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You plan differently for an accumulator in their thirties, a couple three years out from retirement, and a household already drawing income. Describe each of those client types once, as a Client persona, and Hazel matches every household to the closest one and builds the plan accordingly. Personas live in Settings, then Planning, under Client persona in the left rail. Your firm already has three, installed the first time anyone opens Planning settings. Planning settings are open to firm owners; see Roles and permissions.

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What a persona holds

Open a persona to edit its name, description, Hazel instructions and Plan design, or to delete it. The age band is set while you create the persona. The New persona dialog has Age min and Age max fields, both optional, and the persona screen afterwards has no age control. The persona’s row in the left rail shows the band. Solver assumptions are not edited on the persona screen. The three personas your firm starts with carry their own, such as HENRY’s 85% success threshold. Change a planning value for the whole firm in Solver assumptions, or on a single plan by editing the assumption behind the figure it drives. A persona you create with Starting template set to a Hazel preset, or to Copy from an existing persona, starts with that persona’s solver assumptions.
Read Solver assumptions for what each value does and its default, and Where numbers come from for editing an assumption on one plan.

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How the match happens

At the start of a build, Hazel picks the closest fit, weighing two signals together rather than in order:
  • The description. What the persona says it is for, held against what Hazel knows about this household, including the goals it has stated.
  • The age band. All else being equal, Hazel matches a 58-year-old to a persona banded 55 to 67. A better fit elsewhere still beats a match on age alone.
Both read from what Hazel already knows, so a thin profile matches poorly. See How Hazel uses the profile. If nothing fits well, Hazel builds on the base template alone and records that no persona was used. That usually means you are missing a persona for a client type you serve.

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Hazel records the match

Open the plan’s Appendix and read the Applied settings block: a Persona row names the matched persona, or reads None, and each planning value under it carries the layer that set it. See Where numbers come from. The record is stamped when that version is published, so an older version shows what it was built with rather than today’s settings.

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Overriding the match

Name the persona you want up front:
Or name it afterwards on a built plan, and Hazel rebuilds against it.
A persona that keeps getting mismatched needs a sharper description. Rewrite it to say plainly who the persona is for.

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What a persona inherits

A persona is built on the base template and follows it until you change something. Its solver assumptions work value by value: the persona carries only what differs and inherits the rest from your firm settings. Its plan design follows the base design live until the first edit on its Plan design card, which forks a copy for that persona. See Inheritance and re-syncing. Guardrails are firm-wide, and a persona can add one but never remove one. See Guardrails.

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Where to go next