Getting Started with cinder.fi

cinder.fi is a retirement planner that projects your finances year by year, including taxes, government benefits, account drawdowns, and estate value. It works for both Canadians and Americans, with full tax engines for all 13 Canadian provinces and territories and all 50 US states.

This page covers setup and your first projection.

Step 1: Set up your plan

When you first open cinder.fi, you choose between exploring a demo plan and starting with your own numbers.

Demo plans are read-only examples of real situations. You can look around every tab without entering anything.
Your own plan is a short setup. Without an account it takes three steps:
1. Your timeline: country and province or state, your age, when you want to retire, and whether you plan with a partner. cinder.fi suggests your province or state from your location; if it cannot, you choose.
2. The money picture: income, savings, and spending, plus one question about your Social Security (US) or CPP (Canada). Leave it on “Estimate it for me” or enter your own monthly figure.
3. Will it last?: your plan replayed against historical markets and random futures, when your Social Security or CPP and OAS start, and an estimate of the tax you will pay over your lifetime. Save the plan with a free account to keep it, or continue without one.
If you add a life event, it gets a step of its own before the result. Signed-in setups and re-runs of the wizard also include a data sources step: connect a bank, import transactions, or enter your budget and account balances by hand. Without that step, cinder.fi starts you with an estimated budget and estimated account types; connect a bank, import a budget (Manage data, then Statement files), or add your accounts by hand later.

You can skip optional steps and fill them in later from the Retirement tab’s Inputs.

Step 2: Find your way around

The app has five main tabs:

Retirement

Your projection and the inputs behind it. Sub-tabs:

Summary: your cinder score (a 0–100 retirement readiness rating), the main projection chart, and the key numbers for your plan.
Inputs: your income, spending, accounts, benefits, and life events.
Optimize: your withdrawal strategy and tax settings, and the strategy optimizer (Pro).
What if: scenarios to compare against your plan, the stress test (your plan replayed against historical markets and Monte Carlo simulations), where you stand on Coast, Barista, Lean, regular, and Fat FIRE, and the asset mix lab.

Summary’s Worth a look shows the checks most relevant to your plan; All checks (linked from it) has the rest, such as whether your money lasts, income by source, and taxes paid.

The main chart has 12 views. Balances, income, spending vs income, and withdrawal sources are free. Tax, contributions, effective tax rate, break-even, contribution room, PLOC, estate, and Monte Carlo come with Pro.

Budget

Set monthly spending targets by category, import transactions (CSV, OFX, YNAB, Copilot) or connect your bank, and track actual spending against your plan. Sub-tabs are This month, Transactions, Budget plan, and Money patterns. Statement files and Reconcile are in Manage data (see below). Money patterns holds your regular bills and the rules that categorize your transactions in one list (see Money Patterns: Bills and Rules).

Three spending modes feed into your projection:

Manual: enter a number directly.
Budget: uses your category budgets.
Actual: uses your real transactions.

Progress

How reality compares with your plan. Sub-tabs are On track? (your net worth, spending and savings rate over your last complete months next to what your plan assumed for the same period, your saved checkpoint, and your contributions) and Returns (what markets have added, against the return your plan assumes). Your asset mix against a target is on Accounts › Investments, the asset mix lab is in Retirement › What if, and your balance history is in Manage data.

Accounts

All your accounts, property, and debts in one place. Sub-tabs are Net worth, Accounts, Investments (your holdings and your asset mix against a target, shown when you have investment accounts), and Property. The Next dollar section compares where one more $1,000 would do the most good.

Manage data

The places your numbers come from, outside the tab bar: Connections (your bank and YNAB), Statement files (CSV, OFX, YNAB and budget imports), Reconcile (check an account against its statement) and Balance history. Open it from the Manage data button on Accounts or the Manage data row in Settings › Privacy & data. Statement files and Reconcile appear once you have imported or connected an account.

Family

Protection and estate planning for you and your household: life and disability insurance needs, a readiness checklist, beneficiaries and estate projections, charitable giving, and education savings for your children. It appears when you plan with a partner or children, are retired, or turn it on in Settings › Plan & budget.

Settings

Four sections. Account: your plan and billing, sign-in and passkeys, language, appearance and notifications. Plan & budget: country and region, the people in your plan, your partner and household, the Family tab, and how your budget works (Assign every dollar, transaction clearing, whether loan payments count in your plan, and the categorization settings). Ask cinder & agents: the Ask cinder switch, what cinder knows, your API key and connected AI agents. Privacy & data: analytics, encryption keys, Face ID, cookies, Manage data, exports (your full data, transactions and budget as files, on any device) and the danger zone (delete all transactions, reset your budget, erase your data, or run setup again). In the app, Settings is under More.

On desktop there is also a Chat tab where you can ask cinder questions about your plan.

Step 3: Adjust your strategy

On the Retirement tab, open Optimize to change how your retirement income is drawn:

Withdrawal strategy: Minimize tax, Maximize estate, Equalize spousal income, or Manual order.
RRSP meltdown / Roth conversion: planned early withdrawals that fill lower tax brackets.
Max TFSA / Max Roth in retirement: keep funding tax-free accounts.
PLOC (pledged line of credit): borrow against your portfolio during downturns.
Spending decline: lower spending in later retirement years.

Each change updates the projection right away. Open Analyze to see the effect on taxes, balances, and income.

Step 4: Compare scenarios

On the Retirement tab, open Scenarios and choose New scenario. You can start from a template, such as:

Retire 5 years earlier or later
Coast FIRE
Lower or higher spending
Conservative or bull markets
RRSP meltdown or Roth conversion
Different CPP/OAS or Social Security claiming ages
Downsize at 65

Or build your own from any combination of changes, then compare scenarios side by side.

Step 5: Optimize (Pro)

On Optimize, Optimize my strategy (Pro) searches across strategy combinations, including withdrawal orders, meltdown settings, TFSA settings, and PLOC configurations, to find the best mix for your situation. Results appear as presets you can apply in one click: Minimize tax, Maximize estate, or Maximize years.

Free vs Pro

Free (no account required):

Full projection engine with real tax brackets (all CA provinces + US states)
Budget and transaction import (YNAB, CSV, OFX) and a bank connection for one institution with a free account
CPP/OAS & Social Security claiming analysis
cinder score (0–100 retirement readiness)
Stress test success rate (history replay of market periods since 1928)
4 chart views (balances, income, spending vs income, withdrawal sources)
Primary residence & home equity modeling
1 saved scenario (with free account)
Cloud sync (optional free account)

Pro (see Pricing; the yearly plan starts with a 7-day free trial):

Everything in Free, plus:
Strategy optimizer (CPP/SS timing, withdrawal order, meltdown, TFSA, spousal splits)
Monte Carlo simulations (1,000+ runs)
8 more chart views (tax, estate, Monte Carlo, break-even, contributions, and more)
Full stress test: strategy comparison and every historical period (accumulation, retirement, or full lifecycle)
RRSP meltdown / Roth conversion modeling
Unlimited scenarios
Pension income splitting (couples)
Spending strategy comparison (Fixed, Guyton-Klinger, VPW)
Rental income properties (up to 3)
SBLOC strategy
Per-account return rates
PDF report export
Priority support

Next Steps

October 6, 2026 · 6 min read