Moving to another US state in retirement is common - climate, taxes, family, lower cost of living, downsizing. The plan needs to know about it because state income tax brackets vary widely, the home sale typically generates a sizable inflow, and several recurring expenses change as a side effect. (Moving abroad instead? See Planning an international relocation.)

Capture the move as a Relocation Event. On the Milestones & Events page, add an event of type Relocation: pick the year and the destination state. The planner switches state-tax treatment starting January 1 of that year and continues using your prior state's brackets for every year before. You can stack multiple relocations (e.g. retire to a no-tax state, then move closer to grandchildren ten years later). Generated milestones from your other inputs continue to show up alongside the event. See Milestones & Events.

State income tax is the headline impact. Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Nevada, South Dakota, Washington, Wyoming, and Alaska have no broad state income tax. New Hampshire is income-tax-free for wages and currently for investment income too. Several states (Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Illinois, Iowa, and others) exclude most retirement income from state tax even when their wage brackets are high. The state-tax line on the Year-by-Year table reflects all of this once the Relocation Event is in place.

Selling the existing home is its own input. If the move involves selling the old residence, model it on the Real Estate page: set the sale year and price, the cost basis (purchase price plus capital improvements), the outstanding mortgage if any, and the selling-cost percentage. The IRS allows up to $250,000 of capital gain to be excluded for a single filer or $500,000 for a couple meeting the ownership and use tests. The engine respects the exclusion and only taxes capital gain above it; the net proceeds land as a windfall to the destination account you select. See Real Estate.

Anchor dependent inputs to the move. Several plan rows naturally shift with the relocation date: the sale-related windfall, a moving-cost one-time expense, new property taxes and HOA fees, new healthcare premiums (if ACA changes market or Medicare network changes). On the One-Time Expenses, Windfalls, and Recurring Expenses pages, the date pickers accept events as anchors - tying the home-sale windfall and the moving-cost expense to the Relocation Event keeps everything in sync if you reschedule the move.

Healthcare networks change with the move. Medicare Advantage networks are local; switching plans across state lines is allowed during Annual Enrollment, but the Advantage premium and provider network change. ACA Marketplace coverage is also state-specific - the federal Premium Tax Credit math is the same, but premiums and plan availability vary materially. Review the Healthcare pages after a relocation to confirm settings reflect the new state.

Cost-of-living shifts that often go unmodeled. Property tax can double or halve. Homeowner's insurance varies wildly by state and increasingly by climate exposure. Utility costs change. Grocery and dining-out costs shift with regional pricing. None of this needs to be precise on day one, but a 30-year projection that assumes pre-move spending levels through a post-move horizon overstates portfolio survival in low-cost destinations and understates it in high-cost ones.

Tagging expenses by location, and the trap in it. Recurring expenses carry an optional Location tag, and it behaves in two quite different ways depending on the rest of your plan:

• Left blank - the expense always applies. This is most expenses.
• Tagged with a place you never live in the plan - the tag is just a label. It changes nothing. This is what lets you annotate a "Colorado cabin" cost without ever relocating to Colorado.
• Tagged with one of your actual residences - the tag becomes a switch. The expense only applies in the years you live there.

That second and third case are the same tag doing opposite things, decided by whether the place appears in your Relocation Events. It is useful once you know: tag your Florida costs "Florida" and your current-state costs with your current state, and each set switches on and off automatically at the move.

The trap is that editing your relocation silently re-interprets existing tags. Because the same tag means different things depending on where you live, changing your destination flips tagged expenses between the two behaviors, in both directions and with no warning:

• Adding a destination that matches tags you already used as labels. Say you tagged some costs "Arizona" as a note while living in Illinois - they applied every year. Add an Arizona relocation and those same expenses become gated, so they now apply only after the move and vanish from every year before it. Your spending drops and your chance of success rises, for a reason nothing on screen explains. This is the direction worth watching, because it makes the plan look better.
• Changing a destination away from tags that were gating. Tag expenses "Arizona" with an Arizona move planned, then switch the move to Nevada, and those expenses stop gating and apply for the whole plan instead - including years you never intended them.

Across a full set of tagged expenses the difference runs to hundreds of thousands of dollars over a 30-year projection. Whenever you add, remove, or re-target a Relocation Event, revisit the Location tags on your Recurring Expenses before trusting the result.

A Relocation Event captures the tax-relevant piece of a move; the rest is a sweep through the Real Estate, Windfalls, One-Time Expenses, Recurring Expenses, and Healthcare pages with the new state's reality in mind.

Moving abroad rather than to another state? See Planning an international relocation.