Money you have not told the plan to invest

Every month this plan works out what comes in, subtracts tax, then subtracts what goes out — living costs, rent, whatever a home costs to hold. What survives is yours to do something with, and until you say what, it sits in cash.

Cash is an account like any other in the projection. It has a balance you can see, it earns interest, and money is drawn from it before anything is sold.

Why it does not go into an investment account

Until 12 September 2026 it did. The engine swept everything left over into whichever account happened to be listed first, with no regard for contribution limits. A TFSA with $7,000 of room could take $63,000 in a single year, silently, and the projection would compound the result as though the CRA had allowed it.

That is a serious error in a planner. Over-contributing a TFSA is taxed at 1% a month on the excess, and a plan that quietly assumes the excess was permitted overstates what you will have — flatteringly, and by more the longer the projection runs.

It also made the contribution field on the first account do nothing. The dollars it claimed to add were already arriving by the sweep, so typing a number into it changed the label on the money and not the amount.

Now nothing enters a registered account unless you asked for it, and what you ask for is trimmed to the room you actually have.

What cash earns

The default is the Bank of Canada posted rate on non-chequable savings deposits — 0.01% at the last reading. That is what money genuinely earns sitting in an ordinary big-bank savings account, which is where most uninvested money actually is.

It is deliberately the pessimistic end of the range. A high-interest savings account paid about 2.80–2.85% on the same date. If your savings account pays more than the posted rate, change the rate — it is an input, not a rule.

When the plan mentions it

If more than a year of living costs builds up in cash, the plan says so once. That is not a judgement about holding a buffer, which is sensible. It is a flag that a large amount of money is sitting at a rate near zero because nobody has said where it should go, and that the fix is one field away.

What this changes about your projection

Net worth will be lower than it was before this change, sometimes a lot lower, and that lower number is the honest one. The gap between it and what you would have if the money were invested is the thing worth looking at: it is what your accounts are actually worth to you, made visible instead of assumed.