The Work & Other Income page is where you describe every ongoing income source that isn't Social Security or a pension. It has two cards: Earned Income Sources for wages and self-employment, and Passive Income for income that doesn't come from active work. Couple plans get a separate Earned Income card per spouse.

Earned Income Sources

Each row is one earning arrangement - a salary, a part-time job, a consulting contract. Required fields per row:

• Description - a short label like "Salary at ACME" or "Side consulting." Shows in the year-by-year projection and any reports.
• Monthly amount - the gross monthly figure (before payroll tax, before contributions, before income tax). The engine works through the tax stack from there.
• Annual growth rate - how the amount grows each year. For W-2 wages this models raises; for contract work it might model rate increases. Leave at zero for fixed income.
• From age and To age - the range during which the income is active. Each picker lists three groups: sentinels (Your retirement age / Spouse's retirement age / Your lifetime / Spouse's lifetime), your active Custom and Relocation Events, and explicit ages. For lifetime income, set To age to "Your lifetime" (or "Spouse's lifetime" on a spouse income). Ages use calendar-year-of-age semantics ("65" means the calendar year you turn 65). Anchoring a bound to an event ties it to that event's year (see Milestones & Events) so a row like "Consulting from House sold" stays in sync if you reschedule the event.
• Self-employment flag - check this if the income is self-employment (1099 contracting, sole proprietor, single-member LLC, etc.). The engine then applies self-employment tax (15.3% on 92.35% of net earnings, with the half-SE-tax deduction) instead of standard FICA, matching how the IRS treats SE income.

The Spouse Earned Income Sources card (couple plans only) is identical in structure - one card per earner so you can model different career timelines, different growth rates, and different retirement dates.

Employment vs Self-employment - what changes

• Employment (Self-employed off) - the engine applies the employee half of FICA: 6.2% Social Security tax up to the wage base, 1.45% Medicare tax on all wages, and 0.9% Additional Medicare Tax above $200k (single) / $250k (MFJ). Combined payroll tax: 7.65% under the wage base.
• Self-employed (flag on) - the engine applies self-employment tax instead: 15.3% on 92.35% of net earnings, with the standard half-SE-tax deduction applied to taxable income. Effectively you owe both halves of FICA on this income.

Income tax (federal brackets, state tax) applies on top of both. See Federal taxes for how the brackets stack.

Employee contributions

Each earned income row can optionally route a portion of itself into a retirement account. Expand the contribution section on a row to enable:

• Choose the target account from a dropdown grouped by tax category - Tax-deferred (401k, 403b, 457b, traditional TSP), Tax-free (Roth 401k, Roth 403b, Roth TSP), Taxable, Cash, or HSA. The dropdown only shows accounts that belong to the same person as the income row, so you can't accidentally route your spouse's salary into your own 401k.
• Specify the contribution as a percentage of pay or as a fixed dollar amount. The contribution is deducted from each month's paycheck and deposited into the chosen account.

For Tax-deferred contributions, the engine reduces your Box-1 (taxable) wages by the contribution amount each year, matching how a real pre-tax payroll deferral works. Roth contributions don't reduce taxable income but the deposited dollars grow tax-free. HSA contributions reduce AGI and grow tax-free for qualified medical use.

The planner will warn you with an inline insight banner if your configured contribution exceeds the IRS annual limit for that account type (with catch-up provisions for age 50+ and 60-63 super catch-up). Adjust the contribution down to silence the warning, or accept it as a "what if I overfunded" scenario.

Employer match

For employment income (not self-employment), you can configure an employer match alongside the employee contribution:

• Match percentage - the rate the employer matches, e.g. 50% of your contribution.
• Match cap - the maximum match as a percentage of pay, e.g. up to 6% of pay.

The matched dollars are deposited into the same account as your employee contribution and tracked separately in the projection so you can see the total benefit (employee + employer) over time. The match doesn't reduce your take-home pay - it's free money on top.

Passive Income

The Passive Income card (below the Earned Income cards) is for recurring income that doesn't come from active work and isn't subject to payroll tax:

• Rental property (gross rental income; carrying costs go elsewhere)
• Royalties (book, music, patent licensing, etc.)
• Dividends from a brokerage you manage separately from your planner accounts
• Income from a limited partnership or private investment
• Any other recurring stream that's not wages and not a Social Security / pension / annuity (those have their own pages)

Each passive row carries a monthly amount, growth rate, from age, and to age - same shape as earned income (including the option to anchor From / To to a Timeline Event - see Milestones & Events) but with no FICA and no contribution destination. Income tax (federal + state) still applies.

