How do I read the year-by-year ledger?

The ledger, headed Year by year at the foot of the Retirement Tracker, is the whole calculation: every figure on the Overview comes from it. Each row is one year of your plan, from your age today to the age your plan runs to. Read across a row and the arithmetic closes: opening savings, plus investment growth, plus that year’s net cashflow, equals closing savings — which becomes the next row’s opening savings.

The columns

• Age, Stage and Year — the Stage column marks each year as a working year or a year after you have stopped. A couple’s ledger says Both working, which of you has stopped, or Both stopped.
• Opening savings — what the year starts with. Your home is not in it.
• + Income — what comes in that year.
• + Money coming in — one-off sums such as an inheritance or a sale. Shown only if your plan has any.
• + Investment growth — what your savings earned. If any year opens below zero the header becomes + Growth / − carry, because a negative balance is charged rather than grown.
• − Living expenses, − Loan payments and − Life goals — kept apart so you can see which is which. Hover over a goal figure to see which goals fall due.
• − Loans settled early — a loan you said is paid off at a point, charged its remaining balance that year. Shown only if you have one.
• Net cashflow — everything in minus everything out.
• Closing savings — the year’s result, in bold.
• Withdrawal rate — what the year took from savings, as a share of opening savings.

Colours, dashes and missing years

• Money in is tinted green and money out red, as on a bank statement; the + and − in each header say the same thing in words.
• A dash means zero for that year — or, in the withdrawal rate column, that the year opened with nothing to draw on.
• If your money runs out, the table stops at that age and says how many years are left. Show them anyway reveals them; those rows keep compounding a shortfall that would not happen in real life, because you would change something long before.