Accounts Tab

The Accounts tab is where you enter your savings and investment accounts — balances, types, and any ongoing contributions. This is the raw material your plan draws on.

Account types

Each account also gets an asset class (Stocks, Bonds, Cash, or VEBA), which links it to the return and volatility assumptions on the Assumptions tab.

Medical accounts (VEBA and HSA)

VEBA balances are always reserved for healthcare — never drawn for general living expenses.

An HSA is medical-only by default, but you’re not locked in. Each HSA has a mode toggle:

• Medical-only (default) — reserved for medical costs; never drawn for general income.
• General use (tax-free, any purpose) — the HSA also funds your regular retirement withdrawals, modeled tax-free with no RMDs, much like a Roth IRA.

For medical costs, the plan draws VEBA first, then any medical-only HSA, then (only if both are empty) the general pool. Medical accounts are flagged Medical in the list so they’re easy to spot.

You can also run an HSA as a "stealth IRA" — leave it untouched to grow and defer using it until a chosen age, paying medical bills out of pocket in the meantime. It leans on the IRS rule that lets you reimburse yourself later, tax-free, for medical expenses you paid years earlier, so an HSA you leave alone keeps compounding. Set it up on the Strategy tab; see Use my HSA as a "stealth IRA".

Whatever’s left in an HSA at your plan’s end passes to your heirs as part of your after-tax legacy — an inherited HSA is taxed as ordinary income to a non-spouse heir (a spouse can roll it into their own).

Providers, ownership, and contributions

• Providers (e.g., "Fidelity") are just for organization — they don’t affect the math.
• Ownership matters: it drives each person’s RMDs and determines how accounts transfer to a survivor.
• Contributions — for each account set a monthly amount (in today’s dollars), when it starts/stops (e.g., "until retirement"), and whether it grows with inflation. RetireRange warns you if a contribution exceeds the IRS limit for that account type, including age-50+ and age-55+ catch-up allowances.

For what happens when you stop contributing, see what if I stop contributing to my 401(k)?. Next stop is usually the Strategy tab.

Varying contributions over time

A single monthly amount isn’t the only option. Each account can hold more than one contribution rule — use + Add for another — and each rule carries its own amount, growth, and window. So a contribution is really one or more periods, which is what lets you model contributions that change, pause, or resume.

Alongside the symbolic Pre-Retirement and Post-Retirement anchors, a rule’s Start can be From year… (a specific calendar year) and its End can be → Year….

Pausing and resuming. To model a stretch with no contributions — a disability leave, a sabbatical, a few lean years — give one rule an end year and a second rule a later start year, leaving a gap between them. Don’t create a $0 rule: RetireRange reads the gap as a pause and shows a dashed-amber "⏸ Paused from Jan XXXX through Dec YYYY — no contributions to this account" strip between the two rules, so the pause is explicit. For example, contribute through 2027, then a second rule from 2032 at your prior amount leaves 2028–2031 paused.

Two guardrails. If two year-anchored rules overlap, RetireRange soft-warns that the engine sums both during the overlap (adjust an end or start year for a clean pause). A rule whose end year precedes its start year is a hard error and blocks the run.

See Can I retire if I go on disability? for a full walkthrough.