Retirement Planner User Guide on Retirement Planner — User Guide

Introduction

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1. Introduction#

Retirement Planner is a macOS application that helps you model, visualise, and optimise retirement income across every major Canadian income source — CPP, OAS, GIS, RRSP, TFSA, pensions, investments, real estate, and business income. You enter your financial picture once, and the app instantly projects your annual income, after-tax cash flow, and net worth from today through the end of your retirement horizon. Switching between scenarios takes seconds, so you can answer questions like “what happens if I take CPP at 60 versus 70?” or “how long does my RRSP last if markets underperform?” without a spreadsheet in sight.

Getting Started

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2. Getting Started#

2.1 System Requirements#

Operating System Retirement Planner requires macOS 14 Sonoma or later. For the best experience, macOS 15 Sequoia or later is recommended.

Hardware Any Mac capable of running macOS 14 or later is supported. This includes:

MacBook Air and MacBook Pro (2018 or later)
Mac mini (2018 or later)
iMac (2019 or later)
Mac Pro (2019 or later)
Mac Studio (all models)
Any Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or later)

No special graphics hardware or minimum RAM requirement applies. The Monte Carlo stress test runs intensive calculations and will complete faster on Apple Silicon and modern Intel Macs.

Subscription Plans

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3. Subscription Plans#

Retirement Planner is available in three subscription tiers. You can view your current plan and upgrade at any time from the Subscription section of the application.

Features that require a higher tier are marked with a symbol wherever they appear in the app:

⭐ — requires a Pro or Advisor subscription
💎 — requires an Advisor subscription

Free trial. Every plan includes a 7-day free trial. The trial is available once per Apple ID across the whole app — if you start a trial on one plan, moving to a different plan later will not start a second trial. You are not charged until the trial ends, and you can cancel at any time before then from System Settings → [Your Name] → Subscriptions.

Managing Clients

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4. Managing Clients#

A client is the central record in Retirement Planner. Every projection, income source, strategy, and report belongs to a client. You can manage as many clients as your subscription allows — Personal subscribers can have one client, Pro subscribers up to two, while Advisor subscribers have no limit.

4.1 Adding a Client#

Click the + button at the bottom of the sidebar to add a new client. The client form opens immediately in the main content area. Fill in the profile fields (described in section 4.2 below) and the income source tabs as needed.

Application Preferences

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5. Application Preferences#

Open the Preferences window from the menu bar via Retirement Planner → Settings (or press ⌘,). The window has three tabs: General, AI, and Subscription.

5.1 General#

Appearance Choose between three display modes using the segment control:

System — follows the macOS system-wide Light or Dark mode setting (default)
Light — always uses the light appearance regardless of system settings
Dark — always uses the dark appearance regardless of system settings

Disable background data saving When unchecked (the default), the app saves client data to disk in the background at regular intervals. This improves UI responsiveness by keeping save operations off the main thread. Check this option only if you experience issues related to background saving, as disabling it means data is saved less frequently.

Entering Income Sources

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6. Entering Income Sources#

The client edit form contains a dedicated tab for each of the eleven income sources supported by Retirement Planner. You only need to fill in the tabs that apply — any tab left at zero or default values simply contributes nothing to the projection.

For a quick overview of all tabs, refer to the summary table in Section 2.4.

6.1 Canada Pension Plan (CPP)#

The CPP tab lets you enter the client’s Canada Pension Plan contribution history so the app can estimate their projected CPP benefit at retirement. Two input methods are available, selected via the segment control at the top of the tab.

Creating and Managing Strategies

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7. Creating and Managing Strategies#

A strategy represents one complete retirement scenario for a client — a specific set of assumptions about contribution rates, withdrawal timing, investment returns, inflation, and spending goals. Each client can have multiple strategies, allowing you to compare outcomes side by side and answer “what if” questions.

For example, one client might have a “Conservative” strategy with a 4% equity return and a “Growth” strategy with a 6% return, or a “Retire at 60” versus “Retire at 65” comparison.

The Retirement Income Chart

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8. The Retirement Income Chart#

8.1 Chart Overview#

The Retirement Income Chart is the central view of the application. It gives you a year-by-year projection of your income — or a client’s income — from the current age through to the expected end of life.

How to read the chart:

The horizontal axis (x-axis) represents age, advancing one year at a time from the plan start age to the maximum lifespan configured in the strategy settings.
The vertical axis (y-axis) represents annual dollar amounts. Depending on the active chart type, this may be gross income, taxable income, after-tax income, or net worth.
Each vertical bar represents one year. Its height shows the projected total for that age.
A scrollable canvas lets you pan through the full projection timeline when many years are shown. Pinch or use your trackpad to scroll horizontally.

Hovering over the chart shows a tooltip after a brief delay. For simple bar charts, the tooltip displays the age and the dollar amount for that year. In Stacked by Source mode, the tooltip also identifies which income component the cursor is over.

Household Mode

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9. Household Mode#

Requires Pro or Advisor subscription.

9.1 What Is Household Mode?#

Household mode combines the retirement projections of two linked clients — typically spouses or partners — into a single unified view. Instead of reviewing each person’s plan in isolation, you can see combined gross income, combined taxes, and combined net income for the household as a whole, year by year.

