Try your money what ifs without a subscription or linked accounts

By Hannah, founder of Spend Enough. November 11, 2026

If you use Empower or a similar app, you already know where your money is today. Your accounts are linked, your net worth updates on its own, and you can see where it all went last month.

Then a question comes up. What if I quit next year? What if we pay off the house? What if we spend $10,000 more a year while the kids are little? You want to change a few numbers and see what happens, and the app that tracks your real accounts isn’t a great place to do that.

Try ideas away from your real accounts

Some of the most useful what ifs are the ones you’re not ready to say out loud. Quitting to start a business. Selling the house. Retiring five years early. You might want to play with those for a while before they show up anywhere near your actual net worth, or on a dashboard your partner also checks.

Spend Enough doesn’t connect to anything. You type in rough numbers, and they stay in your browser. Nothing gets sent to a server, there’s no account to log into, and nobody else sees what you tried. You can make up a version of your life with a different job and a smaller house, look at it for ten minutes, and close the tab.

You might only need it for a few evenings

A lot of planning tools charge every year, some over $100. That makes sense if you’re tuning a retirement plan every month. Most people aren’t. They have a decision coming up, a job change or a baby or a move, and they want to run the numbers a bunch of times in the next few weeks. Then they don’t think about it again for a long time.

Spend Enough’s free version has scenario buttons and lets you run your plan through every market period since 1926. If you want more control and more explanation, the full version is $39, paid once. There’s no subscription to forget about and no phone call to cancel anything. When the next big decision comes up in two years, it’s still there to use again.

What you can try

You enter what you have: savings, income, spending, and the age you’d like to stop working. You don’t need exact figures. The numbers from your Empower dashboard rounded off are plenty.

Then pick a shortcut button and fill in a couple of ages or amounts:

• Take time off, then go back
• Go part time for a while
• Spend more for a while
• Buy a home later, or sell the house later
• A bad decade in the market right when you retire

Each one shows the range of outcomes next to the version where nothing changes, so you can see how much that one choice moves things. Try one, undo it, try another. None of it touches anything real.

What it doesn’t do

Spend Enough isn’t a replacement for your budgeting software. It doesn’t track your spending or your accounts, and it doesn’t know your life. Its tax math is a rough estimate. It doesn’t model healthcare costs before Medicare, required minimum distributions, or Roth conversions. If you’re fine tuning those, a subscription planner or a financial planner is the better fit.

It’s for the earlier question, when you just want to know roughly what a decision would do and how it compares to the other options.