Stuck? Start here.

GlidePath uses standard financial-planning vocabulary. If any of these are new to you, here they are in one place, in plain English.

Monte Carlo simulation

A way to project a financial plan by running it through 1,000 different market-return sequences — some good, some bad, in random order. Tells you "85% of the time, your money lasts to age 95" instead of giving you one falsely-precise answer. The output is a range and a probability, not a single number.

Sequence-of-returns risk

The order returns happen in matters more than the average. A 30% drop in your first year of retirement is devastating; a 30% drop in your 25th year is barely noticeable. Monte Carlo bakes this in by trying many different orderings of the same average return.

Tax Valley

The years between when you stop working (low income) and when Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs) start — at age 73 or 75 depending on your birth year (income jumps back up). It can be one of the lower-tax stretches of retirement, which is why many households model Roth-conversion headroom there instead of guessing. GlidePath identifies these years and quantifies the "headroom" in your 12% and 22% brackets.

Roth conversion

Moving money from a Traditional 401(k) or IRA (taxed when you withdraw) to a Roth IRA. You pay income tax on the converted amount today; under current law, qualified Roth withdrawals are generally tax-free and Roth IRAs have no owner lifetime RMDs. The planning question is whether the tax you pay now is lower than the tax pressure you may avoid later.

RMD (Required Minimum Distribution)

The IRS forces you to start withdrawing from Traditional retirement accounts at age 73 — or 75 if you were born in 1960 or later (it was 70½ before the SECURE Act changes). The amount is set by a formula; if you don't take it, the penalty is brutal (25% of what you should have withdrawn). RMDs can push you into a higher tax bracket if not planned for — which is why Roth conversions in the Tax Valley matter.

ACA bridge

The health-insurance gap between when you stop working (lose employer coverage) and when Medicare kicks in at age 65. For someone retiring at 62, that's 3 years of buying ACA marketplace coverage, which can cost roughly $12–22K/yr per person depending on age, income, and subsidies (the enhanced 2021–2025 subsidies expired, so 2026 premiums and the 400%-of-poverty subsidy cliff are back). GlidePath models the silver-plan benchmark net of the premium tax credit so your retirement Monte Carlo isn't ignoring this line item.

Social Security claim-age trade-off

You can claim Social Security as early as 62 (with permanent ~30% reduction) or as late as 70 (with ~24% increase above your Full Retirement Age benefit — these figures assume an FRA of 67, i.e. born 1960 or later; earlier birth years shift them slightly). The "right" answer depends on longevity, marital status, other income, and tax bracket. GlidePath runs all three (62/67/70) side-by-side in lifetime real-dollar totals.

PAW / AAW / UAW (Stanley-Danko tiers)

From The Millionaire Next Door. The formula is Expected Net Worth = (Age × Income) / 10. PAW (Prodigious Accumulator of Wealth) is ≥2× expected; AAW (Average) is around 1×; UAW (Under Accumulator) is <0.5×. GlidePath shows your tier on /NetWorth as a benchmark anchor — useful directional context, not a verdict.

Fidelity savings multiples

Fidelity's rule-of-thumb retirement-savings targets: 1× income by age 30, 3× by 40, 6× by 50, 8× by 60, 10× by 67. GlidePath shows you where you stand against these multiples on /Retirement.

Sequence-of-returns risk vs. average return

Same average return, two different sequences. Sequence A: -20%, +10%, +10% (ends at $0.97 of $1). Sequence B: +10%, +10%, -20% (ends at $0.97 of $1). Same final value if you don't touch it — but if you're withdrawing at retirement, Sequence A devastates the plan because you sold the dip. Monte Carlo captures this by trying many orderings.

Single-person households are first-class. On /Retirement, toggle Household Type to "Single" and every assumption adjusts: tax brackets (Single instead of MFJ — the single standard deduction is roughly half the married amount), Social Security provisional thresholds ($25K/$34K not $32K/$44K), spousal and survivor math suppressed entirely. The Monte Carlo, Tax Valley, Roth conversion, and ACA bridge views all become single-person-aware.

Linda (61, single, $850K in 401(k)) is one of the worked example scenarios on the /planning page.

You'll download the installer for your platform, run it, paste in the license key from your welcome email, and confirm the email you bought with. Total time: about 3 minutes. After it finishes, your dashboard is reachable from your computer at localhost:5000.

No. You enter balances (which you'd check monthly anyway) and recurring patterns (your mortgage, paycheck, subscriptions). For deeper transaction-level analysis (spending by category, cash-flow actuals), you export a file from your bank or from a tool like Simplifi, Monarch, or Quicken, and drag it onto the in-app Import page — it previews exactly what will change, and nothing is saved until you confirm. Flip on "Watch my Downloads folder" and new bank exports show up there on their own, ready to import in a click.

The design target is a 5-minute monthly close plus a quick export refresh from your bank or aggregator. Daily transaction-by-transaction entry is not the model — that's what Plaid-linked apps are for.

No — keep them, and use GlidePath on top. Every major aggregator exports CSV files. Once a month, hit "Export" in your aggregator, drag the file onto GlidePath's Import page, glance at the preview, and confirm — the Net Worth, Spending, and Cash-Flow pages fill in from there. You get planning depth (Monte Carlo, Tax Valley, BT tracking) on the same numbers your aggregator already tracks — no double bookkeeping.

If you ever cancel your aggregator, you can switch to direct CSV downloads from each bank. Or vice versa. Import doesn't care where a file came from — you match a bank's columns once and it remembers the format.

