Dates, Events, Time Periods
Previously in Golden Path, setting dates for significant events where your plan involved different life choices was limited to individually setting time periods for your spending, earning and saving activities, and you could only use set dates, the age of a person in the plan, or their nominated "retirement" date.
Whilst this works, it means there is a lot of additional work when playing with particular "what if" scenarios, and how they affect your plan outcomes. And, really, what "retirement" means, might actually be different for different people.
For example - imagine a plan where you intend at some point to 'semi-retire' - take a lower paid job, perhaps part time, and then 'fully retire' at a later date. You might then plan to spend a few years on travelling, spending more on holidays, and you may wish to budget for your own long-term care.
But obviously: how long each of these periods is may dramatically affect the success of your plan. Setting up some events and periods can make this easier to do 'what-if' projections based on these choices.
An Example
Here's an example plan for the Walker family:
Richard plans a gradual step-down from his high-paying, stressful job at some point, but intends to work a few more years.
In addition, they are planning to do something for their 30th Anniversary, to go travelling once Richard has retired, and support their son for the years he is at university.
These date values can now be used for the jobs Richard plans on working:
Meanwhile on the spending front, various different expenditures are present:
Does their plan work?
Sadly, it seems it doesn't. Only the very optimistic scenario shows success, the Central and Unlucky scenarios have them running out of money reasonably early.
What to do?
At this point. lots of different choices might be made. Spending less on holidays - perhaps using the 'goal seek' feature to trim expected spending there to a level so the money does not run out.
How about the option of Richard working for 2 more years in his high-powered job? By changing the event dates in his settings, the holidays dates are automatically adjusted as well, and the spending associated with it. The result? Success!
Checking against historical market returns models also looks good:
This delay allows time for Richard's pension to grow, and shortens the gap to state pension benefits kicking in.
Of course, there are many other plans that would also work - the events and time periods feature should help make tweaking and adjusting these life goals easier.