Milestones and the timeline

The row of small circular chips along the top of the Plan header is the milestone strip. It's a compressed timeline of the events that matter most in your plan — the ones you'd actually circle on a calendar — laid out in chronological order so you can see at a glance what's already behind you and what's still ahead.

What counts as a milestone

A milestone in Haven is a threshold that resolves to a specific point in time. Common ones:

• A target net-worth threshold — for example, the year your portfolio first crosses $1M.
• A target age — your planned retirement age, or the age you turn 65 and become eligible for OAS / Medicare.
• A target year or date — the year your mortgage is paid off, or the year a child finishes college.
• A FIRE date — the year your portfolio is large enough that withdrawals at your target spending rate are sustainable.

Some milestones are derived from the projection (the FIRE date moves around as you change assumptions). Others are fixed inputs you set explicitly (your retirement age). Both render the same way in the strip.

Achieved versus projected

Each chip is a 28-pixel SVG glyph. The colour tells you which side of "now" the milestone sits on:

• Green chips are achieved. The event has already happened in real time — the year is in the past.
• Violet chips are projected. The event hasn't happened yet. The year shown is the model's best estimate based on your current assumptions.

Hover any chip to see the milestone label and the year it resolves to. The hover text is the canonical record — the colour just gives you a fast read across the whole strip.

How the age scrubber lights them up

Below the chart is the age scrubber — a slider that moves a vertical line across the projection. Drag it to any future age and the right-side metrics panel updates to show your projected net worth, income, expenses, and tax position at that age.

The milestone strip plays along. As you scrub past a milestone's year, that chip becomes the active one — the metrics panel anchors to that moment, and the chip itself highlights in the header. It's the fastest way to ask "what does my plan look like the year I retire?" or "what does the year I pay off the mortgage do to my cash flow?"

You can also click a chip directly to jump the scrubber to that year. Useful when the milestones are dense and dragging is slower than tapping.

Common milestones to set

You don't need to configure milestones for the strip to work — Haven derives a few automatically from your inputs (current age, retirement age, the FIRE date implied by the projection). The ones worth adding manually are the personal events that don't show up in the financial inputs:

• Mortgage paid off. Massive cash-flow inflection — worth seeing as a chip.
• Last tuition payment. Marks the end of a multi-year expense.
• Pension start. If you have a defined-benefit pension that begins at a specific age, mark it.
• Spouse's retirement. When the household goes from two incomes to one, or from one to zero.
• A specific net-worth target. "$2M" or "FI number" — gives you a visible victory chip when it happens.

Three to five milestones is the sweet spot. Fewer and the strip feels empty; more and the chips start crowding each other.

Reading the strip as a story

Looked at end-to-end, the strip is the timeline of your plan in twenty pixels of vertical space. Green on the left tells you what's already done. Violet on the right tells you what's still to come, in the order it's expected to happen. The further apart two chips are, the longer the gap between those events in your real life.

If the violet chips look bunched on the far right, you're projecting a lot of important events into a narrow window — worth checking whether that's intentional. If the green run is short and the violet run is long, you're early in the plan and most of the work is still ahead, which is the position most people are in.

Either way, the milestones aren't decoration. They're the human-readable index into a chart that's otherwise just a line.