Calculators
All nine calculators work with no account and no sign-in — nothing you type into them leaves your browser unless you choose to save it. Every input is editable; there are no hidden assumptions. To keep a scenario for later, save it to this browser, or sign in to sync it to your account so it's there on other devices too.
A few calculators (Retirement, Compound Interest) can be opened pre-filled with a balance from an account in your Vault, via a “Project →” link on that account's row. Debt Payoff works the same way from the Liability section's “Payoff order →” link, pre-filled with every liability that has a balance, rate, and payment set. All of these are a one-way handoff — the calculator doesn't save anything back to Vault, and each works the same way whether you arrived from Vault or typed the numbers in yourself.
Plan
Plan is a task catalog filtered to your situation (age band, income type, and similar — answered once, in your profile). Browse it and check anything relevant into a plan: a named, reusable list, like “Before the baby” or “New job.” The same task can live in more than one plan, and each plan tracks its own progress on that task separately — marking it done in one plan doesn't mark it done in another.
Vault — the eight kinds
Vault holds everything with a dollar amount or a due date attached to it. Every item belongs to one of eight kinds:
- Income — recurring cash in: W-2 salary, self-employment, rental, dividends, and similar. Add as many sources as apply — two W-2s for a couple, salary plus a side business, whatever's real — they all stack.
- Asset — what you own: checking/savings, 401(k)/403(b)/IRA, HSA, brokerage, pension, real estate.
- Liability — what you owe: credit cards, auto/student/personal loans, mortgages, HELOCs.
- Insurance — active policies and their coverage amounts.
- Recurring bill — periodic expenses: utilities, rent, subscriptions, and similar.
- Document — legal/identity records like a will, trust, or passport (dates only — Vault never accepts the document itself).
- Tax deadline — quarterly estimates, property tax, and other statutory dates. Most of these recur (property tax, quarterly estimates), so like Recurring bill, it lives on the Monthly tab and its amount counts toward Monthly obligations. A genuinely one-time deadline just uses frequency “Irregular,” which counts as $0 toward the monthly total — same as an irregular bill.
- Key date — anything else worth a reminder.
Liability, Insurance, Recurring bill, and any Tax deadline with an amount (property tax) each get a category (Housing, Transportation, Debt, Utilities, and similar) — that's what powers the spend-by-category chart on the Monthly tab. It's set automatically from the item's Type — an electric bill is Utilities, a mortgage or property tax is Housing — so there's usually nothing to configure; override it only when an item genuinely doesn't fit its usual category. Assets get a liquidity tag instead — Cash, Investments, or Illiquid — which powers the liquidity chart on the Net Worth tab and the “months of runway” figure (cash ÷ monthly obligations).
Vault — payments vs. balances
For a liability or insurance item, the main amount is the balance or coverage — not what you pay. If it has a recurring payment (a loan payment, an insurance premium), enter that separately at whatever cadence it actually runs on — monthly, annual, whatever the bill says. Vault converts it to a monthly figure automatically for the Monthly obligations total; you never have to do that math by hand.
Property tax works the same way, as a Tax deadline item with an amount and its own recurrence. This only makes sense if you pay it yourself — if it's already escrowed into your mortgage payment (most U.S. mortgages bundle taxes and insurance into one payment), don't add it a second time here, or it'll be double-counted against your monthly obligations.
Vault — due dates don't roll on their own
A due date you set never advances by itself, and nothing marks a bill paid automatically — Vault doesn't run on a schedule or talk to your bank. Once a date passes, it turns red and reads “Overdue” wherever that item is listed, instead of just quietly going stale. Click Paid and it rolls forward one cycle based on the item's frequency (calendar-correct — a monthly bill due Jan 31 lands on Feb 28, not some approximation). An item with no real cadence — frequency “Irregular,” or a kind like Document that has no frequency at all — shows Clear instead, which just removes the due date. Either way it's a deliberate click, not something that happens behind your back — a bill you actually missed stays visibly overdue until you say otherwise.
That's the in-app picture, which only updates when you actually open Vault. A daily check also sends an email reminder one week before, one day before, and on the day something is due, covering every bill, tax deadline, insurance renewal, and key date with a due date set — so you don't have to remember to look. Turn it off any time under Email me about upcoming and overdue Vault items in Account.
Vault — cash flow
Retirement and investment accounts (401(k), IRA, HSA, brokerage) can carry a recurring contribution the same way a liability carries a payment — the amount going in, at whatever cadence it runs on. The Monthly tab's Cash flow card sums every Income item you've added and weighs it against your monthly obligations and contributions, ending in a Discretionary (or Shortfall) figure — all computed live from your Vault items, nothing to keep in sync by hand.
Vault — linking a mortgage to a home
A mortgage or HELOC can optionally link to a Real estate asset tracking that home's market value. Once linked, Net Worth shows a computed home equity figure (value − balance). This is entirely optional — a home owned outright needs no linked liability at all, and a mortgage works fine unlinked.
Vault — goals
A goal tracks a target amount against the combined balance of whichever accounts you link to it. Linking is many-to-many on purpose: several accounts can feed one goal (401(k) + IRA + brokerage all counting toward “Retirement”), and one account can count toward more than one goal (the same brokerage balance loosely earmarked for both “House” and “Vacation”). If a goal has no linked accounts, enter what you've saved by hand instead; that manual figure is ignored the moment you link an account.
When two or more goals share a linked account, Vault groups them into one card with a single combined bar instead of showing each goal's progress separately. That's what keeps the flexibility above honest: each goal computing progress fully independently would let a $150,000 account feeding two separate $100,000 goals show both clamped to a “complete,” fully green 100% — the same $150,000 counted as fully funding each one on its own. Grouped, it reads correctly instead: $150,000 of a combined $200,000 target, $50,000 short. Every goal in the group is still listed individually underneath with its own name and target — grouping only replaces each goal's own (misleading, in this situation) bar with the one honest one for the group. A goal that doesn't share an account with anything else is unaffected and renders exactly as a normal single goal.
That relationship shows from the account's side too: an account linked to one or more goals shows which ones right on its row in Net Worth, with the goals' combined target and a “to go” figure — combined target minus this account's own balance, counted once. If a $50,000 account feeds a $500,000 goal and a $100,000 goal, that reads $600,000 combined target, $550,000 to go — so a balance earmarked for something shows that context wherever you're looking at it, not only from the Goals section.
Vault — the three tabs
Net worth is what you own vs. owe. Monthly is what recurs each month — bills, loan payments, insurance premiums, tax deadlines with an amount. Coming up is anything with a date in the next 30 days (regardless of which tab it otherwise lives on), plus insurance policies, documents, and key dates — the kinds that don't fit the other two tabs.
What Vault will never store
Account numbers, routing numbers, credentials, SSNs, card numbers, credit report data, or an uploaded document itself — these are rejected at the database level, not just hidden in the UI. Vault never links to your bank (no Plaid or similar), never pulls live market data, and age is stored as a range, never an exact date of birth.