FAQ - Your Pocket Planner

Getting Started

A tool that builds a plan for your finances, made by Canadians, for Canadians. You enter your numbers and get a personalized Financial Game Plan: where you stand, the moves that matter most, and what the future might look like. It isn't a budgeting app or a robo-advisor.

Your Pocket Planner does three things:

✓We make money stuff simple and sort out the complexity of your finances.
✓We tell you how to make the best decisions you can make with your money.
✓We help you actually do the work to stay on track through the years as your life changes.

Most Canadians carry a quiet worry about money. Not just retirement, but the mortgage, the savings, the debt, the kids, the job, the whole picture. If that sounds familiar, and you've never had anyone sit down and give you a straight answer about it, you're who we built this for. The current system rewards people who already have a lot, and this is for everyone else. Someone with $10,000 deserves the same care and guidance as someone with $10,000,000.

About an hour to get started. We'll ask you about income, savings, accounts, debts and goals, and we walk you through the whole thing. That hour gets you a plan, though, not a finish line. This is a lifelong journey, your life keeps changing and your plan should change with it, and we're with you every step of the way.

Nope. Rough numbers are fine: balances, income, debts. We explain everything in as plain language as we can, so no finance background needed. If a term comes up that you haven't seen before, that's on us to explain, not on you to know. Just ask. Our whole reason for being is to make this as easy as we can for you.

Fair question, and honestly, you should always be careful about who you trust with your finances. What we can tell you is this: the methodology is built on the same CFP body of knowledge used by Canada's Certified Financial Planners, our founders are an ex-advisor (CFA and CFP) and a software security engineer, and the numbers are calculated from real tax and benefit rules, not guessed. We make money only from subscriptions, so there's nothing for us to sell you and no products to push. Probably the simplest thing to do is start with the free snapshot and judge the quality for yourself before you pay us anything.

The Financial Game Plan

It's a one-page, easy to read document that tells you the most important things you need to know about your finances. It answers three questions, in order. Where do we stand today: your net worth, your household income, what you're putting away, and your Financial Health Score out of 100. What should we do next: your top three moves, ranked, with the reasoning behind each one. And are we going to be okay: the income your plan supports, how long the money lasts, and how confident we are in that. It's one page, on purpose, so you can take the whole thing in at a glance. Paid plans add execution support on top of that: step-by-step guidance on each move, and a plan that updates as your life changes.

It's as accurate as we can make it given the numbers you give us. We use current CPP and OAS rates, actual provincial tax brackets, realistic market assumptions and your real balances, and every assumption is shown so you can see exactly what we did. Keep in mind, and this is really important, a projection is an estimate, not a guarantee. Nobody can tell you what the future actually holds, or what will actually happen. Any projection you ever see is only a guess, but consider ours to be an honest and very well-educated guess.

A score out of 100 that looks at your whole financial picture, weighted so the things that matter most count most. Retirement is 40 of the 100, split between how well funded your plan is and how it holds up when markets go badly. Remember, practically every financial decision you make affects retirement, so retirement readiness is a good barometer of overall financial health. The other 60 covers the foundations: cash flow, tax planning, risk management, estate planning, and how your investments are put together. Think of it less as a grade and more as a diagnostic. It shows you where you're strong and where there's room to improve. And if we don't know something about you yet, we leave it out rather than scoring you a zero for it, so the number reflects what we actually know. Most people start somewhere in the middle with a clear path to a better number, so if that's where you land, you're right where most people are.

Yes, on any paid plan. Free gives you a one-time snapshot of where you stand, plus your single most important move. Paid members can refresh whenever something changes: a new job, savings growing, goals shifting. Update a number and the whole plan recalculates around it, so you're never working off something you answered once and forgot about.

Your Data & Privacy

No. You enter your financial information yourself, so we never ask for your banking login or password. We don't sell your data or use it for advertising either. We do rely on a small set of trusted service providers to run the product, under strict confidentiality and never for their own marketing, and they're all listed in our Privacy Policy.

Yes. Your information is encrypted both in transit and at rest. The service providers we rely on to run the product are listed in our Privacy Policy.

You do. We don't share your individual financial details with financial institutions, advisors, or anyone else for their own use. A small number of service providers process data on our behalf to run the product, under confidentiality terms and never to market to you, and our Privacy Policy lists them.

You can delete your account anytime from your account menu, and your plan and everything in it is permanently deleted when you do. The one thing we hang onto is your email address, so that we know not to contact you again.

No. We make money from subscription fees paid by people like you who use our product. Period.

Pricing & Plans

Free gives you the whole picture plus your first move: your Financial Health Score, your retirement outlook, where you stand today, and the single most important thing to do about it, explained in full and all in plain language. It's a real, useful picture, not a teaser. Paid unlocks your other two moves, adds the step-by-step help to actually get each of them done, and keeps the plan updating as your life changes. Our Pricing page has the full breakdown if you want to compare them side by side.

