How to use Runway: a step-by-step tutorial

Runway answers one question: given what I have saved, will my money last, and what should I do each year to make it last longer and cost me less tax? The app has a lot of pages, so this is the guided tour — in the order you'll actually use them, with a real example household running through every step, and a section on exactly where your data lives.

What do I need before I start?

About ten minutes and these numbers, all of which you can estimate:

• Ages or birth years for you (and your spouse, if you're planning together), and the year you plan to stop working.
• Balances by account type: cash and savings, taxable brokerage, traditional IRA/401(k), Roth IRA/401(k), and HSA. For a taxable account, your cost basis (what you paid in) helps the tax math.
• Your Social Security estimate. Runway asks for your benefit at full retirement age (your "PIA"). Your Social Security Statement lists estimated benefits; you can view it by creating a free my Social Security account on SSA.gov.
• A yearly spending number in today's dollars. If you don't have one, Pro can estimate it from your age, location, and assets.

You don't need to connect a bank, and Runway never asks for your Social Security number or account numbers. Everything is typed in by you.

Step 1: How do I enter my information?

The five steps under 1 · Your inputs in the left menu. You can go in any order, and Back/Continue buttons at the bottom walk you through them.

1. Basics. Birth years, planned retirement year, and each person's Social Security estimate and full retirement age. Choose your tax filing status and the age you want the plan to run through (the default is 95). Pro users can also set a state, so state income tax is included.
2. Accounts. One row per account: a name, its type, the balance, and who owns it. Taxable accounts also take a cost basis. Add as many as you have.
3. Other Income & Debts. Pensions, annuities, insurance payouts, rental income. For an annuity you can set what share of each payment is taxable. Pro adds planned large expenses (a new car every few years, a wedding), real estate, and other debts. Leave blank anything that doesn't apply.
4. Spending & Budget. Your yearly spending target for everyday living. Health insurance and any Roth conversion tax are calculated separately and added on top, so don't include them. Pro offers a statistics-based Lean / Comfortable / Generous starting point you can then edit line by line.
5. Market Assumptions. Expected inflation, the stock/bond mix, expected returns and how bumpy they are (volatility). The defaults are reasonable; change them only to test a different view. Pro adds an optional cash reserve.

Stuck on a term? Look for the small ? next to it — each one explains the term in plain language and links to a deeper guide where we have one. Then press Calculate my plan. After every calculation you land on the Overview.

Step 2: How do I read my results?

The Overview opens with a ring showing your chance your money lasts to your plan-through age, next to your total assets, spending target, and withdrawal rate. Below it, Today's Actions lists the few things worth acting on this year — for example a required distribution that applies, or a Social Security claiming age that may not be optimal — each with a link to the page that explains it.

To make this concrete I'll use the sample household the app loads for a new user: Pat (65) and Alex (64), married filing jointly, planning through age 95.

Here's what Runway computes for it, and where each number lives in the app:

Why $0 tax? The plan draws first from cash and then from the taxable brokerage account. Only the gain inside that withdrawal ($24,367 of the $60,917) is taxable, it's taxed at the long-term capital-gains rate, and with no other income that lands in the 0% bracket. The IRAs are left to grow. The Withdrawal Plan page explains each step in a sentence.

Step 3: What do the free planning pages show?

• Social Security. Compares claiming ages and recommends the combination with the highest expected lifetime value for you and your spouse. The trade-off is documented by the SSA: claiming before full retirement age permanently reduces your monthly benefit (see the SSA's age-reduction page). Pro unlocks the full claim-age comparison grid.
• Withdrawal Plan. This year's plan, dollar by dollar: which account each withdrawal comes from, how much, and why that order. It includes required minimum distributions (RMDs) when they apply — the IRS says you generally must start "when you reach age 73" — and your Medicare premium, including the income-related surcharge, which Medicare.gov notes can be "higher depending on your income."
• Long-Term Projection. The year-by-year path to your plan-through age: balances, taxes, withdrawals, and the healthcare and long-term-care overlays. (The Account Detail tab, Pro, shows which account funded every dollar in every year.)

Step 4: How do I stress-test my plan?

A plan that works only if markets behave isn't a plan. The What-If Scenarios page has three tabs, and they ask different questions.

• Stress Test (free). Thousands of randomized market paths. The number you want is the chance your money lasts, plus the 10th, median, and 90th-percentile ending balances (table above). Free accounts get 15 stress tests a day; Pro is unlimited. Our guide Will my money last? explains how to read these results.
• Market Crash Test (Pro). You define the crash — the age it starts, how long, how deep — and how you'd respond (spend less, pause Roth conversions), and it shows the damage against your baseline. For the sample couple, a two-year crash of −20% a year starting at age 66, with no change in behavior, takes the projected balance at the end of the plan from $1,579,976 to $11,931 — still above zero, but with almost nothing left. That is the kind of fragility one average success number can hide.
• Historical Backtest (Pro). Replays your plan from every real starting year in the data (1872 through 2025, so 125 starting years), including the awful ones. For the sample household the plan holds up in all 125; 1966 is the worst starting year in the history it tests.

