Runway Plan — User Manual

Welcome to Runway Plan — your personal finance and FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) planning companion.

This manual covers signup, every feature module, advanced features, account settings, and FAQs. No time for the whole thing? The FAQ usually answers what you're looking for.

1. Getting Started

1.0 Where the FIRE math comes from

The login page's "FIRE goal ≈ annual expense × 25" isn't made up — it's the well-known 4% rule from late-1990s financial-planning research.

Origin

• Bengen 1994 (Journal of Financial Planning) — William Bengen back-tested US stock/bond returns 1926–1976 to find the highest withdrawal rate that survived every 30-year period without depletion. Called it "SAFEMAX" ≈ 4%.
• Trinity Study 1998 (Cooley/Hubbard/Walz, AAII Journal) — Three Trinity University professors extended Bengen's work, showing a 4% withdrawal rate had ~95% success over 30-year retirements. Paper title: "Retirement Savings: Choosing a Withdrawal Rate That Is Sustainable."

The math

If you can withdraw 4% of your initial portfolio (then inflation-adjusted) every year, then:

portfolio × 4% = annual expense
portfolio = annual expense ÷ 0.04 = annual expense × 25

So "$60K/yr expense → need $1.5M".

Important caveats — don't treat this as iron law

Common variants in the FIRE community

• Conservative: 3.5% (× 28.5) or even 3.25% (× 31) for 50+ year retirements with more buffer
• Bengen 2020 update: With broader data he said 4.7% may also be safe
• Vanguard dynamic withdrawal: Adjust withdrawal rate with market performance instead of holding a single number

Verify it yourself

• Mr. Money Mustache — The Shockingly Simple Math Behind Early Retirement — the most-cited FIRE intro on the web, clear charts
• Investopedia — The 4% Rule — mainstream finance reference
• Wikipedia — Trinity study — academic origin + later updates summarized
• FIRECalc — backtest your own assumptions against US stock data 1871–today, returns success rate
• cFIREsim — FIRECalc with more parameters (Social Security, real estate, variable spending)

How this app handles it

× 25 is a rough estimate. Runway Plan's Home / FIRE bar / Life Projection chart don't only use this formula — they simulate your actual portfolio + inflation + income + expenses year by year. Premium users also get Monte Carlo (10,000 stochastic paths → success probability), which is the closest you can get to "is my plan likely to work?" without a crystal ball. So 25× is just the mental-model entry point; the real numbers are computed more precisely.

1.1 Sign in with Google

Head to runway-plan.com and click Sign in with Google. We don't take email/password — everything goes through Google OAuth. On first login, your own isolated database is created, fully separated from every other user.

1.2 Complete onboarding

After first login, the onboarding wizard walks you through:

1. Locale and base currency — TW users pick zh_TW + TWD; others pick en + USD/EUR/.... The base currency drives every monetary number; you can change it later in Settings and all stored values get re-denominated.
2. Family — solo, partner, with kids. You can add kids later (Settings → Family).
3. Salary and income — monthly base, year-end bonus, other income. TW users see fields for labor pension, NHI, and income tax brackets; others get a free-form percentage model.
4. Expenses — pre-seeded with categories: Rent, Food, Transport, Education, Personal. The Education section has a built-in cost estimator for kindergarten through university.
5. Holdings — stocks, ETFs, crypto, cash. Enter a ticker (VOO, 2330.TW, BTC-USD) and prices auto-fetch.
6. Property — primary residence or investment, mortgage balance, ownership share (matters for shared property between partners).
7. Retirement target — target age, expected annual return, inflation rate. Once submitted, you'll see your FIRE progress immediately.

After onboarding, you land on /home with your first dashboard.

1.3 Family setup notes

• Primary (you) vs Partner vs Children — the row with is_primary=1 is the owner key; all assets, income, and policies are stored under that name.
• Multi-household sync — if your partner also uses Runway Plan, you can link accounts (see §5 Household).

2. Core Features

2.1 Home (dashboard)

/home is your dashboard, top to bottom:

• FIRE progress bar — when you'll hit it, how far away you are.
• Net worth trend — historical + projected (factoring inflation, returns, cashflow).
• Allocation donut chart — how diversified your money is.
• Life Timeline — milestones: each child's school stages start, kids' independence, mortgage paid, FIRE achieved, life expectancy end.
• What-if scenarios (Premium) — open multiple hypothetical scenarios (retire 5y early vs late) side by side.
• Monte Carlo (Premium) — 10,000 random paths, success probability of your plan.

Which home cards include property, which don't

The home page mixes "net worth", "investment return", "retirement projection" and "debt ratio" — which of these include your house and which don't follows different rules per card. This is intentional, not a bug — see "Why" below.

Always includes property (unaffected by the toggle)

Always excludes property

Toggle-dependent

Where to flip the toggle: go to the Holdings page — there's a button at the top (🏠 Show/Hide property). Hit Save after toggling. The preference lives server-side, so all pages (Home, Holdings, Allocation chart) stay in sync.

