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. 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.

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 & activation

Purchases are handled by Lemon Squeezy, our merchant of record. After buying you receive a license key by email; enter it once in the app to unlock Save, Open, Recent and the Find Best optimizer.

The Core license is a one-time purchase and is perpetual — it does not expire and there is no renewal. It is also independent of tax-data packs: buying a license does not include a particular data vintage, and buying a data pack does not unlock features.

The tax-data banner

You may see a banner reading roughly “Tax law data last verified for tax year N; results beyond that are extrapolated using inflation assumptions.” This is expected and is not an error.

The engine holds published tax figures in baseline-year dollars and inflates them forward for later years. That is how it produces sensible numbers for a thirty-year plan when nobody knows what 2041 brackets will be. The banner is telling you where verified law stops and extrapolation begins.

Nothing is blocked by it. Installing a newer tax-data pack moves the boundary later; ignoring it entirely is a perfectly reasonable choice.

Updates

The app checks for updates and 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.

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.