Build your first plan

The Plan section turns the accounts you've already added into a forward-looking projection: a chart of net worth over time, a Chance of Success number, and a set of tabs you can dig into. To get there, you need a plan. This walks through creating one and filling in just enough to make the projection meaningful.

Open the Plan section

From the sidebar, click Plan. If you've never created one, the page shows an empty state with a single button to create your first plan. Click it and Haven gives you a blank plan with sensible defaults already filled in for inflation and default returns.

You'll land on the Plan tab with the chart already drawn. The numbers it's using right now are placeholders for everything you haven't told it about yet — your job for the next few minutes is to replace those placeholders with real values.

The three numbers that matter

There are a lot of inputs you can tune. Three of them do most of the work:

1. Current age — sets the left edge of the chart. Without it the projection has nowhere to start.
2. Target retirement age — the year the model switches you from accumulating to drawing down. This is also the year the Chance of Success number is anchored to.
3. Target retirement spending — annual spending in today's dollars. The model inflates it forward and uses it as the withdrawal that has to be sustained.

Set those three and the chart and the success number become real. Everything else — asset allocation, account-level returns, social security, tax modeling — refines the answer, but the first useful version of your plan is one you can build in under a minute.

Watch the chart populate

As you change values, the projection updates live. There's no save-and-refresh — the chart and the right-side metrics react to every input change.

The horizontal axis is your age (or year, if you flip it in display options). The vertical axis is net worth in your home currency. The thick line is the median outcome across the simulated futures. The shaded band around it is the spread of where your portfolio could be — wider band, more uncertainty.

If the band shows your net worth crossing zero before your horizon ends, the simulation is telling you a meaningful share of futures run out of money. That's the signal to either push the retirement age out, lower target spending, or save more — in roughly that order of impact.

What's running under the hood

The chart isn't a single forecast. It's the median of a thousand simulated futures, each one drawing returns from a different sequence of historical market data. The Chance of Success number on the dashboard is the percentage of those futures where your portfolio survives the full horizon. If you want the longer story, see the help article on how Monte Carlo works in Haven, or read the engine internals at the projections methodology page.

For your first plan, you don't need to think about any of that. The defaults are tuned to give a reasonable answer the moment your three core inputs are set.

Save and revisit

The plan auto-saves as you edit. Closing the tab and coming back later picks up exactly where you left off.

Most people end up with two or three plans: the realistic baseline, an optimistic "what if I'm a bit lucky" version, and a defensive "what if returns are weak" version. The Compare tab puts them side by side once you have more than one.

What to do next

Once your first plan looks reasonable, three things are worth doing in order:

• Open the Chance of Success tab and read the number. If it's below 70 %, the plan is fragile and worth tuning. If it's above 90 %, your assumptions are probably already conservative enough.
• Open the Cash Flow tab to see the year-by-year picture, not just the smoothed projection.
• Add or refine your accounts if you haven't already. The plan inherits from real account balances, and the projection only gets sharper as those balances reflect reality.

Don't try to make the first version perfect. The plan is meant to be lived with — you'll come back, change a number, and watch what happens. That's the point.