This matters for retirement planning because income taxes in Canada are assessed per individual, not per household. A couple where one partner earns $120,000 and the other earns $0 pays significantly more combined tax than a couple where each earns $60,000 — even though total household income is identical. Household mode makes this dynamic visible and, through pension income splitting, helps minimize it.

Tax Calculations

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10. Tax Calculations#

Important: Tax estimates produced by Retirement Planner are projections for planning purposes only. They are not a certified tax calculation or a substitute for professional tax advice. Always consult a qualified tax professional for filing decisions.

10.1 How Taxes Are Estimated#

For each year of the retirement projection, the app calculates an estimated federal and provincial income tax figure based on the projected income for that year. The result is used to derive net (after-tax) income and to power the Income After Tax chart and the tax columns in the table view.

Automatic Withdrawal Adjustment

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11. Automatic Withdrawal Adjustment#

Retirement Planner can automatically try to calculate and apply optimal withdrawal amounts across your income sources. The strategy view contains an Experiments button that opens a menu with four withdrawal adjustment commands. Each command analyses your current strategy and rewrites the withdrawal schedule to meet a specific goal — all without manual trial and error.

The same four commands are also available by right-clicking a strategy in the strategy list.

Stress Test (Monte Carlo Simulation)

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12. Stress Test (Monte Carlo Simulation)#

Requires Pro or Advisor subscription.

12.1 What Is a Stress Test?#

A retirement plan built on fixed assumptions — a 5% equity return every year, 2% inflation forever — will always look the same. Reality doesn’t work that way. Investment returns vary year to year, inflation fluctuates, and no one knows in advance what the actual sequence of returns will be.

A Monte Carlo stress test addresses this by running the retirement plan thousands of times, each time with slightly different return and inflation assumptions drawn at random. Rather than asking “what happens if everything goes according to plan?”, it asks “what fraction of plausible futures produce a successful outcome?”. The answer is the success rate.

Client Report

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13. Client Report#

Requires Pro or Advisor. Generating a client report on the Personal plan opens the upgrade paywall.

The Client Report produces a multi-page PDF summary of a client’s retirement projection — suitable for printing, emailing, or archiving as part of a financial planning engagement. The report is fully self-contained: it includes key profile assumptions, the income projection table, embedded charts, a budget coverage analysis, and a real estate and net worth summary.

Glossary

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14. Glossary#

Term	Definition
CPP	Canada Pension Plan — a contributory earnings-related pension benefit administered by the federal government.
OAS	Old Age Security — a universal monthly pension available to Canadians aged 65 and over, subject to a clawback at higher incomes.
GIS	Guaranteed Income Supplement — a monthly non-taxable benefit for low-income OAS recipients.
RRSP	Registered Retirement Savings Plan — a tax-deferred savings account; contributions reduce taxable income and withdrawals are taxed as income.
RRIF	Registered Retirement Income Fund — an RRSP must be converted to a RRIF by age 71, though it may be converted earlier; minimum annual withdrawals are mandatory from the year after conversion.
TFSA	Tax-Free Savings Account — contributions are not tax-deductible, but all growth and withdrawals are tax-free.
Net Worth	The total value of all assets (investments, real estate equity, registered accounts) minus any outstanding liabilities.
Pension Income Splitting	A Canadian tax rule that allows eligible pension income to be allocated to a lower-income spouse, reducing the couple’s combined tax bill.
Monte Carlo Simulation	A statistical method that runs a financial plan thousands of times with randomized variables to estimate the probability of success.
Success Rate	The percentage of simulated scenarios in which the retirement plan did not fail (either net worth stayed positive or income met the budget, depending on the chosen definition).
Standard Deviation	A measure of variability or uncertainty. In the stress test, it controls how widely investment returns are spread across simulated scenarios.
Deterministic Projection	A single projection using fixed, expected-value rates — what the plan looks like if everything goes exactly as assumed, with no randomness.
BPA	Basic Personal Amount — a tax credit that reduces federal (and most provincial) tax on the first portion of income.
Age Amount	A federal and provincial tax credit available to Canadians aged 65 and over, subject to a clawback at higher incomes.

Frequently Asked Questions

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15. Frequently Asked Questions#

General#

Q: Is this app a substitute for professional financial advice?

No. Retirement Planner is a projection and planning tool. All figures — income, tax, net worth, success rates — are estimates based on the assumptions you enter. They are not guarantees, certified tax calculations, or investment recommendations. Tax rules, government benefit amounts, and investment returns will differ from projections. Always consult a qualified financial planner, tax professional, or investment advisor before making retirement planning decisions.

Legal Notices

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16. Legal Notices#

16.1 No Financial, Investment, or Tax Advice#

Retirement Planner is a personal finance modelling tool. Nothing in this application, its outputs, its documentation, or any associated materials constitutes financial advice, investment advice, tax advice, or legal advice. All projections, income estimates, tax calculations, net worth forecasts, and stress test results are produced by mathematical models for illustrative and planning purposes only. They do not represent a guarantee, prediction, or promise of any actual financial outcome.