Running a What If simulation

Most financial decisions for variable-income operators come down to one question: can I afford this if next month is slow? The What If Simulator answers that question with your actual numbers and your actual allocation rules — not a generic affordability calculator.

Every simulation runs in a sandbox. Nothing you do in the simulator changes a real reserve, a real transaction, or your live allocation rules. You can model the same scenario fifteen ways before committing to anything.

When to use it

• Before raising a floor. Will Survival actually fill in a typical month if I bump it from $4,000 to $5,500?
• Before committing to an ad spend. If I add $3,000/month of ads to Growth, what happens if revenue stays flat?
• Before a big personal purchase. If I draw $8,000 from Lifestyle next month, when does it refill?
• Before a slow season. Run last year's slow-quarter income against this year's allocation — would you survive?
• Before quitting a side project. Strip income source X. How long until reserves cross dangerous thresholds?

Setting up a simulation

1. Open Tools → What If Simulator.
2. Pick a starting state. Default is your current reserve balances; you can also load any past month's snapshot.
3. Add hypothetical income events. Each event has an amount, a date, and an optional confidence label (Confirmed / Likely / Speculative).
4. Add hypothetical expense events. Same fields, plus a target reserve.
5. Optionally tweak allocation rules just for the simulation — different floors, different surplus rules, Lean Month thresholds.
6. Click Run simulation. The system replays the scenario day-by-day and renders the results.

What the output shows

Three views, all of the same simulation:

• Reserve trajectories. A line per reserve, showing the balance over the simulation window. You can see exactly when Survival drops under floor and how long it stays there.
• Allocation flow. A waterfall chart for each income event showing where every dollar landed, in priority order.
• Warning timeline. Every "below floor", "below 25%", and "below zero" warning the system would have fired during the scenario. Useful for spotting fragile spots you didn't expect.

Plus a one-line summary verdict — "Survives", "Fragile", or "Breaks" — based on whether any reserve goes negative without recovery during the window.

Three useful simulations

The slow-quarter stress test

Goal: see if you can survive your last bad quarter at this year's spending level.

Setup: load last year's slowest 90 days of income, but use this year's reserve floors and allocation rules. Run for 90 days. If reserves stay positive, your floors are calibrated. If Survival or Business Ops goes negative, you need to either raise them now or cut fixed costs.

The new-ad-spend test

Goal: see what happens if you add $3,000/month to Growth without revenue lifting yet.

Setup: clone your typical month's income (Confirmed only), add $3,000/month of Growth expense for three months, leave revenue flat. Watch when Growth's floor is breached. If the simulator ends with Growth below 50% and Lifestyle paused, the ad spend isn't sustainable yet — wait for revenue to grow first.

The big-invoice landing test

Goal: see how a $25K invoice would distribute under current rules.

Setup: add a single $25K income event next month, no other changes. The waterfall chart shows you whether the surplus mostly lands in Wealth (probably the right answer), or whether you should set up new Surplus Allocation Rules first to capture some of it for Growth.

Applying simulator changes for real

The simulator can't move real money, but it can export the rules it tested:

1. If you tweaked floors or surplus rules in the simulation, the output panel offers an Apply rules button.
2. Clicking it copies those rules into your live allocation settings (with a confirmation step).
3. Income events and expense events stay in the sandbox — they're never applied to real balances.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Only running optimistic scenarios. Run the slow-quarter stress test before the big-invoice test. The downside surprises matter more than the upside ones.
• Ignoring confidence labels. If you mark every income event "Confirmed", you'll get a rosier simulation than reality. Be honest about what's actually committed.
• Tweaking too many variables at once. Change floors or add ad spend, not both. Otherwise you can't tell which change broke the system.
• Forgetting tax pre-skim. The simulator applies it automatically, but operators sometimes forget that 30% of every income event is reserved before anything else flows. Surplus is always smaller than the headline number.
• Treating the verdict as gospel. "Survives" doesn't mean comfortable; "Fragile" doesn't mean doomed. Read the warning timeline, not just the verdict.

What to do next

• Run the slow-quarter stress test once a quarter. Calendar it.
• If a simulation suggests new rules, read Setting Surplus Allocation Rules before applying.
• Use Lean Month Mode trigger settings inside the simulator to test how your trigger thresholds would have behaved on past data.
• Save useful simulations to Tools → What If → Saved scenarios for re-running quarterly.

The simulator isn't predicting the future. It's giving you a 90-second answer to "could I survive this?" — which is the question that matters most when income is unpredictable.