Getting started

Investment Analyzer answers three questions: what you're worth, where it's invested, and whether your plan is on track. This page gets you from a blank account to a portfolio that adds up.

Signing in

Sign-in is Google only — there's no password to make up and none to forget. Click Sign in with Google, pick the account you want to use, and you're in.

The Google account you choose matters more than usual, for one reason: if someone has invited you to their household, that invitation is matched against the email on your Google account. Sign in with a different one and you won't see it. See Households and the plan.

Your household

Everything in the app lives inside a household — a set of accounts, trades, and one retirement plan, with its own list of people.

One is created for you the first time you sign in, called Personal. You own it, and it can't be deleted or left. For most people it's the only household they'll ever need, so the first thing worth doing is making it yours. Open Household settings… from the switcher in the header and:

1. Rename it to whatever you'd call your household out loud — "The Hendersons", "Henderson household". It's the name in the header from then on.
2. Add the people in it. A person doesn't need a login to belong: a child, or a spouse who'd rather not have one, is a name on the roster who still owns accounts and still appears in the plan.
3. Invite the ones who want to sign in, as an editor or a viewer.

You can create a second household from the switcher (New household…), and the switcher moves you between them — but the two share nothing: separate accounts, separate trades, separate plan. That's the tool for a genuinely separate set of books, a parent's finances you help manage say, not for adding the person you're planning with. They go in this one.

The two tabs

Portfolio

What you own today. The dashboard leads with your total value, the date the prices behind it are from, and how much it has moved over the range you pick, then a chart of how it got there, your allocation across asset classes, your accounts grouped by kind, and your largest holdings. It's built from the accounts you create and the trades you enter or import.

Start here: add an account, then get its trades in. See Accounts and Trades and CSV import.

Plan

Whether it lasts. The plan starts from the portfolio you just built — its value and its allocation, which is what sets the returns it simulates — and asks what the household spends: a monthly baseline, the goals you want to fund, the health insurance you'll buy yourselves. Against that it sets what arrives without selling anything — what each adult saves and the year they stop working, Social Security, pensions, other income — and the portfolio funds whatever is left over, plus the tax on the withdrawal. It runs a thousand market scenarios against that and reports the share that don't run out.

You never type a target income; you describe what you spend, and the plan works out whether the portfolio covers it. See Money in, money out.

You need a portfolio before a plan means much, so it's the second thing to do, not the first.

Where to go next

1. Accounts — create the accounts you actually hold, and decide for each one whether you'll track individual holdings or just a balance.
2. Trades and CSV import — enter trades by hand, or bring a whole broker history in at once.
3. Portfolio and cash — read the dashboard, set a cash balance, and understand where prices come from.
4. Households and the plan — add the rest of your household (with or without a login for each of them) and build the retirement plan around everyone in it.