The TIPS Ladders page models a ladder of Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities you have already built outside Retirement Figures. It is an import-only feature: Retirement Figures does not build, price, or recommend ladders - it takes the annual real (inflation-adjusted) cash flows your ladder throws off and models them as income in your plan. TIPS ladder import is a Plus feature.

What a TIPS ladder is

A TIPS ladder is a set of inflation-protected Treasury bonds with staggered maturities, built so that a target amount of inflation-adjusted cash comes due each year over a span of years. People commonly use one to cover a fixed window of spending - for example, bridging from early retirement to age 70 when Social Security is claimed - with income that holds its purchasing power regardless of inflation.

Importing from TIPSLadder.com

Imports use the "Funded Years" CSV exported from TIPSLadder.com (a free, third-party tool). Build your ladder there, download the Funded Years table (not the Portfolio CSV), and upload it here. If you upload the Portfolio CSV by mistake, the importer detects it and tells you which file to use instead.

• The importer reads each funded year's Total income as that year's modeled real proceeds. This figure is authoritative - it is never recomputed from principal plus interest, so first-year amounts that include pre-ladder interest are captured correctly.
• Real principal returned and purchase cost are summed from the per-bond detail rows and shown for reference only; they don't change what's modeled.
• Before saving, you see a preview: the year range, total real proceeds, funded-year count, and a year-by-year table. Validation flags non-CSV files, missing columns, duplicate years, and years outside your plan range.

How proceeds are modeled

Imported amounts are in today's dollars. Each year, the matching proceeds are inflated to nominal using your plan's inflation rate and modeled as TIPS Ladder income - the same mechanism used for windfalls. See How inflation works in the plan. The proceeds appear as a distinct inflow in the year-by-year table, the income chart, and the calculation trace. Retirement Figures never subtracts the ladder's purchase cost or reserves an account for it.

Modeling settings per ladder

• Name and an Enabled toggle so you can keep a ladder on file without modeling it.
• Deposit proceeds to - which account receives the proceeds each year. Any active account is eligible (Cash, Taxable, Tax-deferred, Tax-free, HSA). Defaults to your first Cash account; pick a different bucket if your ladder is actually held inside an IRA / Roth / HSA.
• Tax treatment - choose how the proceeds are taxed:
  • No tax effect (cash flow only) - the default; models proceeds as spendable cash with no tax impact.
  • Tax the full proceeds as ordinary income - taxes the entire amount, including the return of principal. This overstates tax in most cases (phantom income) and triggers a warning.
  • Tax only the interest portion - taxes just the real interest each year; closest to how a held-to-maturity ladder is generally taxed.
  • Tax-free - for a ladder held in a Roth or other tax-free account.

Avoiding double-counting

Because the importer models the ladder's future proceeds as income, you need to make sure the ladder's current value isn't also sitting in your account balances - otherwise the same dollars are counted twice (once as portfolio value today, again as income later). The card asks whether the current value of the ladder is already included in your Accounts; if it is, you'll see a warning. Retirement Figures will not change your account balances for you - exclude that value on the Accounts page yourself if you want to avoid overstating your plan.

A ladder held inside a traditional IRA

This works, and three settings need to agree. Set Deposit proceeds to to the IRA, so each year's rung lands back inside the account instead of arriving as spendable cash. Set Tax treatment to No tax effect, because nothing is taxable as a rung matures inside an IRA - the tax comes later, when you withdraw, and the plan already applies that to tax-deferred dollars. Then exclude the ladder's value from the IRA balance on the Accounts page, as above.

One consequence worth knowing. Excluding that value is what keeps the proceeds from being counted twice, but it also means the rungs that have not matured yet are invisible to the plan. Required minimum distributions are calculated from your tax-deferred balance, so while the ladder is still paying out, your projected RMDs come out lower than the ones you will actually face.

The effect is bounded and it shrinks every year, because each matured rung rejoins the balance. On a $400,000 ladder paying $20,000 a year for 20 years, the projected RMD is understated by roughly $8,100 in the first year it applies, falling to about $1,200 in the ladder's last year - around 9% of that year's RMD at the start, and less every year after. Those distributions are deferred rather than avoided: the money stays in the IRA, keeps growing, and is taxed when it does come out. What it can understate along the way is your taxable income in those specific years, which matters most if you are watching an IRMAA bracket or an ACA subsidy cliff.

None of this applies to a ladder in a Roth or taxable account, which have no RMDs, or to one that finishes paying before RMDs begin at 75.

What this isn't

• A ladder builder. There's no construction tool, CUSIP lookup, or live pricing - model an existing ladder only.
• Manual entry. Imports use the TIPSLadder.com Funded Years CSV only; there is no by-hand cash-flow editor.
• A substitute for entering the bonds as accounts. If you'd rather hold the TIPS as a regular account balance and let the normal withdrawal logic spend them, do that instead of importing here - just don't do both.