1. Start from today
Your life today is the root of the tree — your accounts, your income, and the wellbeing you feel right now. You add accounts and balances manually (no bank linking, ever), and Mentat fills the financial blanks with smart defaults drawn from statutory tax rates and IRS limits. You start from a real baseline, never a blank page.
2. Branch your decisions
Add the forks you're weighing as branches — switch jobs, move cities, go back to school — and the chance outcomes that could follow each one, like a layoff or a move that doesn't pan out. Every stretch of a branch carries its own income, costs, growth, and a wellbeing score you author yourself against a consistent rubric, so your possible lives stay honestly comparable. Give each fork an honest likelihood, and Mentat weighs the whole tree by probability.
3. Compare your possible lives
Net worth propagates forward along every branch on the same projection engine that powers the rest of the app — accounts, contributions, growth, federal and FICA and state taxes. Wellbeing adds up over the years into "wellbeing-years." Then you flip between three views — pure wealth, pure wellbeing, and a utility view weighted your way with a single slider — and watch the path that actually fits you light up.
The principle underneath
Mentat is deliberately broad strokes, not precision. Projections are year-granular; the goal is the shape of your possible lives, not the exact dollar figure decades out. And the app only ever reports facts that follow from your own inputs — it never crosses into "you should do X." The wellbeing numbers are yours; Mentat just does the math on them.
When life changes
When reality diverges from the plan — a windfall, a market drop, a job change — you re-point the tree from where you actually are, and the branches re-project forward from that point. The rest of the time, your assumptions ride. Mentat is built to be opened rarely, at the moments that matter.