Support

Help & documentation

Everything below applies to the desktop app on Windows and macOS. If your question is not answered here, write to support@preflightretirement.com — a real person reads it.

Who it is for

Retirement Preflight models United States tax law and US retirement and health programs — federal income tax, all 50 states and the District of Columbia, Social Security (including the earnings test and its restoration at Full Retirement Age), Medicare and IRMAA, ACA premium credits, and required minimum distributions.

There is no non-US mode. It does not model the tax, pension or healthcare system of any other country, and pointing it at a non-US household will produce confident numbers that mean nothing. It is not intended to be sold or used outside the United States, and the household it describes has to be one that files US taxes.

If you bought it expecting otherwise, our refund policy covers you; just write to us.

Installing

Windows

Download the installer and run it. Windows SmartScreen may warn you about an app from an unrecognized publisher until the installer has built up reputation with Microsoft; choose More info then Run anyway if you are satisfied you downloaded it from this site.

macOS

Open the .dmg and drag the app to your Applications folder. If macOS reports that the app cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified, open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll to the security section, and choose Open Anyway.

First run

The app opens on a sample plan — a neutral single-person household, not anyone real — so that every screen has something in it from the start. Change the figures to your own, or start a new plan from the File menu.

Nothing is uploaded and there is no account to create. The app works with no network connection at all.

Your plan files

A plan is an ordinary file on your disk, with the extension .retplan. Open, Save and Save As behave the way they do in any document-based application, and you choose where the files live — a synced folder, an encrypted volume, a USB stick, wherever you prefer.

Saving is free; re-opening is what a license buys. Without one the app will write a plan but not read one back, so each session starts from a fresh plan. Nothing you have typed is lost when you save — it is on your disk in a readable file — but you will not be able to pick it up again in the app until the copy is licensed. Save as you go regardless: it costs nothing and it is the file that matters.

Because plans are plain files, deleting one is done in Finder or File Explorer rather than inside the app.

Plan files carry a schema version. A plan written by an older version of the app is upgraded automatically when you open it. A plan written by a newer version than you are running is refused rather than opened, on the grounds that a plan silently degraded by an older build is worse than one that will not open — update the app and try again.

Licenses

Purchases are handled by Stripe, our merchant of record. After buying you receive a license key by email; enter it once in the app to unlock Open, Recent, and opening a plan by double-clicking it. Everything else — every input, the full engine, the whole Workbench, the Find Best optimizer, saving, and printing — works without one.

There is no activation and nothing to phone home to. The key is a signature your copy verifies on your own machine, offline. It works with the network unplugged, on a machine that has never been online, and it does not stop working if we ever disappear.

A license covers the tax year its version carries, and it does not expire: that version stays licensed forever and keeps opening your files. When a new tax year ships as a new version, that version is a new purchase — see below.

The extrapolation banner

The app names the tax year it is carrying in the header on every screen, and on the cover of any report you print. Once the calendar has moved past that year you will also see a banner on the tax tables saying, in effect, that the figures shown are extrapolated rather than that year's enacted law. This is expected and is not an error.

The engine holds published tax figures for the year it shipped with and grows them forward at your own inflation assumptions for later years. That is how it produces sensible numbers for a thirty-year plan when nobody knows what 2041 brackets will be — every projection runs past the newest published law by definition. The banner marks where verified law stops and extrapolation begins.

Nothing is blocked by it, and ignoring it is a perfectly reasonable choice: brackets are indexed to inflation, so an extrapolated year is usually close. Moving the boundary later means moving to the version that carries the newer tax year.

Updates & new tax years

Fixes and corrections within a tax year's version line are free, and the app can install them for you. Released builds and their notes are published on the project releases page, so you can always see what changed before updating.

A new tax year is different: it arrives as a new version of the app and is a new purchase. Nothing is taken away from the one you own — it keeps running, keeps opening your plans, and keeps its own fixes. Whether the new year's changes are worth buying is a judgment you make each year, and skipping one is a legitimate answer.

Your plans carry forward. A plan written by an older version opens in a newer one and is brought up to date as it loads. That runs one way only — a plan saved by a newer version will not open in an older one — which is worth knowing if you keep two versions installed.

Troubleshooting

The window is blank on launch.

Quit and reopen first. If it persists, please write to us with your operating system and version — the app can produce a diagnostic console that will tell us what failed.

My results changed after updating.

This can happen legitimately. Published tax law ships with the program rather than being stored inside your plan file, so updating the app can update the law your plan is computed against. The law year in use is named on screen.

A plan will not open.

Most often it was written by a newer version of the app — update and try again. If the file came from somewhere unexpected, check it is really a Retirement Preflight plan and not another .json file.

The projection says I run out of money earlier than I expected.

Check the draw waterfall on the Accounts screen: an account left out of the withdrawal order is never drawn from, however much is in it. The app warns about this case.

Contact

Email support@preflightretirement.com. Please include your operating system, the app version, and what you expected to happen instead. Do not send us your plan file unless we ask — it contains your financial details, and we would rather not hold them.