This article describes one method you may wish to explore for setting your Rates of Return in PlannerPlus.

The first step to selecting a Rate of Return for each of your accounts is always to determine your asset allocation. Your asset allocation is the balance of equities, bonds, and cash in each account and if you don't know what you have in each account this information may typically be found on your statements or in your institution's portal.

Once you have the asset allocation for an account, you may want to use the Portfolio Visualizer Backtest Portfolio feature to view the historical return. You'll enter the percentage of assets you hold in each asset class and be able to view historical data for your particular asset allocation.

You may want to use the CAGR (Compound average growth rate), conservatively reduced by 1%, as the Optimistic Rate of Return in PlannerPlus.

Next, you may want to navigate to the Monte Carlo Simulation in Portfolio Visualizer to view projected returns and determine your Pessimistic Rate of Return. In this feature, enter the same portfolio as you did for the Backtesting feature and use the Projected Return for the 10th Percentile (this is often the worst case scenario), conservatively increased by 1%, as your Pessimistic Rate of Return.