Everything worth knowing.

In the first few days of a new quarter, you record the quarter that just ended. That's the whole rhythm. When April 1st arrives, Q1 is over: every statement is final, every balance settled — so you open Fuego, and enter what each account was worth on March 31. Same for July 1 (record Q2, as of June 30), October 1 (Q3, as of September 30), and January 1 (Q4, as of December 31 — your year-end snapshot).

You're always looking backward at a finished quarter, never maintaining a live, in-progress one. That's why the quarter you're currently living in shows a lock in the editor: its books aren't closed yet, so there's nothing final to record.

Because a snapshot dated "Q1" should mean one unambiguous thing: where everything stood when Q1 ended. If you update mid-quarter, your history becomes a mix of "somewhere in February" and "late March" numbers, and quarter-over-quarter comparisons quietly stop meaning anything. Recording once, just after the close, keeps every column honest — and it's less work: one sitting every three months, not a running chore.

Each column is a quarter-end snapshot: the value of every account on that quarter's last day (the editor prints the exact date — "as of Mar 31" — under each column). A number in the Q1 2026 column is not January's balance or a quarterly average; it's what the account was worth on March 31, 2026.

Just record it when you remember; the numbers are still final, and your history is still exact. The editor marks a not-yet-recorded closed quarter as "Overdue" after the first month, but nothing breaks. The habit matters more than the punctuality — set the quarterly email reminder in Settings or download the repeating calendar reminder from the dashboard banner and punctuality takes care of itself.

Yes — every closed quarter stays editable forever. Open Update net worth and type into any column; totals and trends recompute instantly. Found an old statement with the real number? Fix history. It's your ledger.

Use Backfill in the editor: it adds the quarter just before your earliest one, with your account rows ready and every value left blank — you fill in where each stood back then (old statements are gold for this). History grows one adjacent quarter at a time so your trend line never has holes. Have it all in a spreadsheet already? Import it instead — see the data section below.

Log into each institution and take the total account value it shows — for a 401(k)/IRA/HSA that's the plan total; for a brokerage it's the account's market value including any cash sweep. Don't itemize individual holdings here; one honest total per account keeps the ritual to minutes. (Your quarterly statement, which arrives right when it's time to record, prints this number for you.)

Multiply what you hold by the market (spot) price around the quarter's end: troy ounces × spot price for that metal. If you hold 12 troy oz of gold and gold closed the quarter around $2,600/oz, log ~$31,200. Same recipe for silver, platinum, palladium. For jewelry or numismatic coins, use metal content unless you have a real appraisal — sentimental markup isn't net worth.

Quantity × price at the quarter's close, or simpler: the total your exchange or wallet showed on the last day of the quarter. If it lives on an exchange, the account total is your number.

Use an honest comp: what it would realistically sell for, from a recent appraisal, or a sober average of the online estimates. It absolutely belongs in net worth — just don't update it obsessively. A static value you revisit once or twice a year is fine; identical quarter after quarter is normal for a home. Your house counts fully toward net worth — but not toward FI-funded, the headline number, because you can't spend a house you live in. If you plan to change that, the Plan page lets you model downsizing, selling, or borrowing against it, and then the proceeds do count — on the date and at the amount you specify.

FI-funded is the money that could actually pay for a retirement: your withdrawable engine — investments that compound or pay income — minus the debts that engine would have to service. It's the headline everywhere a percentage claims to measure progress toward financial independence.

Debt follows the thing it's attached to. A mortgage doesn't subtract, because the house it's secured against was never counted in the first place — taking it off your investments would charge you twice. Same for a car loan. Credit cards, personal loans and student loans do subtract: there's no excluded asset behind them, so they're a claim on exactly the money that would otherwise pay you.

Your net worth hasn't changed and hasn't moved — it's still the headline figure at the top of your dashboard, still what milestones celebrate, still what the trend line plots. It just isn't what “% to financial independence” measures, because a balance sheet and a paycheck are different questions.

Not freely — 401(k)s and IRAs are penalty-locked until about 59½, which is why Fuego checks your bridge: the years between your retirement date and 59½, against the money you can actually reach — cash, taxable brokerage, crypto, metals. You'll see it in the Debrief — and under the Logbook's “What this pace builds” table — whenever your projected FI age lands before ≈60.