For why the first years of retirement matter so much, see the 4% rule in 2026.

Step 5: How do I find a better plan?

Your Best Plan (Pro) is the headline feature. You choose what matters most, and Runway searches for it:

• Minimize lifetime tax — finds a Roth conversion bracket to fill each year that lowers the total tax you'd pay over the plan.
• Maximize sustainable spending — finds the most you could spend each year and still keep a 90% chance your money lasts.

Each result is shown next to your current plan, and one click applies it and recalculates everything. Free accounts see a short, rounded-down preview of what the search found — enough to know it's worth unlocking.

The other improvement tools:

• Retirement Year (Pro). The earliest year you could retire and still reach a 90% chance of success. It disappears once everyone in the household has reached their planned retirement age.
• Roth Conversion (Pro). Compares conversion strategies side by side. New to the idea? Start with Roth vs. traditional, then when a conversion pays off (and the free calculator).
• Healthcare (Pro). Looks up pre-65 marketplace costs and Medicare premiums by income. The ACA subsidy cliff is the trap most early retirees miss.
• Explore Your Plan (Pro). Live sliders for spending, Roth conversion bracket, claiming ages, cash reserve, and withdrawal guardrails. Nothing changes in your actual plan until you press apply, so it's the safe place to ask "what if I spent $5,000 more?"
• Saved Scenarios (Pro; free keeps one). Save "retire at 62" and "retire at 65" side by side, switch between them from the picker at the top, and compare them on one page. The app warns before it overwrites a scenario, or before you switch away from unsaved changes.

Step 6: How do I keep my plan current?

On Track (Pro) is for the long run — a plan from three years ago isn't your plan today. It has two parts.

• Update my accounts. Press the button and Runway pre-fills what your plan expects each account to be worth today, from the plan's own projection and inflation since you last updated. Change only what's different, mark an account closed, or add a new one. It shows your total and whether your existing accounts are ahead of or behind the plan, then recalculates with the new balances, ages, and an inflation-adjusted spending target. Each check-in is saved to a history. When your balances are six months old, the Overview reminds you.
• Yearly spending. Log what you actually spent and withdrew for the year and see the variance against what the plan projected.

How is my data protected?

Your balances and spending are the most personal numbers you have, so here's exactly what we do — and what we don't claim.

• Encrypted at rest. Saved plans, On Track entries, and check-ins are encrypted (AES-256) before they're written to the database, with a key kept separately from it. Someone who got a copy of the database alone would see ciphertext for that data.
• Not "we can't see it." Our servers decrypt a plan in memory to run your calculations, so the people who operate the service have access to the key. We don't access individual users' plan contents, no admin screen displays them, and we don't write the numbers you enter to our logs. But because it's technically possible, we don't claim otherwise.
• Keep your plans on your device only. In Account → Privacy & data, turn on "Keep my plans on this device only." Your plans, balances, and On Track history move into your browser and are deleted from our servers; the Save button then reads "Save on this device." Two things to know: your numbers are still sent to our server each time a calculation runs (and discarded afterward, not saved), and plans that live only in one browser vanish if you clear that browser's site data. In the same panel, "Download my data" saves a copy as a file and "Restore from a file" loads it back. You can switch back at any time.
• Download or delete, yourself. The same panel has "Download my data" (everything we hold about your account, as a file) and "Delete my account," which permanently removes your account, plans, history, and subscription. No email to support required.
• What isn't encrypted: your name and email, scenario names, dates attached to saved items, messages you send us, and basic usage records (event types and timestamps — never plan contents).

The full details, including what our hosting provider's backups may retain, are in the Privacy Policy.

What's free and what's Pro?

Every free account can start a one-time 7-day Pro trial with no credit card. Privacy controls are never behind the paywall.

How were the example numbers computed?

Every figure in this post comes from Runway's own planning engine, run on the sample household above with the planner's default market assumptions, married filing jointly, plan through age 95, no state set (so no state income tax), and Social Security claimed at the recommended ages (69 and 68). All figures are in today's dollars. The success probability, median, and percentile balances are from the Stress Test: 2,000 randomized paths with a fixed seed, so it reproduces exactly; that run excludes the optional long-term-care cost, while the year-by-year projection includes the app's default long-term-care overlay. The crash example is a deterministic projection, not a probability: −20% a year for two years starting at age 66, with spending unchanged. The historical backtest uses annual market data from 1872 through 2025. The sample household is an illustration, not a recommendation, and real results will differ with real numbers.