The easiest way to vary the conversion age over multiple values to gauge its impact, would be to set up a SCAN. Under Setup new SCAN, select the ACCOUNTS table, and then the Age of conversion will appear as parameter for each applicable account you have. This way, you can consider a range of ages all in one go. You can add additional parameters to the scan to vary simultaneously on multiple accounts.

The only thing conversion does is to force a minimum withdrawal every year after conversion. This does not mean you can't make withdrawals from (not locked-in) accounts before conversion. Often people don't convert until they have to (age 71) for maximimum flexibility. The Withdrawal Optimizer does honour the minimum withdrawals, but it also optimizes for withdrawals irrespective of the conversion status, so it may start withdrawing earlier from those accounts. You can have the SCANS run with the Withdrawal Optimizer.

You make a good point that the age of conversion is not currently shown in the reports. I think it could be useful in the detailed reports to seperate out the mandated minimum withdrawals from other withdrawals that were made, I'll add that.

I know the second page issue is a little awkward, but the system needs to know what type of account it is to know what questions it needs to ask next, and the type of account can be modified on the first page (so you can convert your RRSP to RRIF when that time comes yourself). I'll see if there's any way to make it easier.
Thanks.

You can force withdrawals from your RRSP by entering an AUTOMATIC Withdrawal entry for the account.
That might not be necessary if you've set the RRSP as a top Withdrawal PRIORITY. In that case, if you need money, the TIME MACHINE will take it from there.
You can also try the Withdrawal Optimizer to find an optimal withdrawal strategy for you.

You can add your own LIFE EVENTS, so just add Go-GO, SLOW-Go and NO-GO entries, with the date/age you want each to start. Then you can add/edit EXPENSES with their own amount, and link each of their start and end dates to those life events. This is meant specifically for expenses (and other entries like incomes and automatic savings) you want to specifically link to those dates.
If you want to smoothly adjust  your expenses over time, you can also play with how they are indexed to inflation. See this previous discussion.

This thread is the most accessed on the Forum. @thermodynamicthoughtfulFalcon4 certainly started something! Thanks @powerfulWildfowl3 and @quasi_motive for continuing it.

I get a lot of reviews from real users by email, and those always make my day. I've collected them over the years and put a selection of them in the Testimonials section of the homepage. My favourites are those that share how MRA made a difference in their lives. One user even wrote an entire Blog post for me!

Feel free to add your own review!

Last week, we introduced Guardrails—automatic, dynamic spending adjustments that help reduce sequence-of-returns risk.

But markets aren’t the only risk. Retiring too soon, living longer than expected, inflation surprises, or simply overspending can all derail a plan.

That’s where SCANS come in. Scans let you sweep key scenario parameters (amounts, dates, life events) to test many “what-ifs” quickly to see how robust your plan is.  It’s one of MoneyReady App’s most powerful features—and now even easier to use.

We’ve added Canned Scans for common risks (longevity, survivorship, early retirement timing, and inflation). One click runs a full set of Time Machine scenarios. You can edit any canned Scan to fit your situation, then save your own for instant re-runs as your numbers change.

👉 Blog post for the details: Building a Resilient Financial Plan

Got ideas for additional canned Scans you think would help others? Post them here!
We’d also love to hear about the custom Scans you’ve built and how they helped your planning.

Hi Everyone,

Several announcements for the beginning of October.

1. Guardrails.
To stress-test your scenario, the 100 Monte Carlo simulation results show you the percentage of runs that did not have a cash-flow problem. 
You want that success rate to be high. If it is low, then your plan is at risk, and a common strategy to mitigate that risk is to reduce spending. Of course, you can adjust your EXPENSES entries to modify the amounts or the dates they apply. 

The new Guardrails feature allows you to explore, without changing your EXPENSE entries yourself, if a dynamic strategy to adapt your account withdrawals in years following years where the market returns have been lower than your expected returns, will help to not run out of money and thus your success rate in the simulations.

