your retirement rather than about the business. From the sale onward the money is tracked on Projection and Retirement, not here. A business with no sale year set is projected to your retirement year, the same rule the Stocks, Crypto and Savings pages follow.
Business Equity
Model an editable list of businesses you hold equity in — Businesses in the left rail. Each business’s stake value = current annual revenue × sale multiple × your stake %. Use + Add Business, Duplicate, or Remove (with an undo toast) to manage the list — you can have as many as you like, or none.
- Name & Stake % — both editable. Stake is your ownership percentage; change it any time (dilution, new grants). Charts and the detail table use each business’s live name.
- Growth — a single overall rate, or switch to Per Year for a custom rate each projection year.
- Sale Year & Cap Gains Tax — selling converts that stake to after-tax cash at the sale year using the per-business tax rate on its card. Proceeds then compound at the Sale Proceeds Growth rate (in Sale Assumptions), so your total wealth line stays continuous. After a sale, that business’s revenue and growth columns go blank — it’s no longer yours.
- Sale Structure — three optional controls that model how a real acquisition pays out, each defaulting to today’s single-lump-sum behavior:
- Proceeds payout — Lump sum (default) books all after-tax cash at the sale year. 2–5 years models an installment sale: the stake still leaves the business at the sale year, but the after-tax proceeds arrive in equal annual tranches, each taxed as received. Undelivered tranches sit as a receivable — counted in your net worth (inside the Sale Proceeds column) but earning no proceeds growth until the cash actually lands, at which point it joins the compounding pool. A lump sum ends up richer than installments because more of the money compounds sooner.
- Valuation basis — Revenue (default) values the stake as revenue × multiple × stake. Switch to EBITDA to value it as revenue × EBITDA margin × multiple × stake; the multiple then reads as an EBITDA multiple and a margin field appears. Growth still applies to revenue either way.
- Multiple range — enter an optional LOW× and HIGH× to see the after-tax stake value across that range on the card, and a one-line “Exit range” note under the Net Worth Projection chart showing how your net worth at the horizon moves across every business’s range. Both boxes are required — leave either one blank and the range is off. (For a full probabilistic band, use Plan Confidence / Monte Carlo instead.)
- Charts — equity over time (total = held equity + sale cash), stake breakdown at the projection year, revenue projection, and year-over-year growth. The first three break out per business; the growth bars are a single series over the combined total (held equity + sale cash), so a sale steps the bars down to the proceeds rate instead of showing a −100% cliff.
- Ownership — each business card carries an owner (you, your partner, or joint), and the household view at the top of the page filters the list to whoever you're looking at. A business you add inherits the owner of the view you added it in.
Stocks
Your equity holdings: shares × price, per brokerage and account type.
- Live prices come from Yahoo Finance through Richifi’s own
/api/price endpoint, so your ticker list never reaches a third-party proxy — a public proxy is the fallback only when that endpoint isn’t there (opening the file straight off disk, say). Click the price status line at the foot of the left rail, or Refresh in Data & backups, to refresh anytime.
- Monthly + Employer Match contributions compound monthly; Growth % per holding overrides the 8% default (rates are treated as effective annual returns).
- Brokerage totals and per-holding history build up from the daily snapshots as you use the app over time.
Crypto
Coin holdings priced live via CoinGecko. 31 symbols map automatically — BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, DOGE and most other large caps; anything outside that list is sent as the lowercased symbol, which prices only when that happens to be CoinGecko’s own id, so coins like TRX, XMR and HBAR need a hand-typed price. Default 15% annual return, compounded annually — override per holding. Click the price status at the foot of the left rail to refresh.
