Adding, Activating & Deactivating Milestones
If you started reading Create a New Plan and wanted to go into deeper detail on adding, activating, and deactivating milestones, you’re in the right place. We will walk through all the steps: including your Retirement date, your Life Expectancy, and becoming Debt Free.
Milestones are the first stage in creating a plan. You can also adjust milestones once you have created the plan by clicking on the milestone icons next to the plan name at the top of the page. For example, Retirement defaults to a palm tree icon. You can also click Settings > Milestones to open the full Milestone Editor.
Note
Your plan defaults to a Retirement date at age 60, a Life Expectancy of 85, and Financial Independence set to a net worth of 25x your annual spend. This is based on the 4% rule: not a suggested withdrawal rate, but a reference to the Trinity Study from the 1990s. Everyone’s plan will be different based on their own circumstances.
Editing a Retirement Date Milestone & Choosing Multiple Criteria
Even though a Retirement Date milestone already appears by default, you may need to adjust it for your situation. Click on the milestone icon to make edits such as adding additional criteria, tax consequences, relocation, and more.
For example, to retire at age 60 with a minimum net worth of $1,000,000: if you never reach that net worth, your plan will show that the retirement milestone was never reached. You can also switch from and to or to keep your retirement milestone at whichever event occurs first.
Adding a Debt Free Milestone
Click + Add Milestone > choose Debt Free. A milestone will appear when your Total Debt = $0.
You can customize the milestone further:
- Total Debt can be changed to Medical Debt, House Loan Balance, or Car Loan Balance, provided those debts are already in your Current Finances.
- Equal (=) can be changed to Greater Than (>), Less Than (<), Greater Than or Equal To (>=), or Less Than or Equal To (<=).
- $0 can be changed to a specific dollar amount.
Activating or Deactivating a Milestone
To see the impact of deactivating or reactivating a milestone without losing its details, click the milestone icon > Activate or Deactivate. If you are on the graph page of your plan, the chart will update immediately.
Note
You cannot delete a Retirement or Life Expectancy milestone. The delete option will be grayed out.
There are many other milestone types you can add, such as the built-in Move Milestone, as well as creating a Custom Milestone.
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