After reviewing dozens of financial tools on this site since 2009, ProjectionLab is one of the most comprehensive planning tools I’ve come across. It shows you how today’s financial decisions play out over the next 10, 20, and even 40 years, with a modern interface that makes financial planning something you actually want to do.
As a DIY retirement planner my entire adult life, I rely on tools to track my net worth, optimize my finances, and forecast the future. Skip the planning and you’ll spend your golden years wondering where all your money went.
Recently, my $408,000 household budget got shredded by critics all over the internet. 3.7 million views and 1,500+ comments later, most of it was people insisting the family was doing everything wrong.
So I figured I’d run that exact household through ProjectionLab and let the math settle it. I’ll show how the family can improve their budget and grow their net worth. And $408,000 isn’t a number I invented. It’s what a family of four reportedly needs to live comfortably in San Francisco.
What Is ProjectionLab?
ProjectionLab is a professional-grade financial and retirement planning tool that lets DIY planners model their entire life, run “what if” scenarios, and plan for retirement.
ProjectionLab is bootstrapped, independent, and run by a small, passionate team. It’s used by hundreds of thousands of households who have modeled more than $250 billion in assets on the platform.
ProjectionLab has strong roots in the financial independence community, a movement I helped kickstart in 2009. It shows in how the tool handles the parts of retirement planning most tools ignore or oversimplify: long retirements, taxes and healthcare costs (including ACA subsidies), Roth conversions, early withdrawal strategies, and estate and legacy planning.
It’s the best tool for anyone pursuing financial independence, early or traditional retirement.
Quick Take
- Best for: DIY financial planners, FIRE pursuers, high earners optimizing taxes, and anyone planning retirement
- Free version: Yes (core planning, forecasting, Monte Carlo simulations, historical backtesting)
- Premium: $129/year with a 7-day free trial
- Standout features: Compare Mode, Optimize, Milestones, cash flow visualizations, integrated Medicare and Social Security modeling, and detailed Tax Analytics
The $408,000 Case Study and Compare Mode
When I was building the $408K household case study, I wanted to see how a few strategic financial planning decisions could take them from living paycheck to paycheck to thriving and shave years off their working careers. Originally, I modeled for them only having $1 left of cash flow left for emergencies, which clearly was not enough.
Cutting expenses was the obvious starting point. But the real power came from testing “what if” scenarios. What if they maxed out their 401(k)s instead of only contributing $30,000 between them? What if they considered geoarbitrage in the future? What if they decided to cut out $90,000 a year in private grade school tuition, and so forth.
Being able to map out a plan and see progress in real time provides clarity and confidence. When the temptation arises to splurge on a business-class upgrade or keep up with peers with a new car, having a visual representation of your goals helps you stay grounded. Revisiting a plan refocuses your priorities and reminds you what you’re working toward.
Testing “what if” scenarios helps you see which decisions are likely to matter most, rather than endlessly debating them in your head. It makes the process fun and exciting, and a feature I think most of you will enjoy.
I tested out what if I poured my assets into a $9 million Honolulu mansion and the model confirmed it wasn’t a good idea. So sad! But also great confirmation to stop day dreaming.
How Detailed Can Your Plan Be?
Most retirement calculators or basic planning tools rely on default assumptions or are a black box. ProjectionLab gives you full control over every assumption, while staying approachable and easy to use.
What I love is how much of your actual life you can represent.
You can set any milestones that matter to you: financial independence, buying a house, kids starting college, a net worth target, a retirement date. And you can dynamically control your plan with milestones as start and end dates for income, expenses, or other plan events. Your plan and Chance of Success show you when you’re likely to reach each one and how confident you can be in the outcome.
I was even able to use ProjectionLab’s fantastic wealth-planning tools to explore whether it’s possible to help children become millionaires before they leave home. After all, if AI is going to destroy millions of jobs in the future, then parents had best try to make their kids as wealthy as possible before they graduate.
Understand Where Your Money Goes
The Sankey cash flow chart is a useful financial visualization. It shows where your money flows in a given year: income sources on the left, outflows on the right, with taxes, savings, contributions, and spending all visible in a single diagram. You can step through each year and watch how your cash flow shifts as you move through different phases of life.