Savings
Cash accounts with an APY and monthly deposits. APY is treated as an effective annual yield and converted precisely to a monthly rate — $100k at 5% APY is exactly $105k after a year. Savings also feed the emergency-runway metric on Snapshot, and the Emergency tile on this page’s own KPI bar. The runway counts each account’s Spendable balance where you have one — what the bank will release today, with pending activity already taken out — and falls back to the Balance where you don’t; net worth and every projection always use the Balance. Each account's deposit can carry an optional Starts / Ends window — set Ends to the last year you want deposits made (say a partner’s paycheck stopping in 2031 — deposits run through 2031 and stop in 2032), while the balance keeps compounding at its APY; leave it on At retirement for the default. Deposits always stop at retirement regardless of the window.
Real Assets
Property, vehicles, and other big assets, with optional loans attached.
- Value moves at the Annual % you set, in the direction the Direction control beside it picks — Appreciates adds that rate each year, Depreciates subtracts it, and Stable holds the value flat and ignores the rate entirely. The collapsed row echoes the result as “+4%/yr”, “−12%/yr” or “flat”, so a mis-set direction is obvious without opening the row.
- Loans amortize monthly: interest accrues, then your payment reduces the balance. If a payment doesn't cover the interest, the balance grows (negative amortization) — the projection shows it honestly.
- Orig Loan (optional) is what the loan was when you took it out. Fill it in and a Paid to Date column — dollars and percent — appears in Loan Payoff Dates on the Debts page, where every asset loan is listed beside your standalone debts. Equity = value − loan balance.
Debts
Payoff strategy answers the two questions a list of debts cannot: does the order you clear them in matter, and is putting a freed-up payment into the next debt better than investing it? It compares avalanche (highest rate first), snowball (smallest balance first) and investing instead — showing when you are debt-free, total interest, and what you are worth on one shared date so the slowest option is not flattered by a shorter clock. Every row spends the same monthly total — the payments you already entered — and differs only in where a payment goes once its debt is gone; nothing asks you for a new number. The month-by-month arithmetic is the same the projection uses, promotional rates included, so a payoff date here cannot disagree with the Debt Payoff Projection chart. It appears once you have two or more debts with balances and payments, since with one there is no ordering question. Caveats it states on the card: the investing side assumes the projection's own return, and both sides are nominal and before tax, which cuts the investing side harder.
Standalone debts — cards, student loans, personal loans. Each accrues interest monthly and amortizes with your payment. Loans attached to a real asset are not re-entered here: they appear below the list as read-only AUTO rows headed Asset-linked loans (edit them on Real Assets), and they count toward this page's totals, breakdown and payoff dates.
You'll see the Debt Payoff Projection chart, a year-by-year Debt Payoff Schedule, and Loan Payoff Dates — a per-loan table giving each loan's payoff month and the months remaining (“Mar 2031 (67 mo)”), or Paid off when the balance is already clear, No payment when none is set, and a red Never (payment < interest) when the payment can't cover the first month's interest. With two or more loans the highest-APR one is flagged ▲ highest APR — pay this first. Enter an Original balance and a Paid to Date column joins the table, in dollars and percent.
Promo APR (optional) models a temporary intro rate: enter the promo rate and the last month it applies, and both the projection and the payoff date use that rate through that month, then revert to the normal APR the month after. The collapsed row then reads “0% until Dec 2026 · then 17.49%”. Clearing the promo rate clears the end month with it.
Paid via (optional) labels how the payment is made — it carries through to the auto-generated payment row on the Expenses page.
Income
Take-home (net) income by source and frequency, with annual raises. Add the optional Gross amount to unlock tax & deduction views and a gross-based savings rate. The Income Over Time chart and the projection table show your income year by year with raises compounded.
Starts / Ends give each source an active window — model "consulting ends 2030" or a Social Security/pension stream that starts when you claim it (the amount you enter is the amount in its start year, and raises compound from there). "Ends: At retirement" stops a stream in your retirement year (retirement is modeled automatically once your age is set in Profile). Future-dated streams don't count toward today's income figures.
