Conventional planning allows you to insist on a discretionary spending target for your retirement years. Frankly I find this feature more annoying than helpful. It seems to illustrate the foolishness of setting your own target, but not much more in my view. Using the living standard index you can raise or lower future living standards. So if you raise the standard from retirement year forward to say 120% it will put you on a severe budget up to that point (meaning make you save). You could also use the reserve fund to "hide" some money from ESPlanner for awhile and then return that money to circulation at some future date.

I stay in economics mode. I would model maximum contributions to the retirement accounts or ROTH if available. I don't like using the standard of living index for this kind of purpose if I can help it. I'm not sure why. If I wanted to force savings into non-retirement assets I'd probably use the reserve fund to sock money away for a few years. This will sequester some of your cash away from the program so it won't use it for consumption smoothing--then you pick a future date where that money returns to your economy for normal discretionary spending/smoothing purposes. That user interface is a little confusing on the Reserve Fund (I believe it's in the Special folder) but once you see what's going on there, I think it's a bit more straightforward than adjusting the curve on your standard of living.

I have ~3 years until I retire. My spending budget format conforms to that the broad categories in ESP's Total Spending and Total Income reports, plus taxes and Savings in the Regular Assets report. (Within ESP's discretionary spending I have more detail in my personal budget.)

Due to a mortgage refinance I have an unusual amount of cash available. ESP wants to spend it, the result being recommended discretionary spending far higher than I need or want. To force ESP to defer use of those funds until my retirement, I created a contribution to reserve large enough to adjust the recommended discretionary spending down to the level that I've actually budgeted.

My wife will retire a couple of years later so we need to maintain some level of reserve. I set it back to my "real" reserve intent as of the year I retire. That makes the sequestered cash available to my economy. When she retires, we'll liquidate the reserve fund since our retirement and regular savings become one big reserve fund, in effect.

The result of the above approach is a level Living Standard Per Adult in my pre-retirement period, followed by a different (somewhat higher) level LSPA starting as of my retirement, through the end of the plan.