Three intake paths, in increasing order of automation:

1. CSV drop (live) — Export from your bank or aggregator (Mint, Simplifi, Monarch, Quicken, YNAB), drag and drop onto the in-app Import page. The app auto-detects the bank format and reports parse errors clearly. Takes ~30 seconds per file.
2. Downloads watcher (live, opt-in) — Turn on "Watch my Downloads folder" on the Import page and GlidePath notices when a bank export lands in your Downloads, then lists it right there to import in one click. You always see the preview before anything saves.
3. Browser extension (live) — Auto-captures CSVs when you click Download on your bank's site. Supports Chase, American Express, Citi, and Bank of America today. Full details + per-bank behavior on the extension page.

What we're not planning to build: Plaid integration. The whole point of GlidePath's architecture is that imports start from files, emails, or captures you can review before they land in your local file. If you want Plaid-style auto-link, keep your current aggregator and use it as the upstream.

Plaid-style linking continuously syncs data through a third-party service. GlidePath is built for the other tradeoff: files and browser captures you can review before they land in your local financial file. CSVs are less automatic, but they give you a visible source, a preview, and a receipt for what changed.

If Plaid is a hard requirement, Simplifi or Monarch is a better fit. We're upfront about this tradeoff.

Everything is stored as plain files on your computer in your data folder (the path is shown on the Settings page after install). By default we don’t upload it or keep a copy. (The only exceptions are optional features you turn on yourself, like AI categorization; the Privacy page lists exactly what they send.)

This means you own the backup story. See the next FAQ — it’s easier than it sounds.

The app has a built-in Backups page (under Setup → Backups). Click Create backup now and it writes a timestamped .zip of your entire data folder to a backups/ subfolder. The newest 30 zips are kept; older ones are pruned. Restoring is the inverse: unzip into your data folder, restart the app.

That handles point-in-time recovery on the same computer. But if the computer itself dies, the backups die with it. Pick one (or all) of these:

1. Put your data folder inside OneDrive / Dropbox / Google Drive. One-time setup: move the folder, then set the env var GLIDEPATHMONEY_DATA_FOLDER to the new path before launching. Every change syncs to the cloud in seconds. Combined with the in-app Backup page, you get both per-file sync and clean snapshots.
2. Copy backup zips to cloud storage. Cheaper bandwidth: drag the contents of the backups/ subfolder into your cloud-synced folder once a week, or wire a Scheduled Task to do it nightly.
3. External drive. Belt-and-braces for the paranoid: Robocopy the DataFolder to a USB drive on a schedule.

All three preserve the local-first property — your data is on hardware you control, not in a vendor’s database.

Three things remain in your hands, no matter what:

• Your installed app. It doesn’t phone home for normal operation. Everything that’s already on your computer keeps working on the installed version — Net Worth, Retirement Monte Carlo, Cash Flow, Balance Transfers, all of it. We deliberately built it that way.
• Your data files. Open them in Excel, Numbers, Google Sheets, a text editor — they’re plain comma-separated files. No proprietary database to be locked out of.
• The Explain Mode walkthroughs. Every calculation is documented in the app itself, so if you ever need to reproduce a number by hand, the formula is there.

What stops:

• Software updates stop. Last version you have is what you keep.

This isn’t a slogan — it’s a property of the architecture. The decision to be local-first instead of cloud-hosted is the same decision that protects you here.

Download the latest installer from our download page and run it. The installer detects your existing install and updates the binary without touching your data. Takes about 30 seconds.

If a new version is available, you'll see a banner across the top of your dashboard automatically — click the download link to grab it.

Mac: Yes — a signed .dmg for Apple Silicon and Intel, carrying an Apple-notarized app, lives on the Mac section of our download page: open it and drag GlidePath Money to Applications. Prefer to place it from Terminal? Scripted-install notes for the same disk image are at /mac.

Linux: Yes — a native .deb for Debian/Ubuntu/Mint and a portable .AppImage for any other distro, both on the Linux section of our download page. Hit a snag on your distro? Email hi@glidepathmoney.com — we'll fix what you find.

Your installed app keeps working on the version you already have — every data file you've built up stays where it is, and Excel can open them all. What stops is access to updates and customer support. If you renew the $39/yr maintenance later, your data is still there waiting.

A refund is different: refunding your original purchase reverses the sale, so the license ends with it and the app stops opening after its next license check. Details on the refund page.

See the full comparison page for the table. Short version:

• Mint / Simplifi / Monarch / Copilot are tracking tools — they show you last month's transactions via Plaid. Great for that. Not built for retirement planning, BT tracking, or data ownership.
• Boldin / New Retirement is a planning tool with similar retirement-math depth, but costs more, has no BT tracking, no real-time mortgage amortization, and stores your data on their server.
• Quicken Classic is the closest cousin — local data, hybrid tracking + planning. We do deeper retirement math + BT tracking; they have a 20-year head start on transaction reconciliation.
• GlidePath Money is the planning depth of Boldin + BT tracking that's rare elsewhere + the data ownership of Quicken Classic — with a $129 desktop license, then $39/yr to stay current (first year included, auto-renews; cancel anytime and your install keeps working).

If the app is already activated, your key lives on the in-app License & devices page — open the app and copy it from there. If you can't open the app (new computer, lost email), go to the license-recovery page and enter the email you bought with. We re-send your key and download link to that address — only ever to the address on file, never to a different one.

Every page in the installed app has a Feedback button in the topbar — opens a modal that sends your question straight to hi@glidepathmoney.com. We read every one. For account / license issues, email directly.