It works this way:
After 100 simulations, the success rate is calculated. If it is less than 90% then another 100 simulations are run, but these also reduce your EXPENSE entries by 10% for any years following a year where market returns were lower than the expected return of your entire portfolio at that time. 
Reducing expenses will reduce the required income from your accounts, thus reducing withdrawals, and that will lead to a higher success rate. 
If still not over 90%, it runs another 100 simulations the same way, this time reducing the expenses by 20%, then again by 30% if it has to.

Be patient, as although the 100 simulations are parallelised so that they complete faster, each set of 100 must be run sequentially, so it might take some time to run up to 4 sets. You’ll be able to see the results of each of the sets. 

What this analysis shows is that you may need to be vigilant with your spending, and you may need to monitor your actual returns in the market and adapt your spending to it.

2. New Chart in the TIME MACHINE results

The guardrails feature requires the calculation of your overall average expected returns in every year of the TIME MACHINE.
I thought this would be useful information, and it has been added as a new Chart in the TIME MACHINE results (new runs only).
You might be surprised at first that your overall average expected return can vary over time. This will happen when you have different expected rates of return for different accounts. 
The overall rate will change as some accounts are depleted or others increase in value. 
The new chart is right above the overall asset allocation charts, as that also varies with time for the same reason.

3. Last resort withdrawals.

The simulations showed us an issue if you set some Withdrawal Priorities limits to 0%. 
The TIME MACHINE follows your orders and refuses to withdraw from those accounts.
That is fine in cases you actually want to make sure those accounts are never withdrawn from, but often in simulations, where the market can go really bad on you, you may need to access that money or run into a cash-flow problem.
For that reason, in years there is a cash-flow problem the TIME MACHINE could not resolve (even if there's a spouse it can try to get money from), the TIME MACHINE will go through another round of your Withdrawal Priorities, ignoring any limits on withdrawals (except for CRA-imposed ones that are never ignored).
So as a last resort, you can always access all of your accounts. When that happens, a Warning is shown in the Timetable for the years it did so you know that happened.

4. Lots of styling changes on the web pages. 
The left menu is now collapsible, which gives you more room to see things on smaller screens. 
A new bottom menu is now visible on all the various reports of the TIME MACHINE, so you can navigate within and between the reports quickly and easily. 
In comparison reports, the scrolling of side-by-side TIME TABLE comparisons is synced both horizontally and vertically. 

Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions,
Happy Thanksgiving!

The app takes into consideration capital gains because it knows not only the value of your investments  but also their book value (cost basis). Make sure you enter accurate book values for your non-registered investments.

The TIME MACHINE grows your investments with separate rates of growth you enter for dividends, foreign and eligible for the dividend tax credit, (which you can set to be reinvested or not) and capital growth. It also adjusts the book value as necessary with any deposits or withdrawals. So for taxes, it knows how to treat the capital gains, foreign dividends and eligible dividends.

You can see some details of your investment growth and taxation in the detailed reports.

A popular thing to do for non-registered withdrawals starting at retirement, is to set an AUTOMATIC Withdrawal of all dividends/distributions from any account you want.

What happens at your death is your accounts are inherited fully by your spouse, but we don’t transfer the investments to her accounts. They might be deemed disposed where appropriate (non-joint, non-registered investments) for your final tax/probate bill, and the tax basis of the investments is thus also inherited by the spouse.  The account ownership is changed from you (or Joint) to solely hers.  You don’t own it anymore, she does. She can use it as her own, and whatever taxes it attracts will also be solely hers. Make sense?

Hello everyone,

I hope you had a great summer. Mine was spent mostly on back-end improvements. We were getting close to outgrowing our cloud provider in terms of capacity for running simultaneous TIME MACHINES  as the MoneyReady App user-base has increased dramatically in the last few of years, a good problem to have. Growing pains were expected as the MoneyReady App turned 6 years old this summer! After considering several options, we finally moved the entire site to Amazon AWS in Montréal. It went quite smoothly with no disruptions for our users, and I'm very happy with that service.

