The Spending Optimizer answers a simple question: what level of ongoing lifestyle spending looks sustainable for this plan? It runs your full Monte Carlo simulation seven times - once at your current spending, and again at -30%, -20%, -10%, +10%, +20%, and +30% of current spending - and shows the success rate at each level.

What "spending" means here

• The deltas scale your lifestyle recurring expenses only. Healthcare costs (Medicare premiums, ACA premiums, LTC) are held fixed at their projected levels because you don't control them by choosing to spend more or less.
• One-time expenses, debt payments, and taxes are not scaled either - they're already determined by your plan inputs.
• If you've set Essential % on any expense row, the deltas apply only to the discretionary portion. "-30%" then means "cut 30% of what you marked discretionary", not 30% of your mortgage. A mostly-essential plan will correctly find the deep cuts unreachable, and the recommended range narrows to what you could actually do. If you haven't set Essential % anywhere, the deltas scale all lifestyle spending, as before.

One thing not to double-count when reading the results: the sweep cuts spending and Essential % already marks part of your spending as flexible. These are not two independent safety margins - a -30% row is leaning on the same flexibility the Essential % column describes.

What the three styles do

The styles do not change the simulation. The same seven runs are produced regardless of the style you pick. What changes is the pair of success-rate thresholds used to interpret those runs into a recommended spending range:

• Conservative: 80% - 95% success zone. Higher safety margin, narrower recommended range.
• Balanced: 75% - 90% success zone. The default midpoint.
• Aggressive: 70% - 85% success zone. Accepts more failure risk, wider recommended range at lower success rates.

After the seven runs complete, the optimizer interpolates between the rows to find the spending levels that would produce the style's lower and upper thresholds. Those become the Recommended range shown in the summary panel, and they drive the Status badge ("In range", "May support more spending", or "Spending may be too high").

Because the underlying simulations are identical, the Current success rate, the Tested spending levels table, and the median end-balance numbers should be the same across all three styles for the same plan. The styles are purely a lens for interpreting the same simulation results.