Move Your ProjectionLab Plan to FIYR Without Rebuilding It

You spent hours in ProjectionLab building a plan: every account, every contribution, the Social Security claim age, the Roth conversion ladder. It models beautifully. There's one problem. Your real money doesn't live in that model. It lives in your bank accounts, and those change every day while the plan sits still.

Switching to a tool that reads those accounts directly shouldn't mean rebuilding everything by hand. FIYR now imports a ProjectionLab export and turns it into a working scenario in about a minute. Here's exactly how to do it, and what to check once it lands.

How to export your data from ProjectionLab

ProjectionLab lets you export your whole account to a single JSON file. Open Account Settings, then choose Export Data. That writes a .json file with your accounts, plans, milestones and assumptions inside it.

Two things worth knowing first:

• Export is a ProjectionLab Premium feature, so you need a paid plan to get the file (ProjectionLab pricing).
• It's a first-class feature, not a workaround. ProjectionLab's own changelog describes it as the ability to "export your data to JSON anytime for backups and portability" (ProjectionLab changelog).

Save that file somewhere you can find it again. That one file is your entire plan.

How to import your ProjectionLab plan into FIYR

Open the FIRE page in FIYR. Under Scenarios, next to + Save this plan, there's an import icon. Click it, then either choose your ProjectionLab file or drag it onto the drop box.

Each plan inside your export becomes its own FIYR scenario, named PL: <your plan name>. That keeps imported scenarios clearly separate from the ones you build in FIYR, so you can line them up and compare.

The file is read on your device. Before anything else parses it, FIYR strips out your ProjectionLab plugin key and your email, so the private parts of the export never travel with the rest of the data.

What actually carries over

This is the part that saves you the afternoon. The importer maps most of a ProjectionLab plan onto its FIYR equivalent:

• Accounts — cash, taxable brokerage, 401(k), 403(b), 457, traditional and Roth IRA, HSA, 529 and crypto, each with its tax treatment and its own growth rate.
• Property and debt — homes and cars, with the loans attached to them.
• Income — salaries, side income, pensions and part-time work, brought in as take-home pay.
• Contributions — your 401(k) and HSA contributions, plus employer match.
• Social Security — including the claim age you chose.
• Tax and withdrawal detail — federal and state taxes, cost basis, Roth conversions and your withdrawal order.
• Life events — the one-off changes you scheduled along the timeline.

The number most people care about lines up too. The year you reach financial independence in ProjectionLab becomes FIYR's FI date, and FIYR tests FI the same way ProjectionLab does: liquid net worth above a multiple of your recent spending, measured before tax. It's the same multiple-of-spending logic behind your FIRE number. Because the test matches, your Freedom Date should land on the same year ProjectionLab showed you, not a year off in either direction.

What gets approximated, and how to check it

Be honest about the trade. ProjectionLab is a deeper manual planner. It goes further on pure modeling than FIYR does, including estate and international-planning detail, and a handful of things get approximated when they cross over.

FIYR doesn't hide that. Every imported scenario has a What came over link. Open it and you get a plain list of three things: what was brought over exactly, what was approximated, and what isn't supported yet. That's your checklist. Spend two minutes on the approximated items, confirm they're close enough, and adjust anything that matters to your plan.

The smart move early on is to keep both tools open and compare. If FIYR's Freedom Date matches ProjectionLab's, you've confirmed the import. If it's off, the What came over list usually tells you why in one read.

Why move the plan at all

Fair question, since ProjectionLab works well. The answer comes down to where your numbers come from.

ProjectionLab is hand-entered by design. You type in balances and keep them current yourself. FIYR links your accounts through Plaid, so the plan runs on your actual balances and spending and updates as they change. You're not re-keying a brokerage balance every month just to keep the projection honest.

It also puts the plan next to the rest of your money. Budgets, transactions and net worth live in the same app as the FIRE projection, so the spending number driving your FI date is the real one, pulled from the accounts you just linked, not an estimate you typed in last quarter.

And it costs less: FIYR is $76.80 a year against ProjectionLab Premium's $129 (ProjectionLab pricing). One note so you set expectations correctly: FIYR is a web app, so you run it in the browser. If you want the full feature-by-feature breakdown, we keep it current here: FIYR vs ProjectionLab.

The move, start to finish

Four steps:

1. In ProjectionLab, open Account Settings → Export Data and save the JSON file (Premium required).
2. In FIYR, go to the FIRE page, click the import icon under Scenarios, and drop the file in.
3. Link your bank and investment accounts through Plaid so the plan runs on live balances.
4. Open What came over, check the approximated items, and compare your Freedom Date to the one ProjectionLab gave you.

If the two dates agree, your plan moved cleanly. From there it keeps itself current instead of waiting on you to update it.

FAQ

How do I export my data from ProjectionLab? Open Account Settings and choose Export Data. ProjectionLab writes your whole account to a single JSON file. Export is a Premium feature (ProjectionLab pricing).

Can I import a ProjectionLab plan into FIYR? Yes. On the FIRE page, under Scenarios, click the import icon next to "+ Save this plan" and choose your export file. Each ProjectionLab plan becomes a FIYR scenario named PL: <name>.

Will my FIRE date change when I switch from ProjectionLab? It shouldn't. FIYR tests financial independence the same way ProjectionLab does, liquid net worth above a multiple of recent spending before tax, so your Freedom Date should match the year ProjectionLab showed you. The What came over link flags anything that was approximated.

Is my ProjectionLab data private during the import? The file is read on your device, and your ProjectionLab plugin key and email are stripped before anything else reads it.