Tax Analytics To Help You Save
Tax analytics are even more detailed. ProjectionLab breaks down your estimated taxes by type (federal, state, local), plots your effective and marginal rates over time, and so much more. If you’ve ever wondered how your future taxes will look, this is where to get the answer.
One of the biggest pushbacks on my $408,000 budget post was that my 32% total effective tax rate was too high. I like to be conservative with my assumptions, but the critics had a point.
ProjectionLab pegs the total effective tax rate for this household closer to 27.72% after all deductions. That is more realistic, and it hands the family roughly $17,460 a year that I had previously written off to the government. Of course, always consult with a tax expert if you’re not sure.
Stress-Test Your Financial Plan
You can run Monte Carlo simulations across thousands of market scenarios and see the range of possible outcomes. There’s no such thing as a 100% chance of success. However, if you can get your financial play up to a 90% success rate or higher, you should feel highly confident you’ll meet your financial goals.
You can also backtest your plan against real historical periods, including the Great Depression, the dot-com bust, and the 2008 financial crisis.
The block bootstrap methodology goes further, shuffling consecutive slices of historical returns to generate more possible market variations while preserving realistic year-to-year patterns. Both ground your projections in real market behavior rather than only randomly generated market sequences. As a DIY retirement planner, you want to hedge against sequence of return risk once you retire.
The flexible spending feature allows you to set rules that reduce discretionary spending when markets drop and increase when they recover, like: “If the market drops 30% from its all-time high, reduce discretionary spending by 60%.” Tag your expenses as Essential or Discretionary, and the simulation adjusts accordingly.
Optimize Your Plan and Taxes
Tax planning is one of the biggest financial levers available. The difference between a basic withdrawal strategy and an optimized one can add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars over a long retirement.
But coordinating Roth conversions, drawdown order, capital gain harvesting, IRMAA thresholds, and ACA subsidies by hand can be complicated, easy to get wrong, or cost thousands of dollars when done with a professional.
ProjectionLab helps you model and optimize across all of these strategies. You set a target, like “stay in the 22% bracket” or “keep income below an ACA subsidy threshold,” and ProjectionLab optimizes around it. Roth conversions, withdrawals, and gain harvesting all work together toward that target.
Optimize lets you choose what to prioritize, such as lower lifetime taxes, higher net worth, increased ACA subsidies, reduced IRMAA, or a larger net legacy. It evaluates hundreds of strategy combinations and presents a winner.
Medicare and Social Security
Two pieces of retirement planning most tools either oversimplify or leave out.
ProjectionLab models Medicare with automatically estimated costs for Part B, Part D, and supplemental coverage. IRMAA surcharges are calculated using the 2-year income lookback, so you can see how a Roth conversion or large capital gain this year would increase your Medicare premiums two years from now.
For Social Security, you enter your Primary Insurance Amount from your SSA statement and pick a claiming age. The engine handles the rest: early reduction factors, delayed retirement credits, spousal and survivor benefits, and the earnings test if you plan to claim while still working.
Because Social Security is integrated with the rest of the plan, you can see how claiming timing affects your tax bracket, provisional income, IRMAA thresholds, and withdrawal sequencing, not just the monthly benefit figure.
One thing elder retirees, including my father, keep telling me is how they didn’t properly forecast their Required Minimum Distribution taxes. So ProjectionLab can help you better consumption smooth beforehand.
Estate Planning and Charitable Giving
ProjectionLab also models what you leave behind, not just what you spend.
The estate view shows your projected net legacy: what heirs receive after taxes, settlement costs, and remaining debt. This is more useful than just net worth because it accounts for the tax treatment of different account types.
Charitable giving is also modeled directly. Qualified Charitable Distributions (QCDs) let you direct IRA distributions to charity, satisfying your RMD while keeping the distribution out of taxable income.
Donor-Advised Funds (DAFs) let you contribute appreciated assets and take the deduction. If giving is part of your plan, it can be built in properly rather than treated as another expense.
Get Help When You Want It
ProjectionLab is built for both DIY retirement planners and financial professionals, which means expert help is available when you want it.