The standard tool for the gap is a Roth conversion ladder: each year you convert a slice of a traditional 401(k)/IRA to a Roth IRA, pay ordinary income tax on the converted amount that year, and five years later that slice becomes withdrawable penalty-free. Start the ladder five years before you need the first rung, and traditional money keeps arriving on schedule. Direct Roth contributions (not growth) can already come out any time, and rule 72(t) offers a stricter early-payout path.

Fuego flags the gap and sizes it — it doesn't simulate conversions or taxes, because your bracket in a conversion year is a question for a tax professional, not a tracker. Not financial advice.

Private-party resale value (KBB-style), not what you paid. Depreciate it when you think of it — nobody audits your Corvette. Collectibles, instruments, equipment: what they'd actually fetch. Keeping these static between real re-appraisals is expected, and Fuego won't nag you about it.

Every asset gets a label answering one question: could this pay you in retirement? Engine means yes — it compounds or pays income, so a 4%-rule paycheck can draw on it (brokerage, retirement accounts, a rental). Stored value means it's real net worth you can't spend without giving it up — the home you live in, your car, a camera. Part engine sits between (cash, crypto, metals).

Fuego labels each asset automatically from its type and name — it can tell a rental property from the home you live in, a small business from a watch collection, and a work vehicle from a runaround. Cash is always part engine, whether it's a high-yield account or a current account: for the question “could this pay you in retirement?” money is money, and how fast it grows is a separate setting. The label feeds every "withdrawable engine" number: the FI card's engine tab, the projection's honesty notes, the trajectory's engine lens, and the debrief.

There are exactly three settings and nothing in between, so the label on a row is the number behind it. If a guess is wrong, fix it in Update net worth: every asset row shows its label under its name — click it to cycle engine → part engine → stored value. Your choice applies to that account in every quarter, and the math follows immediately.

The payoff balance on the quarter's last day: mortgage principal remaining, card balance, loan balance. Enter them as positive numbers under Liabilities — the app does the subtraction.

Your call — just pick a lens and keep it. Track your own money, or the household's, but don't switch mid-history or the trend will show a jump that never happened. If you switch anyway, backfill or edit earlier quarters to match the new lens.

The balance sheet answers "what is everything worth?" — the Logbook answers "what did I actually save?" It's a running ledger of your money moves — deposits, buys, sells, withdrawals — netted against a yearly savings goal. A trade whose cash stays inside the portfolio (sell VTI, leave the proceeds invested) changes your holdings without moving the goal. It is deliberately its own book: a save you log there never changes your net worth numbers, and updating net worth never logs a save.

Why keep them apart? Because they measure different things. Net worth moves with markets — it can fall in a quarter where you saved heroically, or leap in one where you saved nothing. The Logbook isolates the part you control: what you put in. Watch both and you can tell whose work the growth is — yours or compounding's (the debrief literally computes this).

Once a quarter (first days after the close): record the finished quarter in Update net worth — a few minutes. Whenever you save or invest: jot the deposit in the Logbook — ten seconds, in passing. Everything else — dashboard, debrief, projections, Year in Review — is read-only payoff computed from those two inputs.

Switch the direction toggle from Bought to Sold when you log the entry. Fuego stores a sell as a negative amount and negative units, so it nets out of the year's tally automatically — no separate ledger, no subtraction to remember.

Sells are also excluded from the "worth today" column, because a position you no longer hold has no current value to look up. What it leaves behind is the cash you got for it, which shows up in your next net-worth snapshot.

It races this year against last year at the same point on the calendar — not against last year's final total, which would flatter every January. If you have enough history it also projects where the year lands if you keep the current pace, and tells you the date you'd overtake last year. Early in a year the comparison is deliberately about pace rather than totals, because two weeks of saving against a finished twelve months isn't a fair fight.

It takes the retirement your numbers imply and runs it through every market cycle since 1928 — one run for each year you could have retired in. Retire into 1929 and you get the Depression followed by the war; retire into 1982 and you get the greatest bull market in history. Same plan, wildly different outcomes. The page shows you all of them.

A free calculator has to ask you to estimate everything, because it's meeting you for the first time. Fuego has your quarterly record, so it reads the two hardest inputs — what you have and what you actually save — off what already happened.

Three places, and the page labels every figure with which one:

• From your snapshots — your withdrawable assets (the engine, excluding the home you live in and your cars), and your savings rate, backed out of what your net worth grew by that the market can't explain.
• From your plan — retirement spending, your ages, and your stock split, all from Settings.
• Assumption — anything you haven't set yet. It says so rather than quietly using a default as if it were yours.

