Income Lab plans will indeed suggest changes that are due to accrued inflation alone, or the planned income path (smile, etc.) alone, or both together, even if the guardrails haven't been hit. Those changes would have to be greater than the plan's "minimum income change" setting to actually appear in a plan.

For example, over the course of a year, inflation could be up 5.5% but the income path might have been the smile, which could have called for a 1% reduction in real spending over that same period, so the net effect would be 4.5% more than planned. If the minimum spending change is 5%, there still wouldn't be a notification of a needed change. Once accrued inflation hits 6% or more in this example, the system would trigger a "Flag". (However, please note that we only run plans monthly, usually on or slightly after the fifth business day of the month, and that we can only use the most recently available data. For CPI-U, that's the previous month's reading.)