Why this design

Specifically about Annual Return: if property gain were mixed in and then annualized against the portfolio's purchase date, the math breaks (portfolio inception 18 months ago, property bought 5 years ago — squashing the property's 5-year gain into 18 months and re-annualizing roughly doubles the displayed rate). So this column is locked to portfolio-only.

2.2 Holdings

/holdings manages all tradeable assets:

• Add / Edit — click ✎ Edit to reveal +Add. Enter ticker, quantity, total cost (in your base currency).
• Auto price fetch — TW market after 13:30 close, US market after US close, crypto hourly.
• Yearly snapshot — every Dec 31 at 23:00 a portfolio_history row is auto-written so you can see year-over-year returns.
• Manual refresh — click 🔄 Refresh prices at the top.

2.3 Cashflow

/cashflow covers all money in/out:

• Income — base salary, year-end bonus, other income.
• Simple mode (default) — form has just Date + Amount + Type, and the table also only shows Date + Amount. One input in, one column out — fastest path for casual entry.
• Detailed mode (TW only) — toggle via ⚙ Detailed view in the toolbar. Form expands to 11 fields (base, meal allowance, overtime, labor pension, NHI, income tax, net pay, etc), and the table shows the full 14-column TW payroll breakdown. Choice persists in your browser's localStorage across reloads.
• Expenses — categorized rows. Each row has an after_retire flag (continues post-retirement?), which affects FIRE math.
• Education cost estimator — accessible after onboarding via the Cashflow Education section.

TW vs INTL differences:

2.4 Net Worth

/networth (embedded in Home) aggregates:

• Assets — Holdings + Property (market value) + Vehicles + Cash + Other.
• Liabilities — Mortgage + Car loan + Credit + Other.
• Year-over-year curve — see your net worth trajectory.

2.5 Property

/properties manages real estate:

• Market value — manual or auto-grow at a set appreciation rate.
• Mortgage calculator — interest rate, term, amortization.
• Ownership share — ownership_pct. For shared property between partners, this determines how much of the property + loan shows up on your personal balance sheet (e.g. 50/50, 80/20).
• Monthly auto-recompute — On day 1 of each month at 05:30, the system recomputes each party's share based on cumulative contributions. To trigger immediately: Settings → 🔁 Recompute ownership.

2.6 Insurance and Vehicles

• Insurance — track policy name, sum insured, annual premium, term, insured person, beneficiary. The sum insured field is free-text (you can write "$1M", "3x annual salary"), not numeric.
• Vehicles — value, loan, ownership share. Same logic as Property.

3. Advanced Features

3.1 AI Reports

/reports is an AI-generated personalized financial analysis covering:

• Current financial health (net worth, cashflow, FIRE progress)
• Portfolio diversification + concentration warnings
• Risk + opportunity list
• Concrete recommendations for the next quarter / year

Quotas:

Click Export → PDF on any report to save / print.

3.2 What-if scenarios (Premium-only)

Simulate the impact of different decisions:

• "What if I retire 5 years early?"
• "What if returns are 4% instead of 7%?"
• "What if inflation hits 5%?"

You can save multiple scenarios and switch between them.

3.3 Monte Carlo retirement simulation (Premium-only)

Run 10,000 random paths to get a "won't run out of money" success probability, with a percentile fan chart (10%–90%) showing the trajectory range.

3.4 Google Sheets export (Premium-only)

Settings → Connect Google Sheets → authorize → Export to new sheet. Creates a fresh Google Sheets workbook with 4 tabs: Holdings / Expenses / Income / Meta. We can only access workbooks we created (drive.file scope) — your other Drive contents stay private.

3.5 PWA Push Notifications (Premium-only)

"Add to Home Screen" to install as an app, then enable 🔔 Enable push in Settings. You'll get notified on:

• Portfolio moves more than ±3% in a day
• Subscription expiring soon
• AI report completed

iOS note: Web Push works on iOS 16.4+, but only after Add-to-Home-Screen — Safari without ATHS does not get push.

3.6 CSV bulk import

Settings → Bulk import (CSV) lets you upload hundreds of expense or income rows at once.

Supported columns: category, item, amount, frequency, after_retire, person. English and 中文 headers both recognized; encoding handles UTF-8 with Big5 fallback for legacy TW spreadsheets.

4. Account & Billing

4.1 Upgrade to Premium

/pricing → pick monthly or annual → Lemon Squeezy checkout. 7-day free trial, cancel any time during the trial without being charged.

4.2 Cancel subscription

Settings → Manage subscription. Cancellation kicks in at the end of your paid period — you keep Premium until then, you don't lose remaining days.

4.3 Refund policy

• During the 7-day free trial: cancel any time, no charge.
• After the trial: all sales are final. Cancellation stops future billing but doesn't refund the current period.