But today I want to announce a new feature and front-end improvements that you will notice:

For maximum accuracy, the TIME MACHINE uses calendar dates for its calculations, so it needs actual dates. However dates that are far in future are hard to grasp, and we naturally tend to want to convert that date to the age we will be at that date. For this reason, in most forms where a date is required, you can now enter a date, or an age (less accurate), or the life event you want the date tied to. In all cases it is the date that will be used in the TIME MACHINE, and you will see below the entry what date that is, and what age that corresponds to (in years and months).

The new LIFE EVENTS table stores the important dates.  We pre-filled it with what you’ve entered in your Quick Entry Form or later edits, for your retirement date, for the age of the start of taking CPP/QPP and OAS, and the year of death. We also added some convenience dates when you have a spouse, like first and last to retire, and first and last to die. All the life event in this table can be used to link most of your subsequent entries for the start or end of INCOMES, EXPENSES, AUTOMATIC SAVINGS/WITHDRAWALS etc. to that life event. 

This new feature is entirely backwards compatible with what you previously entered, as we've always provided the ability to linking entries to your retirement date (or spouse's). You will find them still linked in that case. The difference is that the retirement dates will now be found under LIFE EVENTS in the left menu, and no longer under PROFILE.

You can edit these life events, and when you change the date, all dates linked to that life event will be changed automatically. For example, the default pre-retirement EXPENSES entry that was automatically added for you will have its start linked to "Previous to this year" and end linked to your retirement date. The post-retirement EXPENSES has its start date linked to retirement and end linked to the date of death.

This LIFE EVENTS table also shows you the entries that are linked to the life event.

You can add your own life-events that you may want to link entries to. For example: "start family", "inheritance", "buy house", "empty nester", "downsize", you get the idea. This is great to do if there is a  life event that you want to tie to changes to in your INCOMES,  EXPENSES, SAVINGS, REAL ESTATE, and other entries. You will also be able to run SCANS on that life event to explore a range of dates for that life events automatically, and all entries linked to it will automatically use that new date.

I hope you have as much fun playing with it as I had implementing it. It's a powerful new feature for easily exploring and comparing different scenarios. As always your feedback, questions, and suggestions are always welcome.

Elisabeth

In the the MoneyReady App you can certainly model both the leveraged scenario with dividends  and compare it to the other scenario where you just withdraw from the RRSP.  The dividend scenario is not guaranteed to work better, it's highly dependent on the factors like your yield and interest rate on the loan (which should be deductible in most cases). The taxes you pay on the dividends are highly dependent on other sources of income, so you also need to condider the timing of CPP and OAS (with its pentential clawbacks). Leveraged scenarios are also inheritently riskier, so that is also something to consider.

Let us know what you find!

Thanks!

For the current year, the amounts for deposits and withdrawals shown in the Time Machine are the amounts from today to the end of the year. The Time Machine starts from today, with today's account balances, thus deposits and withdrawals are shown from today to the end of the year. You don't need to adjust them. The Time Machine prorates your Incomes, Expenses, and any entered Automatic Savings/Withdrawals, since those are set for the entire year (with some exceptions, as you can set one-time lump-sums that are not prorated). It calculates public pensions (CPP/QPP/OAS/GIS) for the entire year, but shows you what is left to be received this current year. It calculates taxes for the full year given all your income, which is why we ask how much you've already paid in taxes this year before you run the Time Machine, so it can credit you. Then it tells you what needs to be deposited or withdrawn in the accounts for the rest of the year.

