Insights are the things your plan flagged for you to look at. Everywhere else in the planner shows you what your plan does; this page is the one that says here is something worth doing about it. Every card links to the page where you can act on it.

Where you see them

Insights appear in two places, and they are deliberately different:

• The Insights page (this one) shows the whole list, across your full plan horizon. This is the complete picture.
• The Dashboard shows the top few, limited to the time range selected there - next 5 years, next 10, or the full plan. It is a hook, not the list, and its heading names the window so you can tell.

That means the Dashboard can legitimately show fewer insights than this page. A withdrawal-rate spike at age 92 is real, and it will not appear in a five-year window.

How they are ordered

By priority, not by date. The most consequential thing sits at the top, so a low chance of success outranks a tax observation twenty years out. The list shows the highest-priority handful with a +N more expander beneath; nothing is silently cut off below the fold.

Color carries severity. Red is worth attention now, amber is worth understanding, and blue is informational - often an opportunity rather than a problem.

What they cover

Examples of what can fire: a chance of success below 70%, a withdrawal rate above 8% in a single year, a year where taxes jump sharply and why, a long gap between retiring and claiming Social Security, how close you are to the next IRMAA bracket, and proximity to the ACA subsidy cliff.

Most are warnings, but not all. One names an opportunity: when a plan holds taxable investments and the year leaves meaningful room below the 0% long-term capital gains bracket, the planner says how much gain could be realized federally tax-free. That room is usually largest between retiring and claiming Social Security, and it shrinks as other income rises. Selling and rebuying within it resets your cost basis at no federal cost, though your state may still tax the gain. If you are on a subsidized marketplace (ACA) plan that year, the gains also count as ACA income: the card then shows only the amount that stays under the 400% subsidy cliff and how much premium tax credit realizing it would cost, and it stays quiet when the cliff leaves too little room to matter. Nothing in the simulation acts on this - the engine never realizes gains on its own - so the plan will not show the benefit until you make the move and record it. See Federal taxes.

Dismissing what you have already dealt with

The X on a card hides it. Dismissing is per plan, so hiding an insight on one plan leaves it visible on another, and it survives between visits. A counter at the top right shows how many are hidden; click Show to bring them back and restore any of them.

Hiding is available here rather than on the Dashboard strip on purpose - dismissing from a list of three, when there may be a dozen, makes it easy to lose track of something.

Dismissing an insight changes nothing about your plan. It only stops the card being shown, and if the underlying condition goes away and comes back, so does the card.

If the list is empty

Nothing is firing. That is a genuine result rather than a failure to load - it means no detector found anything in the horizon being shown. Check the Dashboard's range if you expected something you are not seeing there.