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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 or 75 depending on your birth year (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 — 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 The amount is set by a formula; if you don't take it, the penalty is brutal (25% of what you should have withdrawn).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 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 — just enter your license email there and we email you a one-time 6-digit sign-in code.

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.

Four 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. It never imports anything behind your back — you always see the preview first.
3. Email forward (live) — Each customer gets a private inbox address like [email protected]. 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.
4. 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, [email protected]. 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: Most banks only send alerts to the email on your profile, so the usual path is a forwarding rule in that inbox ("from your bank's alert address → forward to yourname-inbox@…"). Some banks also let you add the address as a second alert recipient directly. The in-app /EmailInbox page has per-bank instructions for Chase, BoA, Discover, Citi, Amex, and Capital One; any other bank works too, since the LLM handles arbitrary formats.

Heads-up for work / Microsoft 365 email: many corporate and Microsoft 365 accounts block automatic external forwarding, so a forwarding rule set up there can fail silently. If your bank alerts live in an M365 mailbox, forward from a personal address (Gmail, Outlook.com, iCloud) instead — or use the browser extension or CSV import, which skip email entirely.

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). By default we don’t upload it or keep a copy. Your data folder isn’t uploaded to us; phone access streams your local dashboard through Cloudflare’s tunnel while your PC is running. (The only exceptions are optional features you turn on yourself, like AI categorization or the email inbox; 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 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.

From your phone, visit https://bridge.glidepathmoney.com and enter the email on your GlidePath license. We email you a one-time 6-digit code (it expires in 10 minutes). Enter the code and the bridge proxies you to your local GlidePath. Your sign-in stays active for up to 24 hours, and re-asks for a fresh code after 30 minutes of inactivity — no app to install, no account to create, nothing to set up inside the desktop app first. Your PC must be on and the GlidePath Money app 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.

Mac: Yes, via early-access manual install at /mac — works on Apple Silicon and Intel via a few Terminal commands. The polished signed .pkg installer (auto-launch, GUI license entry) is on the roadmap.

Linux: Yes — a native .deb for Debian/Ubuntu/Mint plus a self-contained tarball for any other distro, both on the Linux section of our download page. Phone access and the forward-your-bank-emails inbox are still on the Linux roadmap, so a Linux install is local-only for now. Hit a snag on your distro? Email [email protected] — we'll fix what you find.

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 (phone-access sign-ins stop when maintenance ends), 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 — 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 [email protected]. We read every one. For account / license issues, email directly.