Every one of them can be overridden on the page for a what-if, without changing what's saved.

Top to bottom, once — it's built as a walk with four numbered stops. The answer comes first: one sentence, and an instrument showing the gap between what you've budgeted and what your history supported. Then 01 Adjust the plan — every way of changing the answer in one place: the evidence's two ready-made offers, your three dials, the bar they're solved against, and the curve connecting them. Then 02 The house (what selling, downsizing, or borrowing would do), 03 The proof (what would have to go wrong), and 04 Under the hood (the machinery, for the curious). As you adjust anything, a slim rail pinned under the header keeps the live answer — and a reset — in view, so you never scroll back up to see what a change did.

They price the room in your plan as the two things it could buy: spend more each year, or retire sooner. One tap runs the whole page at that setting — nothing saves until you change Settings yourself.

The one-tap try deliberately lands inside the edge — it keeps about a tenth of the room (a full year, for dates) as margin, because taxes and healthcare live outside this model and the room is where they'll come from. The exact maximum is still one quiet click away, labelled “nothing spare” so it reads like what it is.

Look for “What you're testing” — the tray that appears the moment any temporary change is active. Every experiment (a tried budget, a moved date, a modelled home conversion, an override in the studio) is listed there individually. Remove any one of them, or hit Restore saved plan to drop them all. Nothing you try on this page ever writes to your plan — your saved dials live in Settings and only change when you change them.

Because it answers a better question. A percentage can't tell "ran out in year 44 of 45" from "ran out in year 3", people read it as the odds their own retirement works — which it isn't — and for anyone comfortably on track it just says “100%” and stops. That's a dead end precisely when the news is good.

So the Plan turns it around. You pick the bar — held up in 19 of every 20 histories — and the page tells you what that supports, in dollars a year and in a retirement age. Counting past cases is also honest in a way a percentage isn't: these are overlapping stretches of one century, not twenty independent futures.

You'll find these under How this is calculated, with the historical-vs-Monte-Carlo choice. They're methodology rather than answers, but this one moves the result more than anything else you can change.

• Fixed spending — the 4% rule exactly as written: the same real amount every year, straight through a crash without flinching. It's the research baseline and the most pessimistic thing you can model, because nobody actually behaves this way.
• Flexible — Guyton-Klinger guardrails: cut about 10% after the portfolio falls behind, raise it when you're comfortably ahead. Closest to how real retirees respond.
• % of portfolio — always take the same percentage of what's left. It can never run out, which is exactly why its success rate means the least.

Start with fixed to see the pessimistic case, then switch to flexible to see what being willing to adjust actually buys you.

Both, and this is the most important thing on the page. The flexible strategies can't run out of money because they cut your spending instead. A success rate only ever counts portfolios hitting zero, so it scores those strategies perfectly while saying nothing about the income you actually lived on.

So Fuego tracks the leanest year in every surviving cycle and shows it next to the rate. "100% success, and in the worst cycle you were living on 53% of plan" is the honest sentence. Whether that trade is acceptable is a question about your life, not your portfolio — but you can't make it if the number is hidden.

It's in the worst-cycle tile under “How it played out”. For the cycles that failed, it's when the balance first dropped below half what you retired with, and when it finally hit zero. The gap between them is the point: portfolios don't fail overnight, they fall behind visibly and then limp. That gap is roughly how long you'd have had to notice and change something — but a long gap also means the plan was underwater for most of the retirement, which is why both numbers are shown rather than just the reassuring one.

Because your balance sheet records account totals. Fuego knows you have a 401(k); it has no way to know whether that 401(k) holds an index fund or a bond fund. No amount of reading your snapshots can settle it — every historical backtester asks you the same question for the same reason.

So it suggests a split from your account mix and marks it grey until you confirm it in Settings → The plan → Stocks vs bonds. It's worth two minutes: moving from 98% stocks to 60/40 can swing the result by nearly forty points. That dial is the one that feeds only the Plan — the other six also drive your dashboard.

The main one — “What another year of work buys” — has the age you retire along the bottom and sustainable annual spending up the side. The curve is what the record supports; the dashed line is what you budgeted; the coloured bar between them is the finding. Drag the marker (or focus it and use the arrow keys) to try a different retirement age. Where the curve crosses the dashed line is the earliest date your plan works.

