The Profile page is the foundation of your plan. The core inputs here drive nearly every downstream calculation - tax brackets, Social Security claiming, Medicare timing, RMD onset, planning horizon, and state taxes - so it's worth getting them right before filling in the rest. Personal details sit in the first card; the answers that only affect how you are taxed - state of residence, blind deduction, and qualifying dependent - are grouped in Tax Settings below it.

Birth year

The engine works with calendar-year-of-age semantics: a "65" anywhere in the plan means the calendar year you turn 65, not the day. Your birth year sets that mapping. It determines your Social Security full retirement age, your Medicare eligibility year, and whether your Required Minimum Distribution age is 73 (born 1951-1959) or 75 (born 1960 or later).

Retirement age

The age your primary wage income stops. It is independent from your Social Security claiming age and your Medicare start age - those are set elsewhere - so the planner can model the common pattern of retiring at 62 and bridging to Social Security at 67 or 70. Retirement age also gates a few engine behaviors: asset allocation can shift between pre- and post-retirement, and the planner will stop your salary and 401(k) contributions on the configured year.

If you've already retired, set retirement age to your current age. If you're still working, set it to your planned date. You can always change it and re-run to compare scenarios.

Plan to age

How long the plan needs to support you - not your best guess at how long you'll live. Setting this to your "expected" age leaves a roughly 50% chance you'll outlive the plan, which defeats the point of stress-testing. A reasonable starting point is 90 for singles and 95 for the surviving spouse in a couple; the longer horizon costs less than running out of money. The simulation runs through the calendar year you turn this age and then ends - if you set 90, the plan covers ages today through 90 inclusive.

Include spouse

Turn this on if you're married, even if your spouse has no income of their own. It drives your tax filing status (Married Filing Jointly vs Single - the two have very different brackets and standard deductions, and the difference compounds over a 30-year plan into tens of thousands of dollars in lifetime tax). It also unlocks the spouse-specific fields on Social Security, pensions, accounts, and plan-to age, and enables survivor handling: it continues with the higher of the two Social Security benefits after a death, mirroring real Social Security survivor rules.

The filing change on a death follows the tax code rather than switching the moment a plan-to age passes. The year of a death still files jointly for the whole year (IRC §6013(d)). From the following year the household files as a single filer - unless you support a qualifying dependent, in which case see below.

Each spouse has independent birth year, retirement age, and plan-to age. They don't have to match: a couple with different ages, different career timelines, and different life expectancies is the most accurate way to model most households.

State of residence

Drives state income tax across the plan. The engine models each state's brackets at a simplified level (state income tax only - local / city / county taxes are not modeled separately; see State taxes). States with no income tax (Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Washington, Wyoming, Alaska) produce a $0 state-tax line every year.

If you expect to move during retirement (e.g. to a no-tax state), add a relocation event on the Milestones & Events page and the engine will switch state tax treatment starting January 1 of the move year.

Qualifying dependent

In the Tax Settings card, beside your state of residence. It asks whether you support a qualifying dependent - and if so, whether that dependent is a child. It is not a filing-status picker, and that is deliberate: your filing status is worked out for you, separately for every year of the plan, from your marital status, mortality, and this answer. A plan runs for decades and the correct status changes across it, so no single status you could pick would stay right.

The four statuses the engine uses, and when each applies:

• Married Filing Jointly - while both spouses are living, including the entire year of a death.
• Qualifying Surviving Spouse - the two years following a spouse's death, if you support a dependent child. It carries the joint tax brackets and the full joint standard deduction, so it is worth considerably more than filing as a single person during those two years.
• Head of Household - while you support a qualifying dependent. Wider brackets and a larger standard deduction than single, though less generous than joint.
• Single - everything else.

Why the question distinguishes a child from anyone else: Qualifying Surviving Spouse requires a dependent child, while Head of Household accepts a wider group - including a parent you support, who does not even have to live with you. If you have never been married, or the death is long past, the two answers behave identically.

Through what age. By default the support runs for the rest of the plan, which is the right answer for most people who answer yes at all - a permanently disabled adult child never ages out of dependency. Set an age only if the support ends sooner, for instance if they move into care. The age you pick is your age, and it is inclusive: choosing 80 means the last year of support is the year you turn 80, and you file as a single person from 81.

You can watch the whole sequence: turn on Show details on the Year-by-Year table and a Filing Status column appears beside the ages.

What this does not do: Retirement Figures does not model a dependent's own expenses, and there is no Child Tax Credit or dependent-care credit. If supporting someone costs you money, enter that as an ordinary expense with its own end age. Married Filing Separately is not yet modeled at all.

A note on age conventions

Throughout the planner, an "age" refers to the age you reach during that calendar year, evaluated at year-end. So "retirement age 65" means the calendar year you turn 65, with the engine processing income, expenses, and account balances as if you reached that birthday during the year. This convention makes the year-by-year accounting clean and is consistent across every input that takes an age.