Understand your money
Everything you need. Nothing you don't.
Every milestone, laid out clearly.
Change a number. See your future shift.
No jargon. No math degree.
Add what you know. We'll work through the rest.
VividTimeline is a financial planning simulator. You enter what you earn, what you spend, and what you have saved, and it projects those numbers forward year by year, drawing the result as a timeline you can read at a glance. There is no calculate button: every change updates the projection instantly.
One end figure cannot show you the years in between. VividTimeline simulates every year from today to the end of your plan, tracking your income, your spending, the balance of every account you hold, the tax you pay, and the net worth that results. Life events sit on the same timeline, so a new job, a home purchase, a child, a move, or a switch to part-time redraws the projection at the age it happens. Almost every event is free to add and remove on any plan; the couples events, marriage and a spouse starting or stopping work, come with Plus.
The engine models the accounts people actually hold: the 401(k) and the Roth 401(k), the Traditional IRA and the Roth IRA, the HSA, the 529 plan, a taxable brokerage, and high-yield savings. It applies progressive federal tax brackets, tracks contribution limits, handles required minimum distributions from age 73, and models Social Security claimed at 62, at full retirement age, or at 70. Because Traditional and Roth accounts are taxed at opposite ends, the projection keeps them separate all the way through. Debts, from a mortgage to student loans to a credit card balance, amortize alongside everything else.
A financial planning simulator projects your money forward in time using the numbers you give it. VividTimeline takes your income, spending, savings, accounts, and debts, applies tax and growth rules year by year, and draws the result as a timeline. It reports what the math produces for your inputs. It does not tell you what to do with the result.
A retirement calculator typically asks for a handful of inputs and returns a single number. VividTimeline simulates every year of your plan and keeps the detail: per-account balances, tax paid, income and expenses, and net worth for each year. It also lets you place life events on a timeline and watch the whole projection change.
For each year it computes income from every source, spending including one-time event costs, contributions and withdrawals per account, growth on each balance, federal income tax using progressive brackets, and the resulting net worth. The engine behind it began as a spreadsheet of 2,371 formulas.
No. Every financial term in the app carries a plain-language tooltip, and Guide Mode adds a written explanation to each card describing what it shows and how to read it. You can start with your income and current savings, then fill in the rest as you go.
Yes, by keeping them as separate plans. Free accounts include one timeline; Plus accounts include unlimited timelines, and each timeline holds its own accounts, events, and projection. You switch between them, one at a time. Within a single timeline, what-if events such as a bear market, dropping to part-time, or saving more change the projection while they sit on it, and each event reports what it changed.
A few minutes. The wizard asks for your age, income, savings, and a few account balances, then draws your first timeline. You can try it without creating an account.
No. VividTimeline is a planning simulator, not a registered investment advisor. It reports factual observations about the numbers you enter, such as what your savings rate works out to, or how a Social Security claiming age changes a benefit amount. It shows you what the math produces and leaves the decision to you. For educational purposes only. Not financial advice.
Guide Mode explains every card in plain language as you go, and the blog works through the mechanics one topic at a time, from how compound growth works to what a savings rate is. More on the spreadsheet this grew out of, or what the Free and Plus plans include. For educational purposes only. Not financial advice.