The dashboard, explained

The hexagonal chart at the top right is a single composite score (0–100) built from six axes: pot (how close your current pot is to what you’ll need), runway (years of independence given your spend), safety (headroom in your withdrawal rate), spread (diversification across asset classes), resilience (how the plan survives stress, drawn from Monte Carlo confidence when it’s available), and income (how much of your spend is already covered by pensions and rental income rather than portfolio draw). Whichever axis is lowest is called out under the score as your weakest link — that’s usually the highest-leverage thing to work on next.

Every figure feeding the score comes from the same real engine calculation used elsewhere in the app — click the ⓘ icons throughout the dashboard to see the exact computation behind a given number (the Explain popover).

The headline date is when the engine projects you’ll reach financial independence — the point where your investable pot can sustainably cover your target spend. Below it, three figures break down what that takes: the target pot required at your planned retirement age, the current surplus or shortfall against that target, and — if you’re short — the extra monthly investment that would close the gap. All of it is reported in real terms: inflation-adjusted, so the numbers represent today’s purchasing power rather than future inflated currency. If you’re comparing against a nominal-terms calculator elsewhere, expect the raw dollar figures to look smaller here for the same underlying plan — that’s the inflation adjustment, not a different answer.

The instrument row shows both net worth (everything you own, minus everything you owe) and investable (the subset that can actually fund a 4%-style safe withdrawal in retirement). These are deliberately different numbers. Every asset in Ember carries an isInvestable flag: a brokerage account or a pension pot is investable — you can sell down a slice of it every year to live on. The house you live in isn’t — you can’t sell 4% of your kitchen each year without moving out, so it counts toward net worth but not toward the pot the FIRE date is calculated from. This is why the FIRE number doesn’t drop just because your home appreciated.

If you have a mortgaged home and a target retirement age set, a separate tile shows the projected house value and equity at that age — useful context, kept clearly apart from the pot the withdrawal math actually uses.

Further down, a strip lays out exactly how your income at retirement is built up: the sustainable draw from your investment pot, plus any pension income already due by that age, plus net rental income if you have a let property, summed and checked against your spending target. This exists because the pot-only figures shown elsewhere on the page deliberately exclude pensions and rental — otherwise it’s easy to look at the pot draw alone, compare it to your spend target, and conclude the numbers don’t line up. This strip is the one place that shows the full sum, so you can see it does.

A day-by-day history of your net worth and investable pot, with a period selector and a hover crosshair for exact values on any date. Ember records a snapshot once a day, so this chart builds up a real trend line over time rather than a single point-in-time reading — it’s most useful after you’ve been using Ember for a few weeks. The full history lives on the Wealth history page.

The top navigation carries a light / auto / dark theme switch. “Auto” follows your operating system’s setting; the choice is saved to your browser and applies across the whole app.