The Ledger: Every Year of Your Retirement, One Row at a Time

RetireOdds now lays out your whole plan year by year in one table, driven by the same engine that computes your success odds.

For the longest time our retirement plan lived in two places that did not talk to each other. There was the success percentage, a single confident number, and there was a spreadsheet Mayur kept on the side where he tried to reconstruct what actually happened in any given year to produce that number. Which bucket got tapped for spending in 2041. When Social Security started. Whether the RMD in 2038 pushed us into a worse bracket. The spreadsheet was always a guess, built after the fact, and it never quite matched the simulation that generated the odds in the first place.

The Annual Ledger is what replaced that spreadsheet, and the thing that makes it worth writing about is not that it shows numbers — it's that they're the same numbers.

One table, every year, today's dollars

The Ledger lays out the plan year by year, from now to the end of the plan, as a single scrollable table. Each row is a year: income, Social Security, withdrawals split by tax bucket (taxable, tax-deferred, Roth), taxes owed, healthcare costs, total spending, and the balance you end the year with. Everything is shown in today's dollars, so a number in 2045 means the same thing as a number this year — no mental inflation math required to compare them.

Row families are color-coded, so income rows read differently from withdrawal rows, and withdrawal rows read differently from tax rows. Milestone years get highlighted right in the table: the year you retire, the year Social Security starts, the year Medicare kicks in at 65, the year Required Minimum Distributions begin. You do not have to count forward from your birth year to know when the RMD row is coming — the table tells you.

Same engine, not a parallel guess

Here is the part that actually mattered to us. The Ledger is not a separate calculation trying to approximate what the simulation is doing. It is the deterministic median path of the exact same engine that runs the Monte Carlo simulation behind your success odds. One source of truth. That means the table and the odds can never quietly disagree about assumptions — the return you assumed, the spending you assumed, the tax rules applied. If the Ledger shows you funding a Roth conversion in a given year, that conversion is baked into the same run that produced your percentage.

Any traced value in the table can be opened to see a plain-language explanation of where it came from — which inputs fed it, which rule applied. If a row is missing setup data, the Ledger shows an honest setup state instead of quietly filling in a placeholder number that looks real but isn't.

What-if, without touching the real plan

The other piece we lean on constantly is what-if mode. You can temporarily change an assumption right inline — a later retirement age, a different spending level, a different return assumption — and watch the effect ripple through the whole table. It's clearly labeled as a preview the entire time, and nothing saves unless you explicitly save it. We use this to argue with each other productively: "what if we retired at 62 instead of 60" stops being a debate about vibes and becomes a table we can both look at.

RetireOdds has consolidated its planning tools around the Ledger rather than scattering them across separate pages, and once you've used it that way it's hard to go back to trusting a single percentage on its own.

Key takeaways

• The Annual Ledger shows every year of your plan — income, Social Security, bucketed withdrawals, taxes, healthcare, spending, ending balance — in today's dollars.
• It runs on the same engine as the Monte Carlo simulation, so the table and your success odds share one set of assumptions.
• Milestone years (retirement, Social Security, Medicare, RMDs) are highlighted, and any traced number can be explained in plain language.
• What-if mode previews a changed assumption across the whole plan without saving anything, so you can test ideas safely.

Open the Ledger and scroll your own plan year by year — it's a different feeling than trusting one number.