Inside “How it played out”, each faint line is one retirement running from the day you retire; red ones hit zero. The solid line is the median and the band holds the middle 80%. Under it, the ribbon gives one block per year you could have retired in — that's the part worth studying, because the failures cluster in specific eras rather than scattering. Hover or tab a block to trace that year's line. The dollar scale is logarithmic because outcomes span two orders of magnitude.

Yes — leaving it out isn't conservative, it's wrong. If you retire at 50 and claim at 67, benefits cover a large share of the back half of a long retirement, and omitting them can turn a workable plan into a scary one. Enter the annual amount in today's money and the age it starts, and the engine carries it from the right year of your retirement. One caveat: US Social Security has a cost-of-living adjustment, so a real figure is right for it. Many private pensions don't — a fixed one loses roughly a third of its purchasing power over thirty years, so enter it lower than its face value.

Because that's what "a plan that works" usually means on the historical record. A withdrawal rate safe enough to survive 1929 leaves you enormously wealthy in every ordinary decade. It's a real finding, not a promise: the median is the middle of a very wide range, and the whole point of the page is the bottom of that range. But if you're on track to leave far more than you intend to, the lever is spending more or retiring sooner — not saving harder.

Yes — Fuego has free standalone calculators that need no account and no snapshots: your FI number, Coast FIRE, safe withdrawal rate, and mortgage payoff vs. invest. They answer one question each with numbers you type in. The Plan page is the one that uses your own history — start with a calculator if you just want a figure, and come back to the Plan when you want to know whether it would have held.

Taxes, healthcare and ACA subsidies, long-term care, and spending that changes as you age. Returns are real (inflation-adjusted) throughout, rebalanced annually, with the withdrawal taken at the start of each year. Set your retirement spending as a gross figure to account for tax. And read the result as how often a plan like yours would have worked in the past — never as the probability that yours will. It's education, not financial advice.

Yes — Settings → Your data → Import a spreadsheet (the editor also offers it when your sheet is still empty). It reads .xlsx and CSV, tries every sheet in a workbook and picks the one shaped like a net-worth table, understands accounts-down-the-side × quarters-across-the-top as well as date/account/value rows, respects your Assets/Liabilities sections, skips your Total rows, and consolidates monthly columns to quarter ends. You review everything — every account, every quarter total — before one number is saved, and importing never overwrites a quarter you've already logged.

Never any bank linking — you type (or import) your own numbers, which is exactly why the ritual works. As a guest everything stays in your browser; with a free account it syncs encrypted to your login. The whole story is on the Privacy page, written to be read.

It comes with you — everything you entered as a guest migrates into the account on your first sign-in. Nothing to export or re-type.

The core is free and stays free. No ads, no data selling, and no upgrade required to see or keep your own numbers — save them, sync them, export them to PDF or Excel, or delete the lot, all without paying. Some free plans elsewhere let you build a projection and then lose it when you close the tab; yours is still here next quarter. The honest catch is scope, not access: Fuego is built and hosted by one person, so it deliberately does less than a venture-funded app and moves at one person’s pace.

Record them anyway. A flat quarter is real data — it's what makes the up-quarters mean something. What Fuego will flag is a quarter where every market-driven balance is identical to the cent to the previous one — that's the signature of a carried-over quarter nobody updated, not of a calm market.

Nothing special: at the next close, the asset's row gets $0 (or delete it from that quarter with the cell's trashcan) and the proceeds show up wherever they landed — cash, brokerage. Net worth barely moves, which is the truth: you converted an asset, you didn't create one.

Add it in the editor ("Add asset") — it lands in the quarter you're recording. Earlier quarters simply show a dash for it, which is accurate: it didn't exist then. Use the row's ＋ Add to fill any quarter where it did.

Then that's the starting line, and the app is built for it — the trend, the debrief and the "In the black" milestone all handle negative net worth. Watching the line climb toward zero is its own kind of motivating.

Then ignore the FIRE math and enjoy the rest — keeping honest tabs on your money is for everyone, not just the early-retirement crowd. At its core Fuego is simply a private, quarterly balance sheet: every account in one place, trends over time, a Year in Review, exports when you need them. The FI number, Coast FIRE date and projections are there when you're curious — and easy to ignore when you're not.

Record the most recent closed quarter first — that revives your dashboard. Then, if you can reconstruct them, backfill the missed ones from statements. If you can't, a gap is survivable; the trend interpolates visually and you'll get a gentle flag about the hole in case you want to fill it.

The currency setting changes the symbol and formatting, not your digits — Fuego never converts values. If you genuinely move currencies, re-enter future quarters in the new one and keep history as it was.