Income feeds the projection's cash bucket, but only in one direction. A year whose income doesn't cover spending, debt service and contributions drains cash, and that shortfall is what retirement drawdown and “will the money last” are built on. A recurring surplus is assumed spent rather than banked — money you save is money you entered, so raise a savings deposit or a contribution if you want the projection to keep it. The exception is a Life Event you type in: an entered windfall lands in cash and earns your best savings APY.
How contributions are treated: account type on the Stocks page decides the cash-flow source. 401(k), Roth 401(k), HSA, and SIMPLE IRA contributions are payroll-deferred — taken from gross pay before your take-home, so the sweep doesn't subtract them from net income (and employer match is employer money — it grows the balance but never touches your paycheck). Brokerage, IRA, Roth IRA, and Other contributions are paid from take-home and are subtracted, together with savings-account deposits — a SIMPLE IRA is the one IRA that isn’t, because it’s a payroll plan. Enter your net income as your actual paycheck deposit and everything lines up.
Expenses
Monthly outflows by category and payment method. Mark a row as Debt Pmt when it’s a loan payment — it then stops counting as spending in the page totals, the category chart and the projection, so it can’t double-count against the payment the app already reads from your loan. It doesn’t become debt service itself: every debt-service figure comes from your Real Assets and Debts rows.
Loan payments from your Real Assets and Debts appear automatically as read-only AUTO rows filed into the matching category (and a "Debt payments" group), so you never need to re-type them. Set any hand-typed copy you already have to Debt Pmt and it’s flagged “manual copy — safe to remove” and dropped from the totals; left unmarked, it keeps counting as ordinary spending on top of the AUTO row.
Starts / Ends / Grow % make spending time-aware: a mortgage that ends in 2038, childcare for a fixed window, or healthcare that grows 5%/yr. The amount you enter is the value in the expense's start year, and growth compounds from there — future-dated or ended expenses drop out of the cash sweep in those years.
Give a bill an optional Due day and it gets its own column in the list, so you can scan the month down the page and sort by it; it's a reminder, not a schedule the projection reads, so the amount still lands the same way every month no matter which day you set.
Sort & filter — the toolbar above the list narrows and orders the view only: type to match a row’s name, category, pay method or start/end year (or type >500 / <=100 to filter by monthly amount instead), and filter by category, pay method, line type, or lines active in a chosen year (Starts/Ends aware). The list opens flat, biggest bill first — sorting by anything other than Custom order shows that flat sorted list, and both a sort and any active filter pause drag-reordering. Choose Custom order and clear the filters to get the category grouping and the ⋮⋮ handles back. Page totals, charts, and the projection always use the full plan regardless of the view.
Spending drives three things: the emergency runway, how deep a shortfall the projection has to cover in any year, and the FI number. The FI number is 25× your current spending (a rule of thumb); to see how retirement spending actually plays out with growth, use the Retirement page (modeled automatically once your age is set in Profile).
Connections
Connections (in the rail’s Tools group) links real bank, brokerage and loan accounts through Plaid. Connecting is read-only: Richifi can see balances, holdings, liabilities and transactions, and can never move money.
Nothing a connection reports is ever written into your plan on its own. Everything Plaid finds is shown as a proposal — a balance beside the one already in your plan, a detected recurring charge, a loan's APR — and only lands when you click Apply, click Add as expense, or pick Create a new row from that row’s dropdown. Ignore anything you don't want and it won't be offered again.
- Connect an account asks first what you are connecting — Bank or credit card or Investment or retirement account — because that choice decides which institutions Plaid will even list. Then Plaid Link opens: pick your institution and sign in there (Richifi never sees the credentials), and the connection appears with its accounts. An initial sync runs straight after.
- Linking ties a Plaid account to one row in your plan — a savings account, a debt, an asset’s loan, a stock holding, or a crypto holding. Where the institution supplies Plaid’s persistent account id, the link survives the account being renamed. Many institutions supply none, and those links fall back to an id the bank is free to change — Richifi marks them id can change, and a rename there means re-linking.