Three tiers, and which one you get depends on when you join. The first 100 members are Founding Pioneers: year 1 free, then $99/year while active. Members 101 to 500 are Early Members: $99/year while active, with a 60-day free trial for waitlist signups and 30 days for everyone else. From 501+, Standard pricing is $249/year (subject to change), with a 14-day free trial. Founding Pioneer and Early Member rates stay locked while your membership is active.

Yes. If you're a first-time subscriber, cancel within 14 days of your first paid period and you get a full refund. Just tell us and we'll sort it out.

Yes. From your account settings you'll go straight through to Stripe, where you can cancel, switch between monthly and yearly, or update your card. No fees, no phone calls, no retention loop trying to talk you out of it. If you're on monthly you keep access until the billing period ends, and if you're on annual, until your year is up.

Yes, and it depends on your tier. Founding Pioneers get their first year free. Early Members get a 60-day trial if they joined from the waitlist, or 30 days otherwise. Standard members get a 14-day trial. Separately from all of that, first-time subscribers get a 14-day money-back guarantee: cancel within 14 days of your first paid period and you get a full refund. And you don't need a credit card at all to use the free tier.

Your Situation

What we handle best right now is the usual stuff: employment income, self-employment, RRSPs, TFSAs, non-registered accounts, mortgages, pensions, personal debts. Remember, right now we're built to serve the majority of Canadians, so we made sure we built YPP to handle what most Canadians face every day.

More complex and edge cases, like significant corporate income or complicated estates, are coming. We'll still give you a useful picture there, but we'd suggest running a fee-only CFP alongside us rather than instead of us.

You'll tell us about your business income and what you're putting into registered accounts, and your self-employment income flows through the plan the same way employment income does, including the RRSP room it earns you. The corporate side, things like holdcos and estate freezes, is coming after launch, so for now that one's a conversation for your accountant or a fee-only CFP.

Yes. Joint household planning is handled right in onboarding: two incomes, shared assets and shared goals, all modelled as one household. Each of you keeps your own RRSP, TFSA, pensions and non-registered savings rather than everything landing in one pot.

Yes, anywhere in Canada except Quebec. The app is built on real federal and provincial tax rules, so it uses your own province's or territory's income tax brackets, along with the CPP, OAS, TFSA and RRSP rules and federal tax that apply right across the country. Quebec is the one exception today. It needs its own tax modelling and a Law 25 privacy review, both of which we're working through, and we'll share more as soon as that's ready.

About the Advice

Your Pocket Planner helps you build a plan for your finances. We're not a licensed advisor, and our guidance is educational. It does not constitute 'financial advice' as defined under Canadian law and regulations - that's what your typical financial advisor is. What you get is based on your inputs, plus publicly available Canadian rules and reasonable assumptions, and we tell you what they are. For the complex situations (insurance, estates, significant corporate income), we do suggest you consider using Your Pocket Planner alongside a fee-only CFP rather than just on its own.

No, and that one's deliberate. We don't recommend specific stocks, funds, or other securities, and we don't tell you to make any particular trade. It just isn't what we do. What we do is help you understand your whole financial picture and the decisions that move the needle: how much to save, which accounts to use, how to be tax-efficient, and whether your overall setup makes sense. The specific investment choices stay with you and, if you use one, your investment provider or advisor.

Advisors bring some judgment and regulatory oversight to providing investment advice. What we bring is ease, transparency, and no conflicts of interest to giving you your holistic picture. You can open up any number in your plan and see exactly how we got there, and there is nothing we are pushing or hoping you will buy. Our analytical process is built on the CFP curriculum, the same framework used by Canada's Certified Financial Planners. Our methodology is rigorous even though we're not a licensed firm. We expect many Canadians could use both: us for plain-language answers and ongoing tracking, and perhaps an advisor for any really complex decisions.

Bank tools show you scenarios inside bank products. They're not going to tell you your fees are too high, or that you might be better off somewhere else, because that was never what they were built to do. We have nothing to sell and no relationships to protect, so we can just tell you what we see, including what those fees are costing you over a working life. For a lot of people it's pretty eye-opening to finally realize that, no, they're not getting advice from their bank for free.

Wealthsimple manages your investments, which is a part of building wealth. We do something different; we figure out the big picture for you. We help you understand your whole financial life and what to actually do about it, and that includes looking at whether your investment setup is serving you well. Investments are just a piece of it. The mortgage, the kids, the tax bill, when (or whether) you can ever really stop working: those are the things that keep people up at night, and they're the things many people feel like they don't have the answer for. That's what we're here for.