Turn Your Spending History Into a Household Plan

Step 1: Export or list your recent spending

Pull three to six months of categorized spending from wherever it lives now: a Monarch export, a bank CSV, or a spreadsheet. Monarch does well at shared household transaction tracking, so its history is a good starting point. More months give a better read on irregular bills; fewer is fine to start.

• Keep the export as a file; you can import supported files into PeakWorth
• Note which accounts each partner's spending comes from
• Flag transfers between your own accounts so they are not read as spending

Step 2: Turn history into household targets

Average each category across the months you exported, then adjust for anything you know is changing. Write annual bills (insurance, tuition, gifts) as a monthly amount so the plan is not surprised by them.

• Shared costs first: housing, utilities, groceries, childcare
• Then each partner's discretionary categories
• Round to amounts you would actually agree to as a household

Check the history before projecting it forward

Review several months of category spending where available. Separate transfers from expenses, include irregular bills, and check that imported transactions are not duplicated by connected accounts or manual actuals. PeakWorth provides its own monthly plan and actual-spending review; keeping another budgeting subscription is optional.

How PeakWorth turns your Monarch savings rate into a dated FI Age

Monarch tells you, precisely, how much you saved this month — that's exactly the input PeakWorth builds on. Feed PeakWorth the savings rate and account balances you can read straight off your Monarch dashboard, and it runs a year-by-year deterministic projection to age 95 (federal + state taxes, employer match, Social Security, inflation, dual incomes modeled separately).

The result is your FI Age: the year your portfolio reaches ~25× the expenses it must cover after Social Security — roughly 20× your total annual expenses. That turns Monarch's accurate 'where did our money go this month' into 'given that pace, here's the year we reach independence' — and shows exactly how many years sooner you'd get there by lifting the savings rate Monarch is already measuring.