What PreRipple does
PreRipple takes one decision — quitting a job, relocating, buying a home, starting a business, going back to school — and projects how it could unfold along three different paths. Instead of one recommendation, you get a comparison: what each path is likely to cost you, what it could gain you, where the risk sits, and what would have to be true for it to work.
It is a decision-support tool. It doesn't make the decision, and it doesn't predict which future happens.
Step 1 — Your Life Model (optional)
Your Life Model is the personal context you save once and reuse. It can include income and expenses, savings and debt, job and career stage, household and relationships, health notes, and location. You choose what to include, and you can edit or delete it at any time from Settings.
The Life Model exists so you don't re-type your circumstances for every simulation, and so scenarios reflect your real constraints rather than a generic profile. It's optional — see Generic and Detailed modes below.
Step 2 — Describe the decision
You write the decision in your own words, the way you'd explain it to a friend: what you're considering, why now, and what's making it hard. The more specific you are about timing, amounts, and constraints, the more useful the comparison.
Step 3 — Choose Generic or Detailed mode
- Generic mode uses none of your personal information. It's a hypothetical — good for exploring a question before you commit any details.
- Detailed mode layers in your Life Model, so runway, obligations, and household realities shape the scenarios.
Step 4 — Three scenarios are generated
Every simulation produces three pathways rather than a single answer, because most real decisions aren't binary — the interesting question is usually how much and how fast, not just yes or no.
- Stable Buffer — the conservative path. Protect what you have, build room, move later.
- Balanced Flight — the staged path. A partial commitment that tests the decision without betting everything.
- Leap of Faith — the high-commitment path. Move fully and quickly, with the widest range of outcomes.
Each pathway comes with a narrative, projected effects across finance, time, career, health and relationships, and a best-case / most-likely / conservative view.
Step 5 — Compare, don't just read
The comparison is the point. Reading three scenarios side by side makes the trade-offs explicit: the conservative path usually costs time and momentum; the aggressive path usually costs security. Seeing both prices at once is what stops a decision from being made on mood alone.
How risks and trade-offs are surfaced
Alongside each pathway, PreRipple highlights the specific pressure points it can identify from your inputs — a runway that runs short, fixed costs that don't flex, a timeline that assumes income arrives faster than it usually does, a change that quietly moves onto someone else in your household. These are prompts to check, not verdicts.
How factors interact
Life decisions are chain reactions. A new role changes your commute, which changes your sleep and your time with family; a relocation changes your housing cost, which changes your savings rate, which changes how much risk you can carry two years later. PreRipple's scenarios are written to follow those knock-on effects rather than treating each factor in isolation.
What confidence and percentage indicators mean
Where PreRipple shows figures such as a success or regret percentage, these are model-generated comparative indicators. They help you rank the three pathways against each other inside a single simulation. They are not measured probabilities, actuarial odds, or validated statistical forecasts. Read them as "this path looks meaningfully riskier than that one," never as "there is a 41% chance this happens."
Running different assumptions
A simulation is a starting point. Change an input — a later start date, a smaller budget, a partial income, a different city — and re-run it. A refinement uses one move from your monthly allowance, the same as a new simulation. Testing two or three versions of your assumptions is usually more informative than one perfectly detailed run.
What PreRipple cannot know
- Anything you haven't told it, or told it inaccurately.
- Events nobody can foresee — layoffs, illness, market shocks, a family emergency, an unexpected offer.
- Live, verified figures for your market, employer, tax situation, or property prices.
- How you'll actually feel once you're living the choice.
Why scenarios are not predictions
A prediction claims to know an outcome. A scenario describes a coherent way things could go given a set of assumptions. PreRipple produces the second kind. That's why it gives you three of them: the useful signal is in the differences between the paths, not in any single path being "right." For the full picture, read the methodology and the accuracy and limitations pages.