Your income

Enter each income as a yearly amount before tax and before any deductions. Leave your retirement contributions in: you add those on the Accounts step, and LongSpan takes them out there.

The type you pick decides whether LongSpan charges payroll tax on it:

• A salary, a bonus and self-employment income pay payroll tax.
• A pension, an annuity, rent and investment income don’t.

Each income carries forward every year until the year you say it stops. A one-off, such as an inheritance, lands in the single year you pick.

Each recurring income grows every year at its own raise. A new salary, bonus or self-employment income starts with the default raise, and keeps it unless you give that income a raise of its own.

The default starts as a general placeholder, not a forecast, so set the raise you expect. It also grows any future stock grants you expect, which have no rate of their own.

For self-employment income, enter what the business brings in before its expenses. Then enter its expenses, as a yearly amount or a share of revenue: what the business spends to earn that revenue, such as a home office, a vehicle and its mileage, equipment and software, or pay for family who work in it. Leave expenses blank if the figure you entered is already your profit.

LongSpan charges income tax and self-employment tax on the profit: revenue less expenses, never below zero.

If you pay your own health insurance, enter the premium too. LongSpan uses it only to lower your tax. Count the premium itself in your expenses on the Expenses step.

Add each grant that hasn’t finished vesting. Enter it as a dollar value, or as a number of shares and today’s share price, with the year it was granted and how it vests.

• Restricted stock (RSUs) counts as income in the years it vests, and is taxed like your pay.
• Options are worth what their shares sell for, less what they cost to exercise. You pick the year you exercise them and the year you sell.

Shares grow at the rate you enter, or with your market return assumption if you leave it empty. If you expect new grants in later years, add how much and how often, and LongSpan counts those too.

LongSpan doesn’t model employee stock purchase plans.

States tax stock by where it was earned. A grant’s shares are earned from the year it was made until they vest, so a state you left can still tax part of a grant you got before you moved.

If you have stock granted in an earlier year, LongSpan asks where you lived back to your oldest grant, and no further. It splits each vest between the states you lived in while you earned it, month by month. In a year split between two states, that year’s income tax goes to the one you spent most of it in.

If you haven’t moved, LongSpan charges your current state on all of it. A state with no income tax charges none.

LongSpan doesn’t estimate your benefit. It uses the monthly figure you enter, and counts nothing until you add one. Your Social Security statement lists your benefit for each age you could claim it; get it at ssa.gov/myaccount.

Enter the benefit for the age you plan to claim, anywhere from 62 to 70, before tax and in today’s dollars. LongSpan pays it from that age, raises it each year with inflation the way the cost-of-living adjustment does, and taxes the part of it the IRS counts as income.

If you’re planning with a partner, add each of your benefits separately.