How-to
Build your investment plan (IPS)
Write a governing investment plan in Ironlake end to end - objectives, risk, sell rules, and tax-location rules - then keep it as your household's policy.
Your investment plan - the Investment Policy Statement (IPS) - is the document the rest of Ironlake answers to. It records what you are trying to do, how much risk you can take, and the rules you have set for selling, taxes, and concentration. Building it takes about fifteen minutes and needs no positions and no brokerage login.
Before you start
Nothing is required. You can complete the whole plan on the free 30-day trial, with no data imported. Having a rough sense of your goals and time horizon helps, but the wizard walks you through each decision.
Step 1 - Open the IPS Builder
From the dashboard, go to IPS in the sidebar and start the builder. It is a guided wizard, not a blank document - each step asks a focused question and explains why it matters.
Step 2 - State your objectives
Describe what the portfolio is for in plain language: the return you are aiming for, the time horizon, and the household context. This frames every later rule.
Step 3 - Set risk capacity, tolerance, and need
Ironlake separates three things most tools blur together:
- Capacity - how much loss your situation can absorb.
- Tolerance - how much volatility you can live with.
- Need - how much return the plan actually requires.
You answer scenario-based questions rather than a 1-to-10 slider, and the plan records all three so a future you can see the reasoning.
Step 4 - Write your sell rules and never-sell rules
Set the discipline you want to hold yourself to: when a position may be trimmed, what triggers a review, and which holdings you will not sell regardless. These are your rules - Ironlake records and later checks against them; it never tells you what to buy or sell.
Step 5 - Set tax-location and concentration rules
Record your preferred placement for each kind of asset (taxable, tax-deferred, tax-free) and your single-position concentration ceiling. The Asset Location and exposure surfaces later compare your actual holdings against exactly these rules.
Step 6 - Finalize the plan
Finalize to make the version your governing policy. Finalized versions are immutable and effective-dated, so your policy history is preserved - editing later creates a new version rather than overwriting the record.
Finalizing your plan completes this guide. From the IPS page you can also export a shareable IPS PDF - the formatted document you can hand to a spouse, CPA, or attorney. At launch, the shareable PDF is positioned as part of the paid Ironlake Core package; building and finalizing the plan in-product is the core workflow this guide covers.
What you have now
A governing plan your dashboards reference, your rebalancing and tax surfaces check against, and your decision journal ties back to. The next step is usually to create a model and run the projection.