Expenses on rental income

Enter the monthly amount as GROSS rent, then set Expenses to the share of it that is deductible on Schedule E: mortgage interest, property tax, insurance, maintenance, management fees and depreciation. A commonly cited rule of thumb puts operating costs somewhere around a third to a half of gross rent once depreciation is included, but your own Schedule E is the number to use.

This lowers the tax on the row and nothing else. The cash still arrives in full, which is deliberate: depreciation is a deduction that costs you nothing in cash, and if you already track the mortgage and the property tax as expenses, cutting the income too would subtract them twice. Leaving it at zero taxes the full gross amount, which is what plans did before this setting existed.

It matters most above the net investment income tax thresholds ($200,000 Single / $250,000 MFJ), where rental income is billed an extra 3.8%. See Federal taxes.

Businesses you actively run

The 3.8% surtax is not meant to reach a trade or business you materially participate in, only hands-off investments. Tick I materially participate in this business on the row and its income stays out of that surtax. It is still taxed normally as ordinary income, at both federal and state level: the tick changes one tax, not all of them.

The IRS decides material participation with a set of tests that mostly come down to hours worked and how involved you are, so this is your call to make about your own situation rather than something we can work out from the plan. A rental you hire a manager for is the usual example of one that does NOT qualify.

Bonuses and equity compensation (RSUs)

When restricted stock units vest, the employer delivers shares and their value on that date is compensation, not a windfall and not investment income. It goes on your W-2 as ordinary wages, and Social Security and Medicare apply exactly as they do to salary. That is how the planner treats it.

Add a grant under Equity Compensation and enter what you expect to vest each year. A grant carries its own schedule rather than being an income row because vesting is lumpy: grants overlap, a cliff lands in one year, and the amounts are uneven. One income row per vest year would also use up the ten-row limit on earned income quickly.

Two things worth knowing about the numbers you enter:

• Amounts are for the year shown and are not inflated. Enter what you believe the shares will actually be worth when they vest. We do not adjust them for inflation, because what moves the value of a future vest is the share price rather than the cost of living, and inflating it would dress a stock-price guess up as a calculation.
• Where the shares land. Deposit to decides this. Taxable investment is the default and matches what usually happens: the shares arrive in a brokerage account whether or not you needed the money that year, and the cost basis is increased so the deposit is not later taxed as a gain. General cash flow instead treats the vest as money in hand, so only what you do not spend is invested, through the normal surplus routing. The two differ only in a year you spend more than you earn: with cash flow the vest is consumed, with a deposit it is invested and the shortfall is met from the portfolio. See Where unspent earnings go.

Bonuses live in the same place and work the same way: add one, enter the year or years it is paid, and the amount. It is taxed as wages in the year it lands, payroll tax included, exactly as a vest is. The only difference is the default destination - a bonus is paid to you, so it starts as general cash flow and only the unspent part is invested, while RSU shares default to landing in a taxable account.

Do not model a bonus as a windfall. Windfalls are entered NET and the planner applies no tax to them, so a bonus entered that way is untaxed and makes the plan look better than it is. Folding it into salary instead loses the year the money actually arrives, which is the thing that pushes a bracket.

What this does not model. Once the value arrives the planner treats it like any other money, so it does not represent the risk of holding a concentrated position in a single employer's stock. If you intend to hold the shares rather than sell at vest, the plan will be more optimistic than reality about how that money behaves. It also does not track cost basis per lot, the long-term holding clock, or a sell-to-cover election.

What this page is not for

• Social Security - has its own page because of provisional-income taxability rules and spousal / survivor benefits.
• Pensions and annuities - have their own page because of payout options, survivor benefits, and lump-sum mechanics.
• One-time inflows (inheritance, property sale, settlement) - those are Windfalls, not income. See Windfalls.
• Required minimum distributions - generated automatically by the engine when you have Tax-deferred balances past the applicable age. Don't enter them manually.
• Roth conversions - configured on the Roth Strategy page, not here. A conversion isn't income; it's an internal transfer that creates taxable income for the year.