The Money Lifetime Planner helps you accomplish your long-term goals. These goals might include retirement, paying for college, or taking a sabbatical from work.
You can try out just about any event that might have a major financial impact on your lifetime plan. For example, you can “model” what would happen if you took some time off work, received an inheritance, sent all your kids to college, or retired early. You can enter these events in your plan or try out the Financial Event Modeler. This feature uses your actual data, but lets you test different scenarios without actually putting them in your lifetime plan.
Your lifetime plan is automatically integrated with information you enter elsewhere in Money. For example, when you update the balances of your investment accounts (A brokerage account, retirement account, or other account in which you hold investments. You track individual investments, such as stock purchases, in the associated investment account. ) and other accounts in the Banking area, they’re automatically updated in the Lifetime Planner.
Once you create your lifetime plan, the Lifetime Planner tells you what you need to do to start following through. If you keep your accounts current, update your goals as they change, and try to follow the other strategies suggested throughout the Lifetime Planner, your forecasts will be accurate, no matter where life takes you.
Notes
- The Lifetime Planner requires detailed information on your finances, including your investments, retirement accounts (An account, usually tax-deferred, designed to provide savings for retirement. Examples include 401(k) and IRA accounts.) , and assets (An item of value that you own. Assets can be tracked in Money by using asset accounts.) , as well as living expenses and other data. If you haven’t already entered this information in Money, the Lifetime Planner will walk you through how to add it.
- Two other planning tools are available in Money. The Debt Reduction Planner can help you create a plan to get out of debt (Money owed to another person or company, such as loans, credit card balances, or mortgages. ) . The Advanced Budget (The Advanced Budget option in Money gives you more detail and long-term planning tools. You can break your expenses into categories and subcategories, set up and access multiple budgets, track irregular or one-time expenses, reallocate funds from one budget category to another, and set savings goals. ) can help you create a budget so you can better manage your income and expenses, and include that information in your lifetime plan.
About the Debt Reduction Planner
Choose a scenario and see how it would affect the Lifetime Plan
