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You are about to ask Hazel for a plan, so put your context, goals and constraints in that first message and the draft comes back closer to the one you wanted. “Build a plan for the Hendersons” produces a real plan, but Hazel then chooses for you on everything you did not mention: the Client persona to build against, the topics to lead with, the scenario to model, the sections this family does not need. Said afterwards, the same intent has Hazel revising a plan built on different priorities, over several passes, each one a change to review.

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Where you can front-load

Only one of the three ways into a plan gives you somewhere to type.
  • Ask Hazel. On the segmented control under the message box, choose Financial Planning, then send your request and your context in the same message. That message is what the build reads when it starts. A chat left on Ask answers you and never builds a plan.
  • A household’s Financial Planning tab. The Draft financial plan button sends a plain request naming the household and its members, with nothing of yours attached. Once the build is running, Open chat in the plan’s top bar takes you to the conversation, where you say the rest.
  • New financial plan on the Financial Planning page. This wizard asks for your data source, who the plan is for, and any uploads, then starts the same plain request as the tab.

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Hazel stops partway to ask

The second of the three build steps is questions: at most three inputs, the ones that would move the outcome most, plus a check on how this household’s goals should be ranked. A brief settles some of them in advance. Each question arrives carrying the value Hazel would otherwise use, so stepping away is safe: on a household’s Financial Planning tab a question you leave alone settles into that value, while a build you started in a chat waits for you. Getting started has the step in full.

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What to put in the brief

Paste this into a Financial Planning chat, fill in what applies and delete the rest. If you only manage two lines, make them the question the plan has to answer and the constraints.
Hazel cannot infer a constraint, so name it. Repeating a goal Hazel already has costs nothing, so say it even when you are not sure. If your firm has not set up personas yet, leave the persona line out; Hazel builds from your firm’s base template. Whether Hazel can drop a section your firm’s plan design asks for depends on that design’s strictness: under Exact the design is built as written, however you word the request. Strictness covers the three modes.

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What a brief does not set

The planning numbers come from firm configuration instead, set once by your firm owner and inherited by every plan: the success threshold, the default reserve length and its refill policy, the withdrawal guardrails, the Roth conversion strategy, the advisory fee, the Monte Carlo simulation count, and the return, volatility, inflation and tax figures. Solver assumptions and Market assumptions explain what each one drives. Where your firm has set a hard guardrail, asking for something it forbids gets a friendly refusal naming the policy. Guardrails has the details. For a genuine one-off, change the figure directly:
Open Plan settings from the top bar of a plan you are reading in its chat, which is the only view that carries it, and change the figure there for that one plan. See Solver assumptions.

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Naming the persona up front

Hazel matches each household to the closest Client persona without being asked, and the plan’s Appendix records which one. Name a different one in the brief: “Build a plan for the Okonkwos using our Business Owner persona, not the pre-retiree one.” Correcting it after the build means asking Hazel to rebuild. See Client personas.

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Front-loading a change to an existing plan

“Add a lever” leaves Hazel to pick one. “Add a retirement-age lever from 60 to 70 in one-year steps, starting at 62, and show what it does to the success gauge” gets you that lever. The success gauge is the dial that shows probability of success today against probability with the plan.

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Where to go next