You can book a 1:1 session directly with the ProjectionLab team, which is useful if you’re getting started and want help learning how to use the tool. These sessions cover how to use the tool, not personal financial advice.
If you’re looking for professional advice, there’s also a directory of independent financial advisors and coaches who use ProjectionLab Pro with clients. They can help you interpret your plan, refine your strategy, or offer financial advice.
ProjectionLab does not try to upsell advisory services. You also get great human support and access to an active community on Discord and Reddit.
How Much Does ProjectionLab Cost?
Basic (Free). Includes core financial planning, forecasting, Monte Carlo simulations, and historical backtesting. No credit card required, and your data is saved.
Premium ($129/year). Unlocks the full feature set including cash flow visualizations, Compare Mode, tax optimization, Roth conversions, drawdown strategies, estate planning, and more. Includes a 7-day free trial.
For comparison, $129 per year would get you about a half hour with many fee-only financial planners. ProjectionLab enables you to update your plan whenever life changes and run as many scenarios as you need.
Who Should Use ProjectionLab?
ProjectionLab is best for:
- DIY retirement planners who want to model their own financial future
- Anyone pursuing financial independence or early retirement (FIRE)
- People looking to optimize across multiple advanced tax strategies, including Roth conversions
- People within 5 to 10 years of retirement planning drawdown
- Retirees managing RMDs, IRMAA, Medicare, and Social Security decisions
- Financial advisors and coaches serving individual clients (Pro tier)
- International planners or expats in Canada, the UK, Australia, and other supported countries
One thing to keep in mind: ProjectionLab’s comprehensive features mean there is more to learn than with a basic retirement calculator. The core planning experience is approachable, but the advanced tools reward some time spent exploring them.
Final Take
ProjectionLab is built for people who want to understand and optimize their financial future, not just wing it and hope for the best. If you like running the numbers yourself, testing decisions before you commit, and seeing how your choices play out over time, this tool will feel like it was made for you.
The real value of a tool like ProjectionLab is not predicting the future perfectly. It is seeing which choices matter enough to act on and which ones are mostly noise. Whether you’re still accumulating, a few years out from retirement, or already navigating RMDs and Medicare, that clarity is what separates good financial planning from guessing.
Start with the free trial and test one decision you have been weighing. You’ll quickly see why ProjectionLab has become one of my favorite tools for modeling long-term financial decisions.
Get started with ProjectionLab for free
Frequently Asked Questions
What is ProjectionLab? ProjectionLab is a professional-grade financial and retirement planning tool that lets you model your entire financial life and simulate it decades into the future. Hundreds of thousands of households use it, with more than $250 billion in assets modeled across the platform.
How much does ProjectionLab cost? ProjectionLab has three plans. Basic is free and includes core financial planning, Monte Carlo simulations, and historical backtesting. Premium is $129 per year and unlocks the full feature set including cash flow visualizations, Compare Mode, tax optimization, Roth conversions, and estate planning. Pro is $549 per year and offers all the Premium features for financial professionals working with clients. Premium and Pro both include a 7-day free trial.
Is ProjectionLab free? The free Basic plan lets you build a financial plan, run Monte Carlo simulations, and backtest against historical data for free. No credit card is required, and it’s more powerful than other free FIRE or retirement calculators.
Does ProjectionLab connect to my bank accounts? ProjectionLab does not require you to link bank or brokerage accounts. You can enter and update your financial information manually, or use supported third-party integrations for automatic syncing.
Does ProjectionLab provide financial advice? No. ProjectionLab is a comprehensive planning tool. It can perform much of the scenario analysis people typically pay an advisor for, but it does not provide personalized financial advice or replace professional judgment in complex situations. For advice, ProjectionLab offers a directory of independent financial advisors and coaches who use the platform with clients.
Can couples plan together in ProjectionLab? Yes. ProjectionLab is built to model households, including couples with different income timelines, retirement dates, and account types. You can plan jointly and see how each spouse’s decisions affect the overall plan.
Does ProjectionLab work outside of the USA? Yes. ProjectionLab supports tax configurations and account types for Canada, the UK, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, and more.
ProjectionLab is an affiliate partner of Financial Samurai. I only recommend tools I find useful for readers that I also use myself.