- LINKED chips mark those rows in the Savings / Debts / Real Assets / Stocks / Crypto / Expenses lists, with the institution name, so you always know which figures have an outside source. Linked rows stay fully editable — and if you edit a linked figure by hand, Richifi remembers and Apply all will skip it rather than silently overwriting you.
- Minimum payments are never imported. A card's minimum is not what you actually pay, and payment feeds the payoff math directly — it's shown labelled "minimum" and only ever used if you explicitly ask for it.
- Rates and assumptions stay yours. A row created from a Plaid account brings no growth assumption of its own — 0% APY on a savings or crypto row, and the global default return on a stock row — because Plaid observes today’s balance and knows nothing about what you assume. A debt or an asset’s loan is the exception: the lender’s reported APR is a present-tense fact, so it is filled in for you, and a card reporting several rates falls back to the purchase rate — check it. Set the rest yourself.
- Connection health. Banks break links and consent expires; the status line beside DB Sync (open Data & backups in the rail to see it) goes red when a connection is already broken and needs re-authorising, and gold when one is merely scheduled to expire or its data is going stale.
Settings
Settings (rail’s Tools group; the top-bar profile chip also opens it) gathers the things about you and the app rather than the plan. Profile — your name (used in place of “You” across the view toggle, owner labels and Coach), your age (which unlocks retirement modeling), and, for a couple, your partner’s name and age; household plus partner drive the net-worth percentile rankings. Appearance sets light or dark, saved on this device and remembered across visits. Currency picks the symbol shown on every figure (display only — amounts are never converted). Tax & location takes your filing status and state and estimates your effective retirement-withdrawal tax rates — your projected retirement income run through the 2024 federal brackets (ordinary and long-term gains) plus your state’s rate — and fills the two rate fields on the Retirement page, which still override. An estimate, not tax advice. Data & backups exports your plan as JSON and opens the connected-file / import / log / status panel.
Data & Saving
- Where your data lives. Your plan is held in this browser and, when you connect one, in a JSON file on your disk. Unlocking with your passphrase also switches on DB Sync: from then on every edit is mirrored to Richifi’s own database, and your daily net-worth history goes with it — that is what keeps two devices in step. Clear the field on the DB Sync line in Data & backups to turn it off and keep everything local.
- Network traffic. The passphrase check reaches the server before you are let in. After that: price lookups (stock quotes through Richifi’s own endpoint, crypto from CoinGecko), and — while DB Sync is on — your plan document and history archive. Plaid calls happen only for accounts you have connected. Nothing else leaves the browser: every projection, chart and table is computed here.
- Auto-save. Click the save-file line in Data & backups to connect a JSON file — Richifi reconnects it for you on later visits — and every change is written to it. A red status means saving failed.
- Export / Import. Export downloads a full JSON backup; CSV downloads everything as a spreadsheet (all inputs + the year-by-year projection). Import replaces your data after validation — your prior data is backed up in browser storage first.
- Undo everywhere. Removing any row or scenario shows an Undo toast for a few seconds.
- History. History under Tools opens a running record of edits to your live plan and each change’s impact — today’s net worth where it moved, otherwise the figure at your horizon year — so you can spot an accidental change. It records the plan, not the lens you are viewing it through, and What-If edits and the sample plan never reach it. What it journals: every row added, removed, renamed or edited (including which brokerage, bank, exchange, account type or payment method a row is attached to), your business assumptions and exit terms, and the plan-wide settings — your age and your partner’s, your names, whether the plan covers a couple, filing status and state, your net-worth goal and goal year, retirement year and spending, the withdrawal tax rates, inflation, projection year, the surplus-sweep share and the auto Social Security switch. Prices fetched from the market are deliberately left out: they are not your edits. Entries are kept 60 days, stored only on this device, and never exported or written to your save file.