The Recurring Expenses page describes everything you'll spend money on year after year - housing, utilities, transportation, groceries, healthcare, travel, entertainment. The engine adds each row's monthly amount to your year-by-year cash flow, inflates it forward at the growth rate you assign, and applies the configured age range so the row only fires when it's actually active.

Required fields per expense

• Description - a short label like "Mortgage P&I" or "Streaming services." Shows in the projection and any reports.
• Category - one of: Housing, Home maintenance, Utilities, Transportation, Insurance, Healthcare (premiums), Healthcare (out-of-pocket), Groceries/household, Dining out, Clothing/personal, Travel, Entertainment, Subscriptions, Hobbies, Debt servicing, Charitable giving, Gifts/family support, Taxes, Other, or Custom. Category drives how the row is grouped in the Spending Outlook chart. One category does more than group: Charitable giving also feeds the charitable deduction from 2026, so on Plus, cash gifts entered there lower your taxable income without any extra setup - which is a reason to use it rather than Other for genuine charitable gifts. Use Custom if you want the row's description to become its own category label.
• Monthly amount - the recurring monthly figure in today's dollars. For non-monthly expenses (annual property tax, quarterly insurance), enter the monthly equivalent: $600 every 6 months = $100/month, $2,400 a year = $200/month.
• Annual growth - how the expense grows year over year. Choose the plan's general inflation rate, the medical inflation rate, or a custom percent. Healthcare and Insurance rows commonly use the medical rate; Housing and most others use the general rate. See How inflation works in the plan.
• From Age and To Age - the range during which the expense is active. Each picker lists three groups: sentinels (Always / Your ret. age / Your lifetime), your active Custom and Relocation Events, and explicit ages. Set To Age to "Your lifetime" for expenses that continue through the plan, or to a specific age for expenses that stop (e.g. childcare ends at 18, mortgage P&I ends at the payoff age). Anchoring a bound to an event ties it to that event's year (see Milestones & Events) so a row like "Mortgage P&I to Mortgage paid" stays in sync if you reschedule the payoff date.
• Owner (couple plans) - Joint / Self / Spouse. Matters for survivor spending: a "Self" expense disappears when that person dies, while Joint and Spouse handle the survivor-spending adjustment differently.

Location (plans with a relocation)

If your plan includes a relocation on the Milestones & Events timeline, the expense grid gains a Location column. Tag a row with a residence - your home state or a place you move to - and the engine only applies it during the years you actually live there. A "Property tax" row tagged to your current state stops when you relocate away; a "Rent abroad" row tagged to the destination applies only while you're there. Leave a row on Anywhere and it applies in every active year as before. The picker only offers residences your plan actually visits, and the tag doubles as a handy reference for which expenses belong to which place. Plans created with Passport set these tags for you automatically.

Check your tags after changing a move. A tag is matched against where the plan says you live, so changing a relocation's destination - or duplicating a plan and pointing its return somewhere new - can leave a row tagged to a place you no longer go. That row then stops applying, quietly, and your spending drops for those years. If a plan's expenses look unexpectedly low over a stretch of years, this is the first thing to check: a "Go-go years" row tagged to the state you used to return to, on a plan that now returns somewhere else, simply won't apply. Rows meant as "wherever I'm living" belong on Anywhere rather than tagged to a specific state.

Frequency conversions

Every expense is stored as monthly. Quick conversions:

• Annual / 12 = monthly
• Semi-annual / 6 = monthly
• Quarterly / 3 = monthly

If you'd rather think in annual terms, you can - just remember to divide by 12 when entering.

Essential %

Each row carries an Essential %: how much of that spending you could never give up. It feeds two things: the Funded Ratio on the Dashboard, and Adaptive Spending if you have turned that on.

On its own it changes nothing - not your projection, your success rate, or any figure in the year-by-year table. It only affects results once Adaptive Spending is enabled, and then only because it decides what that rule is allowed to trim.

It is a percentage rather than a yes/no because most real expense rows are a mix. A $700 grocery budget might be 75% essential and 25% comfort. A single "Go-go years" row covering all your spending might be 60% essential. Both answers are more honest than forcing the whole row into one bucket.

A row you have not answered counts as fully essential, which is the conservative reading - it keeps the essential obligation at its largest, so nothing is overstated by leaving it alone. Clearing the cell returns it to that state; entering 0 is a real answer meaning entirely discretionary. Until at least one row is marked partly discretionary, the Dashboard card shows a single ratio, because the essentials figure would be identical to the total.

Spending Outlook (chart)

The tab switcher at the top toggles between the expense list and the Spending Outlook chart - a stacked-area view of your projected monthly spending across the plan by category. Useful when you want to see how the spending profile changes as expenses come and go (mortgage payoff, travel slow-down at 80, healthcare ramp-up). The Today's $ / Future $ toggle lets you view it in either current purchasing power or nominal future dollars.

Survivor spending adjustment (couple plans only)

When one spouse passes, household spending typically drops - one person eats less, drives less, has fewer subscriptions. Use the Survivor spending adjustment to specify a monthly reduction in today's dollars that begins in the year of the first death. The reduction is applied to recurring living expenses only (not healthcare or insurance), and it inflates forward like any other expense. Typical values are 20-30% of the household's pre-death recurring spend.

Starter sets

If you're new to the planner, the page offers three starter modes when there are no expenses yet:

• Start fresh - empty list. Add rows one at a time.
• Simple starter set - a handful of common categories pre-populated with placeholder amounts, useful as a skeleton you can tune.
• Full starter set - an extensive pre-categorized list. Worth it if you closely track spending or want to assign different age ranges / inflation rates to different categories.

None of these set values that match your real spending - they're scaffolding. Replace the placeholders with your actual figures.

Common modeling patterns

• Travel that tapers with age - one row "Travel (active years)" from retirement to age 78, and a smaller "Travel (slow-go years)" from 78 to end of plan. Both are good candidates for a low Essential %.
• Healthcare ramp-up - keep Healthcare (out-of-pocket) on the medical inflation rate, and consider an additional "Late-life care" row that activates around age 80.
• Mortgage P&I - belongs on the Debts page, not here. Property tax / homeowners insurance / HOA / maintenance go here.
• Holiday and gift spending - lumpy but predictable. Average annual into a monthly equivalent under Gifts/family support.

What this page is not for

• One-time expenses (new car, kitchen remodel, wedding) - see One-time expenses.
• Mortgage / loan payments - the principal+interest portion belongs on Debts. The taxes/insurance/HOA portion belongs here.
• Federal / state income tax - calculated by the engine each year from your income and brackets. Don't enter it as a recurring expense, or you'll double-count.
• Medicare / ACA premiums - the engine generates these from the Healthcare pages and adds them automatically to the Med/Ins line. Don't duplicate them here.

The 50-row limit

The page caps at 50 recurring expense rows. If you're hitting it, you're probably tracking at a level of detail that doesn't change long-run plan outcomes. Combine related rows (all utility lines into one Utilities row) - the engine doesn't see less precision; it just sees less noise.