A legacy goal is an amount you'd like to leave behind. Set one on the Profile page and your dashboard reports how often your plan achieves it, alongside the estate it typically leaves.

Legacy goal is a Plus feature. The assets it counts are too - Real Estate and Other Assets are both Plus - so on the free tier the figure would leave out the two things that usually matter most to it.

This is the first piece of estate planning in Retirement Figures rather than the whole of it. It covers your portfolio, property you still own, other assets, and life insurance still in force; estate taxes are not modelled yet - see what is not counted below, which is kept deliberately explicit so you always know what the figure includes.

It does not change your chance of success. Success rate answers one question and one only: did the money last. A legacy goal is reported as a separate figure, so setting one never moves the number you have been watching. A plan can be 95% likely to succeed and only 40% likely to hit an ambitious legacy goal, and both statements are true at once.

Two settings

• Amount to leave - in today's dollars. The projection runs in future dollars, so the target is converted for you. This matters more than it sounds: a $500,000 goal is roughly $1,000,000 after 27 years of inflation, and comparing against the raw future number would be badly misleading in your favor.
• Heirs' tax rate - their income tax rate, not yours. Default 22%.

Why the tax rate matters: a dollar is not a dollar

What your heirs receive is not the same as your ending balance, because different accounts are taxed very differently when inherited:

• Traditional IRA and 401(k) - taxable income to your heirs, and under the SECURE Act they generally must empty the account within 10 years. At a 22% rate, a $1,000,000 traditional IRA is worth about $780,000 to them.
• Roth - inherited tax-free, worth its full value.
• Taxable brokerage - receives a step-up in basis at death, so the embedded capital gain is wiped out. Worth its full value.
• HSA - fully taxable to anyone other than a spouse.
• Property you still own - also gets a step-up in basis, so heirs who sell it owe essentially nothing on the gain. Counted at market value, minus anything still owed on it.
• Other assets you still own - same step-up treatment, counted at their projected value. Most depreciate to very little over a long plan; business equity and collectibles do not.

The goal is measured after that tax. Measuring on the raw balance would overstate a tax-deferred-heavy estate by roughly a quarter to a third, which is exactly the kind of comfortable-but-wrong number this tool tries not to produce. It also means the mix of your accounts affects the result, not just the total - two plans ending with the same balance can leave meaningfully different amounts.

What is not counted

The figure covers your portfolio - investment accounts, cash, and tax-advantaged balances - plus any property you still own at the end of the plan, valued at market and net of anything still owed on it.

Property is counted at market value with no tax taken off, and that is deliberate rather than an oversight: real estate gets a step-up in basis at death, so heirs who sell it straight away owe essentially nothing on the gain. Market value already is the after-tax value to them.

A property your plan sells is counted once, through the sale proceeds landing in your portfolio - never twice. You can also exclude a specific property from the estate with the Leave to heirs switch on the Real Estate page, for something you expect to pass outside your plan.

Other assets count too. Vehicles, jewellery, collectibles, business equity - anything on the Other Assets page that you still hold at the end of the plan, at its projected value. Each category carries its own rate of value change, so a car that depreciates 10% a year is worth very little after decades while art, precious metals and business equity hold or gain. There is a Leave to heirs switch there too, and an asset your plan sells is counted once through its proceeds.

Life insurance is counted, and counted in full: a death benefit is not taxed as income to the people who receive it, so unlike an inherited traditional IRA it reaches your heirs whole. But it only counts where cover is still in force at that person's plan-to age. A term policy that ends at 80 on a plan running to 95 contributes nothing, and the Life Insurance page says so on the policy rather than leaving you to work it out. Premiums are treated as level and stop being charged when cover ends.

A benefit reaches the estate the same way every other dollar does - it is paid into the plan in the year that person dies, so it can be spent first and only what remains is left behind. That also makes it the one item here that can move your chance of success, since it is money arriving while the plan is still running. A policy you cash in during your lifetime pays its cash value instead and then counts for nothing at the end, which is correct: the cover is gone.

Still not counted: estate taxes federal or state, trusts, and gifting strategies.

How it relates to "Legacy / Do not spend" accounts

These are two different tools and they work together. On an investment account, Draw priority can be set to Legacy / Do not spend, which stops the plan ever tapping that account for spending - that decides which dollars are off-limits. The legacy goal decides how many dollars you are aiming for.

You can use either alone or both. If you earmark $800,000 of accounts and set a $500,000 goal, expect to hit the goal essentially always - you have guaranteed a floor well above your target, and the report saying so is correct rather than a bug.

Reading the result

Two numbers are reported: how often the plan meets the goal, and the estate it typically leaves (the median). The second matters as much as the first. "You meet your goal 61% of the time, typically leaving $612,000" tells you far more than the percentage alone, because it says what happens in the ordinary case rather than only how often you clear a line.

It will not match the End Balance on your dashboard, and it should not. That tile reports future dollars - the actual number in the accounts on the last day of the plan. This figure is in today's dollars and after heirs' tax, so it is normally much smaller. Over a long plan inflation does most of that work: a plan ending with $1,000,000 after 28 years at 2.54% inflation is worth about $496,000 today, and the heirs' tax then takes it to roughly $421,000. Both numbers are right; they answer different questions.