Your non-retirement assets, referred to as regular assets in MaxiFi Planner, are brokerage or saving account balances that MaxiFi uses to help smooth your discretionary spending. Each plan you create is going to show regular assets with its own unique saving and withdraw pattern. You can view this annual saving/withdraw pattern in the Saving > Regular Asset Saving Plan report.

The pattern of saving and dissaving may at first appear to be arbitrary or random: for example, it might indicate that you should be saving different amounts for several years, then withdrawing for a year, then saving for another 4 years, then withdraw for 6 years, etc. However, this unique saving and withdraw pattern is an important element in keeping your discretionary spending smooth year over year. In other words, the program is not trying to smooth your regular asset saving or withdraw, it's instead trying to smooth your annual spending.  

What if I want to save $1000 per month into my non-retirement taxable assets?

The best practice, initially anyway, is to let the program calculate the saving/withdraw pattern related to Regular Assets for you so that you can see what your natural, annual, smooth, safe spending allowance is before you start trying to manipulate that annual spending amount by saving more than is needed to create the smooth, sustainable, safe spending level. 

After seeing that smooth spending allowance (discretionary spending), then look at your Saving > Regular Asset Saving Plan report to see what the annual saving/withdraw pattern looks like.

Next, how to handle a desire to specify regular asset contributions or saving may have different solutions depending on the motive or purpose for doing so and context of your planning model.

  1. If you want to save this money up to some specific balance level (say until you accumulate $10,000 as a backup) then you could use the Reserve Fund feature. But with a reserve fund, the accumulated saving is never spent. It's an emergency fund. It remains in reserve for the life of your model or until in some future year you switch it back to a non reserve fund. 
  2. If you want to save some amount for a future expense--say you are saving up for a $10,000 vacation 7 years from now--then the best way to model this is to enter a $10,000 special expense 7 years from the current year and the saving/withdraw pattern will show you what saving is needed each year to provide for this expense, and your annual discretionary spending will be smooth through the year of this expense.
  3. If you want to save in order to lower your discretionary spending for a period of time and then raise your discretionary spending later, there are a few things you can do described below.
    1. You can contribute more to your retirement accounts or create a Roth and contribute there, but remember that using a qualified account to save assumes that your withdraws are after age 59.5 and unless you use "special withdraws" the amount you put into these accounts will come out as "smooth withdraws" per the assumptions you use in Settings and Assumptions > Retirement Accounts. Furthermore, this approach may not lower your near-term spending. It will move your regular assets over to qualified retirement assets. 
    2. You can simply save the money (i.e., not spend it)--the $1000 per month in this example--from your discretionary spending and think of this extra saving (in addition to what the Annual Saving and Withdraw Report is showing) as the way that you are using your annual discretionary spending allowance. In effect, you are just not spending the full annual spending allowance and rolling this saving into next year's regular asset balance when you update your plan in the new year.
    3. You can go to Settings > Living Standard > and adjust the index there to raise your far term spending by some percentage such as 115% starting in some future year to the the end  of the plan. This will lower spending in the near term. 
    4. If you are simply wanting to lower your annual spending allowance this year and every year, you can go to Settings > Estate and limit or lower your discretionary spending. This will lower your discretionary spending and leave the excess in your estate.  

Summary

What you choose to do has a lot to do with what you want to do with this extra saving. Is it for a reserve fund to never spend? Is it ear-marked for some future special expense such as a car or vacation? Should it be going into a Roth? Or do you really want to tighten your spending belt for a period of years so that you have a future period of years with a higher spending allowance? If this last question describes you, one approach not described above is to use the "living standard adjustment" feature in Settings > Living Standard. However, most people want a smooth annual living standard (economics research backs this up) and that they want to make the decision to live below their means (by saving more or withdrawing less) or beyond their means (by saving less or withdrawing more) on a year-by-year basis as described above rather than locking such decisions into the model using the living standard adjustment feature.


So this is the design of the program: Instead of putting saving on auto-pilot (so to speak), MaxiFi puts spending on smooth pilot and creates an irregular saving/withdraw pattern that is in service of smooth optimal spending, not a spending pattern in service of smooth saving.