If you’re unsure about how much you can spend, or if the TIME MACHINE has warned of a cash flow problem, The MoneyReady App can help you explore a budget you can live with. Recent improvements are shown in red.
New users start with estimated expenses. Before retirement, these are based on earnings minus estimated taxes and savings. For retirement, you enter how much you would like to spend each year. The next step is to explore whether those amounts fit your financial plan.
Some people discover they need to reduce spending to make their plan work. Others, after a lifetime of careful saving, are wary of spending their savings—even when their plans suggest room to enjoy more or help their children and grandchildren earlier.
1. Find a starting spending level
Use CHOOSE YOUR LEGACY to estimate spending, including gifts, consistent with your inheritance goal under your scenario’s assumptions. It explores adjustments to address cash flow problems and reach your desired legacy.
2. Turn the result into a budget you could follow
You can now set the optional % Discretionary for each expense: the portion you could realistically adjust. The essential remainder is protected from spending adjustments.
If CHOOSE YOUR LEGACY calls for lower spending, its suggested negative LEGACY expenses represent the reductions needed. The TIME MACHINE's "negative expenses" don’t automatically reduce your other expenses.
Our new Adjust negative expenses tool helps you replace them with cuts to your actual expenses. It suggests reductions within your discretionary limits and shows their effects year by year. You can adjust the suggestions and review the changes before saving.
3. Test how that budget could adapt
Run 100 market simulations with guardrails to explore your budget under different market conditions.
Spending guardrails can now work in both directions: increases following stronger-than-expected portfolio returns, as well as reductions following weaker returns. Only the discretionary portion of expenses is adjusted.
We target 90%–95% success to balance financial resilience with enjoying your money. Requiring 100% can mean unnecessarily limiting spending, without guaranteeing the future.
A new comparison table shows simulation success alongside median lifetime spending, taxes and legacy. Check whether the proposed spending changes would suit you. Guardrails leave your saved expense entries unchanged.
You may find room to loosen the purse strings—or a clearer plan for the changes you need to make.
