Planned events and scenarios

An event is anything that changes your money at a specific future age — not part of your ongoing day-to-day cash flow, but a one-off or a bounded stretch of time. Ember covers a broad range: one-off or regular income, rental income from a property you own, buying or selling a property (including a downsize), selling other investments, renting out your home while renting somewhere else (the net difference is what feeds the plan), one-off or regular expenses, taking out a mortgage or loan (repayments are modelled through to payoff), and gifts given or received. Inheritance is handled separately, with its own entry point, when estate modelling is switched on for a scenario.

Every event feeds directly into the same engine that produces your FIRE date — adding a planned expense at age 55 doesn’t just annotate a chart, it changes the required pot and the projected date, exactly as if you’d always had that expense in the plan.

The dashboard’s journey chart plots your projected pot from now through to your life expectancy, and every planned event that falls within that window is pinned directly onto the line at the age it happens — an inflow nudges the line up, an outflow dips it. This is the same underlying pot trajectory the dashboard headline uses, so a pin on the chart and the events list on the Planned events page always agree. A property sale that settles an outstanding mortgage shows the net proceeds banked into the pot, not the gross sale price — the mortgage payoff happens at the same moment.

A scenario is a complete, independent copy of your plan — its own assets, pensions, liabilities, events, and assumptions. Use scenarios to ask “what if” questions without touching your main numbers: what if I retired two years earlier, what if I moved country, what if I took on a larger mortgage. The Scenarios page lists every scenario side by side with its own FIRE age, required pot, and readiness percentage — each computed independently from that scenario’s own data, so a forked scenario reflects the changes you made in it, not a patched copy of the original.

Exactly one scenario is active at a time, and the active scenario is what drives the dashboard, the events page, and every other planning page you visit. Switch the active scenario from the picker on the dashboard or the Scenarios page — everything else in the app follows.

Your target retirement age is stored once, on your profile, and every page that shows or edits it — the Profile page and the retirement-age card on the Planned events page — reads and writes that same value. Change it in either place and it takes effect everywhere immediately; there’s no separate copy to keep in sync.