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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 (income jumps back up). It's the cheapest stretch of your life to do Roth conversions because you're in the lowest tax brackets you'll ever see. 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 (no tax on withdrawals). You pay income tax on the converted amount today, but the converted money grows tax-free forever. The trick is doing it in years when your tax bracket is low — i.e., during the Tax Valley.

RMD (Required Minimum Distribution)

The IRS forces you to start withdrawing from Traditional retirement accounts at age 73 (was 70½ before SECURE 2.0). The amount is set by a formula; if you don't take it, the penalty is brutal (25% of what you should have withdrawn).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 $10–18K/yr per person depending on income and subsidies. 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). 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 — $14.6K standard deduction not $29.2K), 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 an installer (~50 MB), run it, paste in the license key from your welcome email, and confirm the email you bought with. The installer provisions a private subdomain (e.g., yourname.glidepathmoney.com) and installs a Cloudflare tunnel service. Total time: about 3 minutes. After it finishes, your dashboard is reachable both from your PC at localhost:5000 and from your phone via bridge.glidepathmoney.com — sign in with the email on your license and we'll text a 6-digit code to your inbox.

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 CSV from your bank or from a tool like Simplifi, Monarch, or Quicken, and drop it in a folder. The app reads it automatically.

Most customers do a 5-minute monthly close and a quick CSV refresh from their 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 CSVs. Once a month, hit "Export" in your aggregator, drop the file in your GlidePath DataFolder, and the Net Worth, Spending, and Cash-Flow pages fill in automatically. 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. The files in your DataFolder don't care where they came from.

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. Email forward (live) — Each customer gets a private inbox address like yourname-inbox@glidepathmoney.com. Forward statement-ready notifications, transaction alerts, or payment confirmations to it. A Cloudflare Email Worker parses the email with an LLM, extracts the transactions, and queues them for your app. The email body is parsed and immediately discarded — only the extracted transactions ever reach your PC. See the "What's the email inbox feature?" FAQ below.
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 your bank credentials don't live in a third-party service. If you want Plaid-style auto-link, keep your current aggregator and use it as the upstream.

Each customer gets a private email address — for example, yourname-inbox@glidepathmoney.com. Anything forwarded there gets parsed for transactions and queued for your app to pick up automatically (every 5 minutes, or instantly via a "Poll now" button on the in-app /EmailInbox page).

What it parses well:

• Per-transaction alerts ("You made a $42.18 purchase at MERCHANT")
• Payment confirmations ("We received your $250 payment on card ending 1234")
• Itemized statement bodies (some banks include the full charge list inline)

What it doesn't (correctly):

• "Your statement is available" notices with no charges in the body — these are correctly identified as non-transactional and skipped
• Marketing emails, security alerts, fraud warnings without specific charges

Setup options: Either set up automatic forwarding in your email client (filter "from chase.com" → forward to yourname-inbox@…), or add the address as an additional alert recipient in your bank's notification settings. The in-app /EmailInbox page has per-bank instructions for Chase, BoA, Discover, Citi, Amex, and Capital One. Any other bank works too — the LLM handles arbitrary formats.

Privacy promise: Email content lives on our infrastructure for the seconds it takes to parse, then the raw body is purged from our database. Only the structured transactions (date, amount, description, last4 of card) ever stay — and even those are queued on our side only until your app picks them up. The dedicated privacy page spells out exactly what we store and don't.

Plaid stores your bank credentials and continuously syncs your data into a third-party service. We don't want to be that third-party service for you — the whole architecture is local-first. Practically: Plaid integrations break frequently, expose you to the breach risk of every middleman, and route your transaction history through commercial data partnerships. CSVs are uglier but you control the flow.

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 PC in your DataFolder (the path is shown on the Settings page after install). We never see it, never upload it, never have a copy. The dashboard URL works via a tunnel that streams the page from your PC to your browser on demand — the data itself never leaves home.

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 DataFolder to a backups/ subfolder. The newest 30 zips are kept; older ones are pruned. Restoring is the inverse: unzip into your DataFolder, restart the app.

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

1. Put your DataFolder 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 keep working forever, no matter what:

• Your installed app. It doesn’t phone home for normal operation. Everything that’s on your PC keeps working — 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:

• Your subdomain (e.g., yourname.glidepathmoney.com) and its sign-in gate go away — so phone/remote access stops. The app on your PC still works at localhost:5000.
• Software updates stop. Last version you have is what you keep.
• The email-inbox feature stops (its parser runs on our infrastructure). CSV drop and the browser extension keep working.

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.

Visit https://bridge.glidepathmoney.com from your phone. Enter the email on your license, and we'll email you a 6-digit sign-in code. Type the code, and the bridge proxies you to your local GlidePath. The sign-in stays good for 7 days per device — no app to install, no account to create. Your PC must be on and the GlidePath Money app must be running (it auto-starts at logon — wired up by the installer).

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, your tunnel, or your sign-in. 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.

Not yet. The current build is Windows 10/11 only. macOS and Linux support is on the roadmap. If you'd use it, email hi@glidepathmoney.com — votes move it up the priority list.

Your installed app keeps working forever — every data file you've built up stays where it is, and Excel can open them all. What stops is access to updates, the private subdomain (we tear that down on cancel), and customer support. If you re-subscribe later, your data is still there waiting.

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 + the BT tracking nobody else has + the data ownership of Quicken Classic — for $129 one-time + optional $39/yr to stay current.

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.