4.4 Referral program

Settings → Referrals to grab your unique link (e.g. runway-plan.com/r/K7H2M9PX). For each friend who upgrades to Premium via your link, you earn 30 days of Premium credit. No cap, no tier requirements — fully self-serve.

Credit applies at your next subscription cancellation, extending your end date. E.g. if your subscription ends 12/31 and you have 60 days of credit, when you cancel your end date moves to 3/1.

4.5 Bring Your Own Key (BYOK, Premium-only add-on)

Premium subscribers can paste their own Anthropic API key in Settings → Bring your own AI key. After:

• AI reports run on your key (Anthropic bills you directly, typically $2–5/mo)
• Weekly cap drops, replaced by a 5-minute cooldown
• Key is stored Fernet-encrypted on the server; the encryption key is derived from SESSION_SECRET via PBKDF2

Note: if the server's SESSION_SECRET is rotated (e.g. after a security incident), your stored key becomes undecryptable and you'll need to re-paste it.

4.6 Theme and locale

Settings → Theme: Auto / Dark / Light. Auto follows your OS preference. Settings → Locale: zh_TW / en. UI flips immediately — no re-login needed.

4.7 Data export, sessions, and account deletion

• Export your data — Settings → Export your data. Packages your full personal SQLite database + metadata as a zip download. No limit, no questions asked — full data ownership any time.
• Active sessions — Settings → Active sessions lists every device currently signed in (with IP / User-Agent summary / last-seen time). Revoke any single device, or one-click Sign out other devices to kick everyone except this one. After revoke, the next request from that device bounces to login.
• Delete account — Settings → Delete account. Immediately wipes your personal database, sessions, and login history (irreversible). Lemon Squeezy subscription records are NOT touched — if you have an active Premium subscription, cancel via Settings → Manage subscription first, then delete the account (avoids future charges).

5. Household

5.1 Invite your partner

Settings → Partners → + Invite partner → enter their email. They'll see the invitation on next login.

After they accept, you're linked. You can both:

• Toggle the 👥 Household view on /home to see combined household totals
• Shared property / vehicles get split per each side's ownership_pct

5.2 How shared numbers add up

• Each side's "personal balance sheet" only counts the slice matching their ownership_pct (e.g. 50/50 split on a $1M house: each personal view shows $500K)
• The Household view aggregates back to the full $1M

5.3 Revoking the link

Either side can revoke the link from the Partners page. After revoke, both sides' data become independent again — no historical leakage.

6. FAQ

6.1 Is my data secure?

• Each user gets an isolated SQLite database. Cross-user reads are structurally impossible — the path is derived from your session, never URL params.
• Nightly encrypted backups to Cloudflare R2 at 02:30 using AES-256-GCM. 30-day retention.
• BYOK keys are Fernet-encrypted with a key derived from SESSION_SECRET.
• We don't sell data, don't run ads, don't include third-party trackers.

6.2 My numbers look wrong, what should I check?

The three most common causes:

1. ownership_pct not set correctly — shared property defaults to 100%. If you and your partner each own 50%, change it.
2. Owner field stale — after a name change. Renaming the primary in Settings → Family auto-cascades to all related tables (assets / income / retirement / insurance), but old imported data may have missed the cascade.
3. Timezone off-by-one — server uses UTC internally, displays in your local time. Late-evening records may show under UTC's next day.

6.3 Why don't I see some features mentioned in the docs?

What-if, Monte Carlo, Sheets export, and Push are all Premium-only. Basic users don't see them at all (not greyed-out with a lock — actually invisible: the UI block is hidden and the backend API returns 404). Upgrade to Premium and the UI appears — no re-login required.

6.4 An AI report failed. Did I waste my "welcome report"?

No. The 1 lifetime welcome report on Basic is only counted when the report successfully completes. Failures don't burn the quota — just retry.

6.5 Why are Annual Return and Return showing different numbers?

Two KPIs on the same hero card, but computed differently:

• Return (+NT$ 1.25M / +58%): cumulative gain in $ + %, which may include property — depends on the Holdings-page property toggle
• Annual Return (+13%): portfolio-only annualized return, ignores the toggle entirely

Full breakdown + design rationale in §2.1.1 Which home cards include property.

6.6 If I switch phone / browser, do I lose data?

No. Everything lives in your server-side personal database — nothing in LocalStorage. Switch devices and re-login with Google to see your full history.

6.7 Will the service stay free forever?

Basic tier stays free forever. Premium funds the server + AI costs. If we ever shut down:

1. We give at least 90 days' notice
2. We provide a full data export (CSV / SQLite dump)
3. AI reports get converted to PDF for archival

6.8 More questions?

• Bug reports / feature requests: GitHub Issues (private repo — request access; or email the admin)
• Billing questions: Lemon Squeezy is the Merchant of Record; they have their own support channel
• Privacy / data rights: email [email protected]

Manual version: 2026-05-02