The dashboard opens with a verdict: one readiness score, the four numbers behind it, and where each one leads.

The wall of cards problem​

Most planning tools — ours included, until now — greet you with a grid of equal-weight cards. Retirement age here, a portfolio chart there, savings rate, a runway figure, an asset-allocation donut, and a what-if panel folded away at the bottom. Everything is present, but nothing is foreground. The one thing you came to find out — are you on track? — has to compete with a dozen other numbers for your attention. So you squint, you scroll, you do the arithmetic in your head, and you leave a little less sure than you'd like.

The deeper miss is that a dashboard like that is read-only. It tells you where you are, but not what it would take to change it. The most natural next thought — what if I retired two years earlier? what if I saved another $300 a month? — sends you off to a separate screen, if it's answerable at all.

A dashboard that opens with the answer​

Mission Control flips the order. The retirement-readiness score is the hero: a single number from 0 to 100, colour-banded and captioned in plain language — "On track. Your plan funds spending through life expectancy. Retiring at 65 is achievable." No interpretation required.

One number, and the four that justify it​

Beside the gauge sit the four figures that explain the verdict, each a doorway to the detail behind it:

• Retire at — your target age and whether it's funded.
• Net worth today — what you're worth now, and what that grows to by retirement (here, $1.08M → +$2.53M projected by 65).
• Free cash / mo — what's left over each month after tax, expenses, and debt, with your savings rate.
• Runway — how long the money lasts, and whether it lasts for life.

They never disagree with the gauge. If your plan technically scores well but the money runs short late in life, the verdict won't claim "On track" — it steps down to "Tight," so the headline, the colour, and the tiles always tell one honest story.

The live "What if…"​

This is the part that changes how the dashboard feels. A slim What if… bar sits right under the verdict with three levers — retire at, extra savings per month, and retirement spending.

Three levers. Drag one and the entire dashboard recomputes from the real projection engine.

Drag a lever and the whole page responds at once — the gauge re-scores, the verdict rewrites, every tile updates, the chart redraws, the milestones shift, the metrics recompute. And it isn't a back-of-the-envelope estimate: each tug re-runs the same projection engine that produces your actual plan, accounting for tax, government benefits, contribution room, and your real withdrawal order. A scenario badge appears so you always know you're looking at a hypothetical, and Reset to plan snaps everything back.

See the cost, not just the score​

Numbers tell you whether; the chart tells you by how much. The lifetime portfolio scrubber stacks your investable accounts by type and lets you scrub year by year from today through life expectancy. The moment you open a scenario, a dashed "current plan" line is laid over the live bars — so the trade-off is drawn, not described.

Retire at 58 instead of 65? The scenario bars fall below the dashed current-plan line — the gap is the cost, drawn.

Pull retirement forward to 58 and you can see exactly what it costs: the bars peak lower and sooner, the retirement marker slides to 2044, and the space between your scenario and the dashed plan line is the wealth you'd be trading for those extra years. Underneath, a milestones rail marks the moments that matter — mortgage-free, your portfolio doubling, retirement, and when funds run out or last — and clicking any one jumps the chart straight to that year.

Why it's worth using​

• You get the verdict in one second, not after a scroll. The score and its caption are the first thing on the page.
• You can answer your own "what ifs" without leaving the screen. Work longer, save more, spend less — see the effect on every number live.
• What you see is real. Scenarios run through the actual engine, so a hopeful slider can't paper over tax or a depletion the plan would actually hit.
• The trade-offs are visual. The dashed plan overlay turns an abstract "you'd have less" into a gap you can point at.

Retirement planning is most useful when it's a conversation, not a report. Mission Control makes the dashboard the place you have that conversation — ask a question, drag a lever, read the answer, and reset.

Changelog · FEAT-028

• A verdict-first dashboard replaces the previous card-grid body in place at /dashboard: a readiness-gauge hero, four verdict tiles, an inline what-if lever bar, the lifetime portfolio scrubber with a current-plan baseline overlay, a milestones rail, and a key-metrics strip (src/app/(app)/dashboard/dashboard-content.tsx, src/components/dashboard/{readiness-hero,what-if-bar,portfolio-scrubber,dashboard-milestones}.tsx).
• Surface, don't compute. Every figure reads existing projection output — the readiness score (computeReadinessScore), dashboardMetrics, fund-depletion age, and the per-account composition from ADR-0028 — and the live what-if reuses the existing POST /api/projection recompute (WhatIfOverrides). No new engine, schema, or ADR.
• A single scenario state drives the gauge, tiles, chart, milestones, and metrics together, so a lever drag never leaves a stale figure; a dashed current-plan line overlays the scrubber whenever a scenario diverges; an owner filter re-scopes the portfolio by household member.
• Milestone derivation is unit-tested (deriveDashboardMilestones); the full suite stays green (1,193 tests).

"This year, in flow," for a working-age household at age 45 — the whole year in one column.

The job: see the whole year, decide once​

When you sit down to review your money for the year, you have one question underneath all the others: after everything I owe and everything I've committed to, what's actually mine to direct — and where should it go?

The old panel answered the first half. It showed income minus tax minus expenses, told you whether you were in surplus, and tucked the details behind a "view breakdown" link. To answer the second half — how much room is left in your RRSP, what your tax is actually made of, how your mortgage fits — you had to leave the page. So we rebuilt it. Everything that decides your year now lives in one scrollable column, no drill-in.

