Your personal year number cycles 1–9 and colours the theme of each year. Find yours and what it favours.
It is calculated from your day and month of birth plus the current year, which means it turns over on your birthday rather than on 1 January. That single detail is where most personal-year readings go wrong: someone born in November spends most of the calendar year in the previous personal year, and reading the wrong one describes a year they are not in yet.
The nine-year cycle is a rhythm of beginnings, consolidation and release, not a forecast of events. It says nothing about dates, and it cannot see the transits or the dasha that would let anyone put a date on anything. For the parts of a year that can genuinely be timed — Jupiter and Saturn crossing specific houses of your chart — you need the chart, and that is free here.
On your birthday, not on New Year's Day. If your birthday is late in the year, you spend most of the calendar year in the previous personal-year number.
No. In the cycle's own logic 9 is a closing and clearing year that precedes a 1, and treating it as a punishment misreads it. Endings in this framework are structural, not a verdict.