Your accounts

Link a bank, card, loan or brokerage through Plaid, and LongSpan reads its balances. It refreshes them once a week, or whenever you ask. LongSpan never moves money.

Add anything Plaid can’t reach as a manual account, like a pension or an old 401(k). You keep a manual balance current yourself: each figure you enter is dated, and an edit adds a new figure beside the old one.

Sometimes a bank reports a retirement account without saying whether it’s Roth or traditional. LongSpan asks you, and until you answer it treats the account as traditional, with withdrawals taxed as income.

In a year your income doesn’t cover, LongSpan draws on your accounts in a set order: cash above the amount you keep on hand, then taxable investment accounts, then tax-deferred accounts like a 401(k) or traditional IRA from age 59½, and Roth accounts last.

A 529 pays for college and an HSA for medical costs. From 65, an HSA is also drawn alongside tax-deferred accounts. A share of a private business is never sold to cover a shortfall.

A retirement, investment, education, health or bank account says how it’s invested rather than what it earns: your plan’s mix of stocks and bonds, a fixed mix such as 60% stocks, or cash that earns interest or doesn’t. What it earns each year comes from your plan’s stock, bond and cash rates, set under Market return below your accounts, so changing one moves every account that holds it. How an account earns.

Anything else you hold as an account, like a car, grows by its own annual rate. Left empty, the balance stays flat.

On a debt, the rate is the interest you’re charged. Give each debt its rate, or LongSpan never pays it down. A mortgage keeps to its monthly payment. Other debts are paid down from what each year has spare, highest rate first.

An annual fee is optional: a percent of the balance charged every year, like an adviser’s fee, a 401(k)’s administration charge or a fund’s expense ratio. It comes off whatever the account earns.

Under your accounts, three rates say what markets earn in your plan: stocks, bonds and cash. By default stocks earn 6.5% a year, bonds 4.45% and cash 3.2%, which are 4.0%, 2.0% and 0.75% above 2.4% inflation. Change any of them, or go back to LongSpan’s.

Your market return follows a mix of stocks and bonds that shifts toward bonds around your retirement, and earns what that mix comes to at your stock and bond rates. Each of your accounts says how it’s invested (your plan’s mix, a fixed mix of its own, or cash that earns interest or doesn’t) and earns from these same rates, less any fee you set. How LongSpan chooses your default rates sets out where each comes from, the mixes you can choose, and when they change.

A new invested account starts on your plan’s mix, a new savings account as cash that earns interest, and a new checking account as cash that doesn’t. These follow your plan’s rates by themselves, so there’s nothing to update when you change one. New property starts with the default growth rate and keeps the rate it started with, so changing that default never moves what you’ve entered. LongSpan offers to update the ones still on the old rate instead.

The defaults are placeholders, not a forecast or a recommendation. Set what fits your plan.

For each 401(k), IRA, HSA or 529, enter what goes in each year. The limits shown are this year’s, for each owner’s age.

Money goes in once a year through the year you enter, or for the whole plan if you leave the year empty. For a 529, enter the age your child will be when you stop, and LongSpan works out the year.

Enter amounts at today’s prices. LongSpan raises them with inflation each year, as the IRS raises the limits, so a contribution at this year’s limit stays at the limit.

For an employer match, enter the match and the share of pay it covers. For a match of 50% on the first 6% of pay, enter 50 and then 6.

After-tax 401(k) money, sometimes called the “mega backdoor”, is money you’ve already paid tax on, added on top of what you defer. LongSpan treats it as converted to Roth at once, so it grows and comes out tax free.

Each 529 pays for college as the bills come due. Left as is, it covers four years of in-state public tuition from age 18. You can change when it starts, how many years it covers and what a year costs.

The yearly cost rises with inflation to the year each bill is paid.

Cost basis is what you paid for what a taxable account holds. When you withdraw, only the gain above it is taxed. Your brokerage reports this figure.

Leave it empty and LongSpan assumes the whole balance is gain, which is the most tax it could be.