The story it tells: income meets your needs first; the rest is yours​

The spine of the panel is a waterfall. It reads top to bottom like a sentence: your gross income, then each thing that has first claim on it, and finally what survives — your free cash flow — split into where it's going.

Gross → taxes → expenses → debt service → free cash → saved → prepay → unallocated.

Three things have first claim, and they're shown as deductions before free cash — because they aren't choices you make this month:

• Taxes — income tax plus payroll.
• Expenses — your living costs.
• Debt service — the scheduled payment on your loans and mortgage, principal and interest together.

What's left — free cash flow — is the number the rest of the panel is about. The bar then partitions it into what you're saving, any extra debt prepayment, and the unallocated surplus that's still yours to direct.

How to use it: read it top to bottom​

1. Glance at the four vitals. After-tax income, free cash per month, your effective tax rate (with marginal alongside), and your savings rate. The health check, in one row.
2. Follow the waterfall. See what's committed and what survives. Free cash is the emphasised pivot — everything below explains it.
3. Check the receipts. The side-by-side Inflows / Outflows ledger itemises every source and cost, each with a monthly figure and a share — including the debt-service line, so nothing is hidden in "expenses."
4. Decide where the surplus goes. The Where free cash goes bar and the contribution room remaining meters turn the number into an action: there's $26,560 of registered room still open — enough to shelter most of the surplus.
5. Move the age slider. Every figure re-renders for the selected year. The panel sits beside the lifetime chart, so you watch the bars and the breakdown move together.

"Where free cash goes" — the discretionary half of the story, prepayment included.

And because the question "why is my tax that big?" always comes next, the tax figure is broken into its parts — federal, provincial, CPP, EI — that sum exactly to what you paid.

Tax composition — the levers a planner reaches for, made visible.

The intent: why it's built this way​

Planner-grade density, not a wall of numbers​

We explored five treatments — from a pure statement ledger to a terminal-style dashboard — and landed on this hybrid. A waterfall carries the narrative so a household gets it at a glance; a dense ledger and the planning sections carry the precision so an advisor never has to leave the screen. Story first, density second.

Debt, modelled honestly​

The most important decision in this redesign is how debt is treated — and it mirrors how the projection engine already works.

• Committed · debt service — your scheduled payment (principal + interest) is subtracted before free cash: a band in the waterfall and a line in the ledger. It's never folded into "expenses," so your living costs stay clean and comparable.
• Discretionary · prepayment — only extra principal you choose to add from surplus appears in "where free cash goes." It's the one debt decision that's genuinely yours to make this year.

Showing the whole payment as both an expense and a place your surplus goes would count it twice. Splitting committed service from discretionary prepayment is what keeps the waterfall honest.

Every number is real​

Nothing on the panel is estimated in the browser. The debt-service split, the tax breakdown, and your remaining contribution room are all computed server-side from the same engine that runs your projection — so the panel and your long-term plan can never disagree.

In retirement, the same panel shifts to a "how this year is funded" view — pensions and portfolio withdrawals against your spending need — in the identical shell, so the page never feels like a different tool before and after you retire.

Lifetime cash flow — GIS stacked with CPP and OAS across every year of retirement.

For lower-income Canadian retirees, the Guaranteed Income Supplement can be worth more than $13,000 a year, entirely tax-free. But it's income-tested: every dollar drawn from an RRSP or RRIF can claw it back — and the mandatory RRIF minimum that kicks in at 72 can erase thousands of it in a single year.

Most planning tools don't model GIS at all. So the most consequential trade-off a low-income retiree faces stays invisible — until it's too late to plan around.

GIS now lives inside your projection​

WealthPath estimates your entitlement for every year of retirement — single or couple — using the published income-tested schedule, recalculated as your income changes and indexed to inflation. It sits right in your income waterfall, so the benefit and the withdrawals that erode it finally live in one place.

Income-tested, recalculated every year​

Each year's GIS is estimated from your projected income using the published reduction schedule — about $1 less for every $2 of non-OAS income. WealthPath applies the single rate, or the combined-income couple rate when both partners receive OAS, then indexes the maximum to inflation. Non-taxable, and updated automatically as your plan changes.

The full calculation trail — GIS estimated for each year, beside CPP and OAS.

See the RRSP/RRIF trade-off​

GIS appears as its own band in your cash-flow chart and a column in the full calculation trail, stacked alongside CPP and OAS. The moment a withdrawal pushes your income up, you can watch the benefit shrink — no spreadsheets, no guesswork, just the real cost of a drawdown decision.

Get warned before it's gone​

When projected RRIF minimums are set to reduce or eliminate your GIS, WealthPath flags it — with the age it starts, the dollars at stake, and the lever to fix it: draw down earlier, or hold more in a TFSA to keep taxable income low.

An automatic alert when mandatory RRIF minimums will erode your GIS.

Changelog · GIS (FEAT-002 §1)

• New entitlement model — single ($13,042.56/yr) and couple-both-OAS ($7,850.76/yr) maxima, 2025-anchored, inflation-indexed.
• Computed per year in both single and household projections; testable income = net income excluding OAS.
• Surfaced in the All-Data table, lifetime totals, and the cash-flow income chart; treated as non-taxable throughout.
• Automatic RRIF→GIS erosion warning with the onset age and annual amount at risk.
• 16 new unit + integration tests; full suite green (lint, types, build, e2e).