A retirement plan is rarely one person's decision. You can give your spouse, partner, or financial advisor access to a plan so they are looking at the same numbers you are, instead of a screenshot or a PDF that went out of date the moment you changed something.

It works the same way when you are the one helping rather than the one being helped. If you look after an ageing parent's finances, they can share their plan with you, or you can build the plan yourself and share it back to them so they can see where they stand. Either way nobody has to hand over a password, you each keep your own account, and access can be withdrawn later without anything being rebuilt. If a parent's affairs eventually pass to you entirely, an editing share means you can simply carry on with the plan that already exists.

How to share a plan

Go to Manage Plans, open the three-dot menu next to the plan you want to share, and choose Share. Enter the person's email address and pick what they can do:

• View only - they can open the plan and see everything in it, but cannot change anything.
• Can edit - they can also change the plan's inputs, exactly as you can.

You can change someone between the two at any time, or remove their access entirely.

They do not need a subscription

Only the person doing the sharing needs Plus. Whoever you share with needs nothing more than a free account, and the plan still shows its full Plus features to them - the plan keeps the abilities of the person who owns it, not of whoever happens to be looking at it. Bringing in a spouse or an advisor does not cost you a second subscription.

If they do not have an account yet

Share with their email address anyway. They are sent an invitation link; when they follow it they can create a free account and the plan is waiting for them. The link is good for 14 days, works once, and is tied to the address you sent it to - forwarding it to somebody else will not let that person in. If you share again with the same address before they accept, a fresh invitation goes out and the previous link stops working.

Until an invitation is accepted it shows on the Shared access page as pending, so you can tell the difference between "they have not looked yet" and "the email never arrived". You can cancel a pending invitation at any time.

What the other person can see

They see everything in the plan you shared, exactly as you see it - every figure you have entered and every result it produces. They do not see your other plans, and they cannot share it onward with anyone else. Sharing is a decision only the plan's owner makes.

Seeing and removing access

Open the account menu and choose Shared access. That page answers both directions of the question: which of your plans you have shared and with whom, including invitations that have not been accepted, and which plans other people have shared with you.

Removing someone takes effect immediately - they lose the plan the next time they try to open it, and they never see any later changes. What it cannot do is unsee what they already saw; anyone who could read a plan could have written down or screenshotted what was in it, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise.

If the person who shared a plan with you lets their own Plus lapse, your access continues. Plus is required to start sharing, never to keep an existing share working.

Sharing and encryption

If you have turned on encryption for your cloud plans, be aware that a shared plan cannot stay end-to-end encrypted. Encryption means we hold only ciphertext that your passphrase unlocks, and we cannot hand that to somebody else without your passphrase - which you should never give out. So sharing a plan stores that one plan in a readable form instead. Your other plans stay encrypted, and the share dialog tells you this before you commit. If you later remove everyone's access, that plan goes back to being encrypted the next time your session is unlocked.