The guardrails you see in Retirement Stress Test and in Tracked & Monitored plans are refigured every month of the plan to reflect all changes as the plan progresses and new data becomes available. That includes:

• As time goes on, clients age and plan length changes
• Purchasing power changes due to accumulated inflation or deflation (for example, when nominal income stays the same and we haven't yet hit an inflation adjustment, real income is actually a bit lower, which means risk is lower too!)
• Changes in nominal legacy goals: If a legacy goal is not adjusted for inflation, the goal itself is changing in real terms as time goes on and inflation accumulates.
• Changes in where the plan is on its original "income path" (e.g., is it early in the "age-based" retirement smile, when planned income is going up/staying the same, or is it on the way down the smile?)
• Changes in where certain spending goals are in the plan. Six years into a plan, an "other/variable" expense that was 10 years away at the beginning of the plan is now four years away. Inflation also affects these spending goals (if they are nominal), so as time goes on, the actual goal size changes with inflation.
• Economic context changes (rising/falling CAPE, inflation, etc.), and so risk estimates change
• Capital market assumptions and/or additional historical data change as time goes on (e.g., ten years into a plan, the plan has access to 10 more years of market data than it had access to at the beginning of the plan)
• Guardrails adjust for minimum income change, so a guardrail can't be "hit" until the change that would be triggered would be at least an X% change. In this case, the guardrail will look like it's "running away" from the balance

That means guardrails will almost never stay steady. They would only stay steady if we weren't really updating the plan.