Household Tab

The Household tab is where you set up the people in your plan and a few plan-wide settings. It’s the first stop when you build a plan.

The people

You can model one person or a couple. For each person you set:

Birth date — used to compute age at every point in the plan.
Retirement date — when they stop working (and when contributions stop and the health-insurance bridge begins).
Social Security claiming age and the benefit estimates at 62, Full Retirement Age, and 70 from your statement at ssa.gov. See Social Security.
Mortality mode — None, Deterministic, or Stochastic, for modeling the death of a spouse. See Surviving spouse.
Medicare eligibility age — defaults to 65 (set earlier only if you qualify through disability); it marks where the health-insurance bridge ends and Medicare costs begin.
Pre-Medicare bridge and Medigap supplement — your health-coverage costs before and after 65. See Health insurance bridge.

For couples, each person has their own retirement date and claiming age, since those are often different.

Plan start date — usually today or the start of the current year; the simulation begins here.
Plan end age — how far out the plan runs (we suggest 95–100). It’s a planning horizon, not a prediction of your lifespan — setting it higher is more conservative because your money has to last longer.
Filing status — Married Filing Jointly or Single, which drives the tax brackets. (It switches to Single automatically if you model the death of a spouse.)
Filing state — your state of residence, which drives state income tax (all 50 states + DC). You can also plan a move during the retirement window — pick a destination state and the year — to model the tax impact of relocating. (See moving in retirement.)
Number of simulations — how many randomized futures to run (default 5,000; raise to 10,000 for more precision on close calls, at the cost of a little speed).

Start with your best estimates — you can refine any of this later.
Leave mortality on None for your first run, then turn it on later to test surviving-spouse scenarios.
If you’ll retire before 65, don’t skip the pre-Medicare bridge — it’s a real and often large cost.

Next stop is usually the Accounts tab. For the full first-run walkthrough, see Getting started.