The Outcome Quadrant plots your plans against the two measures this planner uses to answer "is this plan okay" - and they are not the same question, which is the whole point of putting them on one chart.

• Chance of success (across) is the Monte Carlo answer: the share of simulated market histories in which the plan never runs out. It is a probability, and it moves in jumps when assumptions change.
• Funded ratio (up) is the actuarial answer: everything funding the plan divided by everything it owes, in today's dollars, discounted at a low-risk rate rather than at your portfolio return. No simulation, and it moves smoothly. See Funded Ratio.

Find it on the Plans page, under the Outcome Quadrant tab.

Two points per plan, joined by a line

Each plan appears twice. The filled dot is the plan as written. The hollow dot is the same plan with only the share of each recurring expense you marked as essential - the Essential % column on your expenses. The line between them is what your discretionary spending is costing that plan.

The connector is the part worth reading. Its length is how much that spending is worth; its angle says which measure it was hurting. A long, nearly flat line means the spending was buying risk rather than covering a shortfall - the money is there either way, but the timing has to cooperate. A steep line means the plan was genuinely short.

The line is not a path. It joins two computed points and says nothing about the spending levels in between. Funded ratio moves close to linearly as you trim spending, because it is a present-value ratio - cut the spending by a fifth and you cut what the plan owes by roughly a fifth. Chance of success does not: it is the tail of a distribution, steep through the middle and flat at both ends, so most of the gain arrives over one part of the cut rather than spread evenly along it. A half-way cut will not usually land half-way along the line.

If you have not set Essential % on anything, the two points sit on top of each other. That is not a fault; it means nothing has been marked as cuttable, and the planner treats an unanswered row as fully essential rather than assuming you could drop it.

Reading the four quadrants

• Funded and likely (top right, shaded) - enough money, and the simulations agree. The strong corner.
• Funded but fragile (top left) - the money is there in present-value terms, but a poor run of early returns still breaks the plan often. A sequence-of-returns problem rather than a shortfall.
• Leaning on returns (bottom right) - clears the success threshold while under 100% funded. This is not luck: it means the plan works because stocks are expected to earn more than the low-risk rate the funded ratio discounts at. Reasonable, and worth knowing you are relying on it.
• Short on both (bottom left) - neither measure is comfortable.

The dashed lines mark 100% funded, where a plan could in principle defease what it owes, and 80% success, the level worth a second look.

Controls

Tick plans off to isolate a comparison. The axes deliberately do not rescale when you do - they are sized to every plan you have, so two different selections stay comparable against each other. Hovering a point highlights its twin and their connector, and the tooltip gives both readings for that plan.

What it costs to draw

Each plan is simulated twice: once as written, once with discretionary spending removed. A chance of success is a simulation rather than a calculation, so there is no shortcut to the second point. The chart only computes when you open the tab, and not before.