How do I experiment with a goal? (Lifetime Planner)

If you want to see what would happen to your overall plan if you changed a life event goal or assumption, you can create a temporary scenario. When you're finished setting up the scenario, Quicken displays its effects on your overall plan in the What If dialog. If you like the changes, you can save them to your plan. If you don't like the changes (or they don't improve your plan), you can go back to your original plan.

Click the Planning tab.
Click the Lifetime Planner button.
Click Explore What Ifs.
In the What If dialog, choose a goal type (Retirement, College, Special expense, Home purchase).
On the left, choose either a What if scenario to play with or an assumption to modify.
In the dialog that appears, enter information about this goal.
Click Done to return to the What If dialog and view the effects of changing this goal.
Do one of the following:
- Click Reset What If to remove all temporary changes and start over.
- Click Save What If as Plan to save the change to your Lifetime Plan.
- Click Close Without Saving to remove all temporary changes and close the What If dialog.

Notes

The most important decisions in your plan are your savings rate, retirement age, life expectancy, and return on investments.

The other two large effects, taxes and inflation, are conditions you have to live with in the real world. You should be realistic and conservative in estimating values in your plan for these important forces. Don't try to make your plan work by decreasing the inflation or tax rate below what experts reasonably expect.