RRIFs and LIFS are special cases because there are mandated minimum withdrawals from those accounts. We must ask you for the last end of year balance and what has already been withdrawn year-to-date (you set that in the account's properties), because the Time Machine calculates the minimum withdrawal for you. It will tell you how much to withdraw at a minimum if you haven't already. To that, it will add any additional withdrawals, if any, to cover your expenses or additional automatic withdrawals you set up.

Believe me covering the first year of the Time Machine both easily and accurately is not a simple problem. First, we take pride in our accuracy. We use your current account balances and expect you to keep them updated, and if you wish at no extra cost to you, we automatically update them for you with market data or Wealthica. So we expect you to have the most accurate values for today, not Jan 1 values, which are quickly out of date. Future projections are hard enough, we need to start from a known accurate base. Second, we try to keep the app as simple as possible for you. We ask as little as possible and still be accurate, and useful as we show you the data you don't know, not what you already know. What happened Jan 1 to today, you already know, it's in the past. For the app to give it to you accurately, we would have to ask you for all that data, (all balances, deposits, withdrawals, actual growth/loss to date of investments, how much you've actually earned and spent),  which would be a great pain to enter and not that useful to you since you already know it. You can fill in the current year that has already past more accurately than we could estimate it if we were to "predict" the past. 

That said, I'm still working on finding a solution so that you can get a complete first year that is accurate, and not too painful to enter the data necessary to get that needed accuracy.

The big news today is that the house of commons approved the proposed tax cut for the lowest income tax bracket. It still has to pass legislation, but that looks like a done deal, so we've implemented it in the MoneyReadyApp. It will go from 15% to 14.5% in 2025 and 14% in 2026. This will help everybody as it reduces the taxes paid on the first $57.375 of earnings. However, that lowest tax rate is also used to calculate non-refundable tax credits, so the overall tax savings may be a little lower than advertised

Other recent changes:

You can now link an EXPENSE to a real estate property. This makes sure the expense does not occur before the property is bought or after the property is sold.

I've been asked too often (including on this forum) how to enter an inheritance. A new `Inheritance' INCOME type makes it easier.

The TIME MACHINE calculates the taxes for the current year in full, and then credits you with the amount of taxes you told it was already paid in the screen right before launching it. You're telling me she's still paying $1000/month in taxes deducted from her pay, and you expect she'll get a ~$6000 tax refund when she files taxes next year. So there's a bit of cash problem and you need to withdraw more from your investments.

The TIME MACHINE has mostly a resolution of one year and it must close the books on taxes each December 31. It would give her the tax refund on that date and that will reduce the amount that needs to be withdrawn to meet your expenses.

Your work-around of adding an Expense is fine. You can also add a one-time Income, not taxable, to recoup the expense on the date you expect the tax refund in 2026.

The amount deducted at source from her employer seems high. It indicates the employer is not aware of deductions she may have. You might want to consider filing this form with the CRA to reduce tax deductions at source:

https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/forms-publications/forms/t1213.html

If you do, it has to be done every year.

Also consider that EI and CPP contributions stop once you've paid up the maximum contribution amounts, so that it's common for high earners to get a boost in take-home pay later on in the year. On her last pay-slip check how much EI and CPP she's paid already. For 2025 the EI max is $1077.48 and the CPP max is $4,034.10 (plus a bit more for CCP2)

We've added an 'Inheritance' Income type as a shortcut.

Pension income splitting can occur at any age, as long as there is eligible pension income to split. The TIME MACHINE calculates the future eligible pension income, and then  optimizes the amount to split using 2 criteria:

1. To equalise taxable income between the 2 spouses, so pension income can be claimed by the lower income spouse rather than the higher income spouse

2. If possible for both spouses to get the pension income tax credit, so that even a higher-income spouse can receive pension income from a lower-income spouse up to the maximum amount for the pension income credit.

There are some additional complications for Québec due to whether splitting is allowed for the health tax based on age.

RRIF withdrawals become eligible pension income only at 65 as you said. How it will be split is determined by the TIME MACHINE to try to optimise it.