How Reign calculates your numbers

Overview

Every number you see in Reign, including your FI number, your projected retirement age, and your health score, comes from a deterministic formula running on data you entered or connected. Reign's AI (Google Gemini) never computes or invents a number; it only writes the sentences around numbers the code already calculated. This page explains those formulas exactly, including the assumptions built into them and the ones you can change.

Your FI number

Financial independence, or FI, means you've saved and invested enough that you could stop working for an income and still cover your living expenses for the rest of your life, funded by withdrawals from your portfolio instead of a paycheck. Your FI number is the size of that portfolio: how much you'd need saved to make that possible. The formula:

FI number = monthly spending × 12 × multiplier

Most FI calculators use a flat 25× (the 4% rule) regardless of when you retire. Reign adjusts the multiplier based on how early you're retiring. A 30-year-old retiring at 45 needs their money to last much longer than someone retiring at 65, and a longer horizon needs a lower, more conservative withdrawal rate:

Example: $5,000/month in spending, retiring at 50 → $5,000 × 12 × 29 = $1,740,000.

Your projected retirement age

This isn't a single formula. It's a search. Reign projects your assets forward month by month (compounding at your assumed investment return, plus your monthly contributions and any debt paydown) and finds the first month where your projected assets cross the FI number for that specific age, since, as above, the target itself depends on what age you'd be retiring at. Real per-debt interest rates and minimum payments (from Plaid, or what you enter manually) are paid down using the avalanche method, highest interest rate first, before the leftover surplus goes toward investing. Your mortgage is the one exception: it stays on its own stated schedule rather than competing in the avalanche order, since paying it off early isn't always the highest-value use of extra cash the way it usually is for higher-rate debt.

Assumptions you can edit

Every projection rests on assumptions about the future, and Reign doesn't hide them. Wherever you see a projection, you can open the assumptions behind it and change:

• Expected annual investment return (default 6%)
• Home appreciation rate (default 3.5%), and whether home equity counts toward your net worth chart
• Interest rate and remaining term on each debt, when you don't know the real numbers (defaults come from typical rates per debt type: mortgage, auto, student loan, credit card)

Change any of these, and every number on the page (your FI age, your chart, your health score) recalculates immediately from the new assumption. There's no hidden “true” answer being approximated. The projection is only ever as good as the assumptions feeding it, so you should be able to see and challenge every one of them.

What about Social Security?Coming soon

Your FI number currently does not factor in Social Security, even if you've told Reign your expected benefit. This is a deliberate choice, not an oversight. Properly modeling Social Security means modeling an actual retirement drawdown: a bridge period before you claim, then a blended income source after. Reign doesn't simulate spend-down after retirement yet, only accumulation toward a target. Folding in an estimated benefit against a target that isn't actually simulating that phase would make the number look easier to hit than the underlying model can really support. Your estimated benefit is still calculated and shown elsewhere for reference; it just isn't subtracted from what you need to save. We'll factor it in once real drawdown modeling ships.

A range, not a single guess

Markets don't return the same percentage every year. Where you see a shaded range around your projection line, that band comes from running your numbers through hundreds of simulated versions of the future (a Monte Carlo simulation), each drawing a different random annual return from a realistic distribution centered on your assumed return with typical year-to-year variability. The line is the average outcome; the band is the spread, a reminder that any single projected age is an estimate, not a guarantee.

Your financial health score

A 0–100 score built from five weighted components:

1. How much you're saving relative to income
2. How many months of spending you hold in cash
3. How much high-interest (credit card) debt you're carrying
4. How much of your income goes to debt payments
5. Whether you're on pace for your stated goal

Each component only counts toward your score when Reign actually has real data for it. A category with no data isn't silently scored as zero, and if fewer than three of the five components are computable at all, Reign shows “not enough data” rather than a confident-looking number built on guesses. A wrong number with high confidence is worse than an honest “we don't know yet.”

What the AI does and doesn't do

Reign uses Google Gemini to write the narrative around your numbers: the observations, the plain-language explanation of your health score, the weekly brief. The AI is given your already-computed figures and told to write about them, never to calculate or alter them. On your Outlook and weekly brief, every generated narrative is automatically checked against the real numbers before it's shown to you, and rejected and regenerated once if it cites a figure that doesn't match. This is a safeguard against the AI drifting onto a plausible-sounding but wrong number in prose. Chat responses stream to you live, so they're checked after the fact rather than gated before you see them; we're working toward the same pre-send guarantee there. As with any AI-generated content, outputs may occasionally contain errors; the underlying calculations described on this page do not depend on the AI and are unaffected by this risk.

Not financial advice

Reign is not a licensed financial advisor, and nothing it surfaces is personalized investment or financial advice. It's a planning and monitoring tool. The observations, projections, and recommendations are informational, meant to help you think, not a substitute for a professional when you need one. Reign never recommends specific securities and never moves, withdraws, or has the ability to touch your money. See our Privacy Policy for how account access works.